My Thoughts on Marvel's "Sinister War" and Their Annoying New Habit

 Sinister War

Written by Nick Spencer

Drawn by Mark Bagley and too many other artists.

I'll be honest; I was skeptical of the storytelling merits of "Sinister War" when it was announced. I know that as an entertainment company, basically Marvel is all about cash grabs, but this one felt a little more gratuitous than usual. It wasn't unlike the manner in which Marvel, especially during Spencer's run, has made a habit of swelling up his storylines with extra issues during which parallel stories run right alongside the main one as not quite necessary reading but definitely as an important supplement.  They did this with the godawful Kraven story, as well as the Sin-Eater/Kindred story.

"Sinister War" had a different feel to it, and from a pure story perspective, I feel it actually worked better than a lot of the other "parallel" stories Marvel has put out as companion pieces to "The Amazing Spider-Man." 

The premise is simple: Kindred, whom we thought was Harry Osborn but apparently isn't (as is disclosed over in the main title), has made a deal with five different supervillain teams: kill Spider-Man, or face an eternity of damnation.  Spidey is basically in for the fight of his life, but may yet find some unexpected help along the way.  Also, in the background, a mysterious conversation takes place between Doctor Strange and Mephisto.

I guess Marvel figured that people were getting sick of this "plus" style of storytelling, so they packaged this latest batch as a miniseries to change the marketing angle a little bit. That said, "Sinister War" reads pretty well on its own.  Rather than shed light on the backstory of Kindred, which is still being teased agonizingly slowly in the main title, the story stays focused on Peter's battle royale with three dozen supervillains, and it's a brisk and decent, if slightly insubstantial read.

The only thing I truly disliked about this was the irritating "jam" style art. The story was drawn mostly by legendary Spider-Man artist Mark Bagley (who's probably a bazillionaire owing to the fact that his art has adorned Spider-Man merch for a good portion of the 21st century) but unlike the good old days in which he drew Ultimate Spider-Man all by himself for Brian Michael Bendis for a record-setting number of issues, for some reason he needs  an army of backup artists filling in random pages for just four issues of story.  While I patiently sat through this format for something like two years, it's no longer fun, whether it's here or over in the main title, and makes for a distinctly unpleasant reading experience. Bring back John Romita, Jr. for gosh sakes.

As Nick Spencer wraps up his run, which I thought started so strongly back in 2018, I can't help but have mixed feelings about the stories he produced.  He set out, for example, to undo the resurrection of Kraven the Hunter, which essentially invalidated the modern classic "Kraven's Last Hunt" story, only for editorial to allow him some half-assed compromise in which Kraven is killed but survived by his clone. His buddy-comedy storyline involving Boomerang becoming Spider-Man's roommate was, oddly enough, one of his more solid pieces of narrative, with the most genuine emotional resonance and the best artwork, courtesty mainly of Ryan Ottley and Patrick Gleason, and it has a tragic footnote right  here in "Sinister War."  

The centerpiece of Spencer's run appears to be this meandering mess involving Kindred, which is either an attempt to undo the infamous "One More Day" or, given the heavy involvement of Norman Osborn, a revisiting (and hopefully eradication) of his retconned sexual affair with Gwen Stacy, the abhorrent "Sins Past."  While I'd be happiest if it was the latter, at this point I really just want it to be over, whatever the outcome.

And with two more issues two go for Spencer's run, I'm about to get my wish.

In the meantime, though, "Sinister War" was a decent enough distraction, muddled art notwithstanding. 

6.5/10

Kevin Smith's Clumsy, "Bait and Switch" Writing Is NOT a New Thing

 Much has been written and posted on Youtube about how filmmaker Kevin Smith has desecrated one of the sacred cows of 1980s pop-culture, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, with his new Netflix series, Masters of the Universe: Revelations.  I would even go as far as to argue that the firestorm of controversy that this series has kicked up has gotten Smith more exposure than he has had in some time, and that's bearing in mind his stature within the geek community.  I've already weighed in on the series itself here, so I won't be reviewing this series in this blog post.

What I would like to point out, though, for the angry fans, is that, unfortunately, this is not the first time that Smith has hijacked a story which was supposed to feature a beloved character in order to hamhandedly push some clumsy advocacy.  We comic book fans experienced this from him some time ago, long before the hotly-debated topic of "woke culture" was even a thing.

