Jupiter’s Legacy: Requiem #1
Image Comics
Writers: Mark Millar
Art: Tommy Lee Edwards
Letters: John Workman
A few months back, after I got notice that the release of Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy was near, I finally got around to reading the comics. I’d been avoiding Mark Millar for a while since my last review of his The Magic Order comic but I decided to give it a go. Jupiter’s Legacy, and its spin-off titles were written before TMO and yet are surprisingly better, in my opinion. That being said I was pretty hyped when I got word a sequel to the original novel was coming out. So I opted for trying it out fresh from the oven.
Set 32 years after the end of the original graphic novel, the first chapter for the new series starts off with beautifully illustrated natural disasters taking place all over the globe. A hacker engages in a video conference with the UN’s secretary-general holding the Global Climate-Regulator hostage for a trillion dollars in true golden age villainy style. In the next pages, however, we follow the new Utopian, Jason, preventing those disasters by himself, living up to his grandfather’s legacy. He’s the world’s number one defender and continues his other grandfather’s, Skyfox, research about the island that started it all.
Millar is clearly up to expanding the series main cast as we now have Jason’s two new brothers and a sister in the family. Skyfox and Lady Liberty got divorced and they both live very different lives, deviating from the “Happily ever after” ending we saw at the end of Jupiter’s Legacy. I liked how the writer is picking loose ends from both JL and Jupiter’s Circle right from chapter one. This gives me hope that it may all come to conclusion eventually. Even so, the first issue is not without its flaws. There is A LOT of name-dropping. I like the series and the family lines like every other fan but I had to take my time to understand who is married to whom and specialists who are the Utopian’s new siblings and what’s their deal. That’s not a bad thing by itself but I feel like it could have been fit better into the chapter’s reading flow. The best example of this problem is in the opening scene when everything is familiar and then, out of the blue, we’re introduced to Otto, Jason’s brother, protesting in New York. For me, it put a big halt to all the action.
Tommy Lee Edwards’ work is stunning right off from the first pages. The artist’s choice of colors for the natural disasters is mesmerizing and literally took me a few minutes to take it all in. Incredible stuff. Overall his line art style is pretty good as well although I think some expressions turned out a little too stiff, especially for the younger characters, with fewer expression lines. The highlight of the artwork is the colors, easily. Bright tones for strong lights really make the pages pop out. It can be a bit tiring if you decide to read this after a whole day in front of a screen, but it is undeniably gorgeous. There’s also a brief contribution from John Paul Leon for the memory sequence was quite refreshing towards the end of the chapter.
The lettering by John Workman is very cool though it did use “square” point tails for the dialogue bubbles. Each dialogue bubble has a colored outline depending on the character’s emotion when saying something. That associated with bigger sized and bolder font for emphasis make for a quite complete representation of how the lines are being delivered and how the characters conduct themselves in the comic’s situations.
Jupiter’s Legacy: Requiem is not without its flaws but it is off to a fantastic start. It seems Millar has an endgame for the story and I hope he maintains the quality level to this franchise as it is, in my personal opinion, his best independent work. The artwork is wonderful and innovative and I cannot wait for more of it.
Jupiter's Legacy: Requiem is not without its flaws but it is off to a fantastic start. It seems Millar has an endgame for the story and I hope he maintains the quality level to this franchise as it is, in my personal opinion, his best independent work. The artwork is wonderful and innovative and I cannot wait for more of it.
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