A superhero show with infinite ambition
Comics legend MARK MILLAR on his new Netflix series Jupiter’s Legacy — which he claims will out-epic Marvel
MARK MILLAR KNOWS a thing or ten about superheroes. This is the man who, when writing for Marvel, reinvented the Avengers as the Ultimates, pitted Iron Man against Captain America in Civil War and reinvented Wolverine as an elegiac Western hero in Old Man Logan,
all of which proved hugely influential on big-screen adaptations. For DC, he gave Superman a Communist makeover in Red Son.
And under his own auspices at Millarworld, he’s been busy reworking and subverting tropes of the genre in the likes of Kick-ass.
So, when he says that Jupiter’s Legacy, the first Netflix adaptation of one of his creations since he sold Millarworld to the streaming giant in 2017, is “the most ambitious superhero project ever”, you sit up and take notice. Of course, the impish Millar is one of the comics industry’s great showmen, never passing up a chance to talk up his work. In a way, he’s the John Lewis of comics — never knowingly undersold. But he is also well aware of the expectations that can be created by saying things like, “Let’s not beat around the bush, let’s just try and do the greatest superhero epic of all time,” and, “My idea was to create Lord Of The Rings for superheroes.” Now it’s time to back that up.
Jupiter’s Legacy, the comic and the show, tells the story of a group of superpowered beings (led in the show by Josh Duhamel, Ben Daniels and Leslie Bibb), now in their twilight years, and their superpowered offspring, who are challenged in every possible way as they try to live up to their parents’ legacy. Flitting between time periods (so Duhamel and co won’t always be in old-age make-up), it’s not as drenched in irony as some of Millar’s previous work. This will still have plot twists ahoy, unexpected character deaths and plenty of the old ultra-violence, but Millar has approached it from a very different point of view. “You couldn’t just do the thing about bank robbers and a supervillain getting powers,” he says. “It’s a 50-year story self-contained inside one franchise. It’s got a cast of 50 or 60 super-characters. The
story starts in 1929 and runs until the end of time. It runs through all time and space and explains the mystery of human existence, all tied into a superhero story.”
Netflix, we all know, has rivers of cash, but does it have enough to support such a grandiose vision? “That’s what’s really great,” says Millar. “Right now, there is nobody with more money than Netflix, which from a storyteller’s point of view is the most exciting thing in the world. There hasn’t been one conversation where someone said, ‘Can we make that explosion slightly smaller?’ Ambitious ideas are being rewarded.”
Even so, Jupiter’s Legacy is about to launch into a marketplace that, after a fallow period, is crowded with superheroes, particularly on the small screen, with Disney+’s aggressive strategy of stringing MCU show after MCU show together. Millar, however, is confident that his creation can thrive within that marketplace, even if the brand-recognition factor isn’t as high as it would be with a Wandavision or a Loki.
“I think in a weird way we’re not going to have an issue with the crowded field that we would have had in normal circumstances,” he says. “Compared to a typical year, this feels like 2002. There’s almost no other superhero content out there. And the last big superhero thing was probably Avengers: Endgame, so just when viewers were saying there was oversaturation, now there’s starvation, which is the perfect time to come along with something really cool.” How cool, exactly, is it? “It’s part-2001, part-avengers, part-godfather II,” says Millar.
See what we mean about being never knowingly undersold?