In 2002, Smith and artist Terry Dodson launched a mini-series that featured Spider-Man, then white-hot thanks to the record-breaking success of his first-ever feature film, and his ex-girlfriend and on-again, off-again ally Felicia Hardy, aka the Black Cat, in a series title "Spider-Man and Black Cat: the Evil that Men Do."  Smith's stock among comic-book fans was soaring at the time; he had already completed the eight-part Daredevil epic "Guardian Devil" which was one of the flashpoints that brought about Marvel's renaissance at the turn of the millennium, following a truly disastrous period for the company in the 1990s, and had also just finished a highly-successful run on "Green Arrow" over at DC Comics.   

The first three issues of the series shipped one after the other, and offered an intriguing, brand new villain who had both telepathic and teleportation abilities. It was fairly clear why Spider-Man and Black Cat needed to team up to take this bad guy down, and yet, by the end of the third issue, readers were left with a cliffhanger as the bad guy had mentally paralyzed Felicia and looked, from all indications, like he was  about to rape her.

And then, for nearly three years, the miniseries went on hold as Smith stopped writing to take care of...stuff. It was one of a pair of embarrassments for Marvel as Smith had actually launched two miniseries that year, the other one being "Daredevil: Target" with Glenn Fabry, which, incidentally, was cancelled after one issue because Smith simply couldn't get his act together. 

When the story was finished in 2005, things had taken a turn for the ridiculous as the Black Cat was in jail for the killing of the guy who had been poised to rape her at the end of the last issue, and suddenly the focus of the entire story was on Felicia's sudden, weird bond with the brother of the villain (and eventual villain himself), who had barely uttered any dialogue during the first three issues, but who turned out to be similarly superpowered, and a victim of rape growing up, something Felicia connected to as Smith had retconned a date-rape into her history as well.

Sound familiar, He-Man fans?  Yup, Spider-Man had become a guest star in his own fucking book.  There were a couple of gratuitous cameos by Daredevil and Nightcrawler, but the effect was still the same; Spider-Man was sidelined.

It didn't even bother me that Black Cat was the focal point of the remainder of the series; at least her name was in the title. No, what really got my goat was how hard Smith pimped his new villain, trying in the course of a few issues to both build him a backstory and make him formidable, and by the end actually made him the new Mysterio.  A few years earlier, Smith had made Quentin Beck, the original Mysterio, blow his own brains out in the pages of "Daredevil."  It felt somewhat presumptuous that Smith could just slot some "rando" into the bubble helmet and green tights after Beck had spent decades becoming an iconic villain, but, well, Smith presumed to do just that.  And as one might expect, this new character didn't take at all; within less than two years, Beck was brought back from the dead--from Hell, in fact--and Smith's creation Francis Klum was killed off in the pages of another Spider-Man book and never heard from again.  Similarly, Kevin Smith never wrote a book for Marvel again.

I don't really know if it's any consolation for disgruntled He-Man fans to know that Smith has done crap like this before, but, well, he has, and unlike Masters of the Universe, which has at least one more season to wrap up its obvious cliffhanger, that Spider-Man miniseries came to a most unfortunate  conclusion. 

One can hope, though, that Mattel has learned the same lesson that Marvel did and will never put Smith in charge of one of their most beloved properties again. 

 

Xavier's School for Gifted Students...But for WIZARDS!: A Review of Strange Academy Volume I

 written by Skottie Young

drawn by Humberto Ramos

colored by Edgar Delgado

I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan. I stopped reading the series after the fifth book, content to just finish the overarching seven-part story by watching the movies, not all of which I even enjoyed. Nor, for that matter, am I the biggest fan of the "magic" corner of the original, printed Marvel Universe. I was always more of a "traditional" superhero fan, and so apart from a handful Doctor Strange trade paperbacks, I don't have much by way of "magic" Marvel stories. 

What drew me to Marvel's relatively new book, Strange Academy, therefore, was an interesting creative team in Skottie Young (Rocket Raccoon), and Humberto Ramos (Champions).  Also, I have almost invariably enjoyed Humberto Ramos' work whenever he has worked on "kids' team" books like Runaways or Champions.  I'm happy to say, my curiosity was satisfied. 

