Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, frank quitely, gorlan parlov, image, image comics, jupiter's legacy, Mark Millar, starlight

Reading Starlight #1 And Jupiter's Legacy #4 – And Realising Just How Much Mark Millar Likes The Incredibles

When promotional images were first released, we noticed some similarities between the images seen in Starlight #1, out this week, and Pixar's movie The Incredibles, a film writer Mark Millar had stated was his favourite Pixar movie by quite a margin.

Well now we've also read Jupiter's Legacy #4 as well, and boy howdy.

Starlight sees Duke McQueen, a retired science-hero who is definitely not Flash Gordon honest, looking back as headlines of his past as he is brought back to active duty, as a result of events.

And Jupiter's Legacy #4, also out on Wednesday, shows a superhero family in hiding, keeping their powers secret, encouraging their superpowered son to take part in school sports… but not to do too well.

But of course there are twists in another direction away from that.

Indeed, Jupiter's Legacy seems to be looking at the limits of government. This was echoed in recent realities, the major chaos that first hit the Obamacare website, the continuing chaoes in veteran payment delays, the best laid plans of Government failing and failing badly.

Because there was no reason why an economic plan laid out by a superhero would have any better chance of working than one laid out by an economist. And in Jupiter's Legacy we see the real life implications of ideological solutions that fail to account for people doing what people always do.

As ever, its the details that make Jupiter's Legacy something special. Frank Quitely taking the extremity approach of Tex Avery for different panels, showing the extreme point of an action, frozen in space, when missing a goal. Or his multiple poses of one person in a panel used so expertly in All Star Superman is almost hidden in the background but vital to the story and rewarding the careful reader. You can see it in tomorrow's BBC documentary as well.

So yes, it's familiar, but that's not altogether a bad thing. It comforts, it envelops, it rewards and it entertains. And that's not the only Millarworld book doing that today.

Starlight #1 starts at the end. The end of Flash Gordon, the end of Star Wars, when the heroes get the medals. And our hero is uncomfortable doing so. Straight away this is a story about what happens after the end of the movie, the comic, the traditional tale. It begins with the epilogue, with a sequel very unlikely.

So, yes, it's Incredibles, but it's also Dare. Probably more than it is Dark Knight Returns, frankly. The washed out hero, trying to recapture the good old days decades in in a world, a galaxy, that has moved on. And he's left on the shelf, redundant. But the tone is also closer to the Jack Nicholson film, About Schmidt, or Red. There is loss here. Someone who has done the amazing, the impossible, faced with the impossibly mundane. And dreaming about what once was, a galaxy away, with no way to get back.

And yes, of course there's going to be a way to get back. Duke gets his sequel after all. Even if he's been trapped in development hell for a good long time.

Gorlan Porlav shows us two worlds, the majestically impossible and the grind numbingly mundane with ease, the distance only a gutter away but a whole galaxy in style and approach. You can see why Duke wants to get back so badly.

But there may have been other ways to do so. With these issues, we also get to see what binds Starlight and Jupiter's Legacy together, a system of portals, and some rather familiar looking alien priests. Looks like it wasn't just Duke McQueen doing the interdimensional travelling…

Millarworld – or Millarworlds – begin here.

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