Today on the site: Mighty Matt Seneca on the new Jupiter's Legacy.
LISTICLE: 10 Things About Jupiter’s Legacy #5
- Jupiter’s Legacy is for all intents and purposes an annual comic at this point. One issue came out in 2014, and issue #5 looks to be the only one we’ll get this year (though there’s a prequel miniseries in the pipeline, so uh, yay?). For my part, I don’t mind; the annual schedule is a pretty excellent one. Provided the work is good enough, a year is a perfect amount of time to fully digest everything put on display in a comic book – from each line of dialogue to the color choices being made in each panel on down – without the general plot outline completely slipping out of mind by the time the next installment drops. Prison Pit had a great run as an annual for a bit there. So did ACME Novelty Library. John Pham’s Sublife and Epoxy are models for the format, and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books have also favored it in recent years. And now Jupiter’s Legacy(unintentionally, due to scheduling issues) joins the ranks. Being a pamphlet-format superhero comic it’s a bit of a sore thumb in the annual crowd, but since it’s the best superhero comic I’ll let it slide. The annual format makes every issue an event, and new issues of Jupiter’s Legacy are definitely that. Especially in this extra-sized fifth issue, there’s more than enough meat to satisfy until 2016 (aka the future). This is hardly the most plotty comic anyhow: the fun part of reading it is getting hyped over all the neat little bits Mark Millar and Frank Quitely insert to elevate their superheroes-fighting-back-against-a-world-taken-over-by-the-villains story above the reams of stuff with the same general idea going on. Especially now that Quitely seems to be completely done cutting corners on his backgrounds and Millar is structuring his installments as discreet acts rather than incremental “single issues”, this is a jewel of a comic, one in which just about every panel contains an individual idea worth interrogating. Following are some of the ones I thought were noteworthy.
Elsewhere:
Our own Paul Tumey will be in NYC on Tuesday night, March 3rd at Parsons for the weekly Comics and Picture-story Symposium presenting "Forgotten Funnies
Images of America in the Comics of Percy Winterbottom, Dwig, and Ving Fuller."
Great piece on Heavy Metal in 1985 over here.
Sophie Yanow has an excellent comic strip up on The Nib. Speaking of online comics, Seth has one ongoing at The Walrus.