As the title suggests, Strange Academy is a school for budding magic wielders, i.e. wizards or sorcerors, in the same way that Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Children (or the Jean Grey school...whatever they're calling it now) is a school for mutants, with one significant difference being that this school accepts students from other worlds like Asgard or Jotunheim, or even other dimensions, like the Dark Dimension. Told mainly from the point of view of Emily Bright (a new character introduced in this series), the first six issues focus mainly on the various students getting together and (of course) getting into some pretty hairy misadventures, often with pretty serious consequences. 

Generally, the book, as befits a story about children, is light-hearted in tone, though it does have its moments of darkness, as is also apropos for a story featuring, among others, the son of Dormammu.  On that note, I'll run through the cast very quickly, apart from the main character (and reader avatar) Emily Bright, the cast of students who form the book's core group is actually surprisingly big; there's (deep breath) Doyle Dormammu (yes, the son of that Dormammu), fairy Shaylee Moonpeddle, voodoo sorceress Zoe Laveau, twin Asgardian brothers Iric and Alvi Brorson, Frost Giant Guslaug, Despair the Demon from Limbo, Toth from Weirdworld, and "regular" kids Calvin Morse, whose jacket is apparently a magical being attuned only to him, and German Aguilar, who has the magic power to conjure up just about any animal. Of course, the faculty roster is a who's who of magical heavyweights in the Marvel Universe, including Scarlet Witch, Doctor Voodoo, Magik, Damion Hellstrom, Sister Grimm and the Ancient One, to name a few, with Doctor Strange popping up time and again for good measure.  

Notwithstanding his surprisingly large cast, Skottie Young navigates his story quite ably, crafting a pretty satisfying romp that spans the first six issues, even as he obviously teases more to come. There are some tropes, sure, but I quite like the way Young gave distinctive voices to each of these young characters. I don't quite appreciate his attempt to flip the bully-hero dynamic, i.e. Dormammu is the sympathetic character while one of the Asgardian twins is a bully, mainly because it feels heavy-handed at times, but on the whole the characters feel authentic and relatable.  Also, I know there's a certain tongue-in-cheekery going on here, but I really feel that the alliterative "Doyle Dormammu" feels a bit much. Would the Lord of the Dark Dimension really call his kid "Doyle?" 

Another thing I'd like to praise is the choice of location. I really, really liked that the story was set in New Orleans, not because I have any particular affinity for the place but because it was really refreshing that they didn't set it in New York or any other "traditional" superhero hub like a big, bustling metropolitan city. A mystically-concealed mansion in the midst of Big Easy seems just like the right place for powerful young wielders of the mystic arts to truly master their abilities. 

Speaking of young characters, this series features Humberto Ramos very much in his element. I know I've been quite vocal about how he was a poor fit for Nick Spencer's sequel to Kraven's Last Hunt over in The Amazing Spider-Man a few years back, but this is the kind of book in which Ramos truly shines; it's like he was born to draw teen team books, whether it's Runaways, Champions or this.  It's particularly helpful that all of these kids are original characters, so Ramos doesn't have to deal with the baggage of living up to someone else's designs, even though several of the Strange Academy students have obvious visual ties to the realms from which they hail, whether it's Doyle Dormammu's flaming head or Despair's cloven hooves. Ramos really stamps his signature on these characters and it's really pleasant to behold. 

The volume neatly wraps up its story arc, even as it ends on an obvious cliffhanger, but I don't mind; given how much I've enjoyed this series so far, I'm more than willing to indulge Young and Ramos their tropes. 

Bring on Volume 2!

8.5/10

The Apocalypse Through the Eyes of an Innocent: A Review of Sweet Tooth

 created for television by 

Jim Mickle

based on the DC Vertigo Series by 

Jeff Lemire

As someone who quite faithfully followed The Walking Dead television series for six whole years up until the time that Glenn Rhee, the character played by Steven Yeun who first appeared in Season One and who was a mainstay of the show, died brutally at the hands of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's evil-yet-charismatic Negan, I can say with some confidence that I know a little about shows set in the apocalypse, and what makes them work well as narrative and what doesn't.   No matter how cool the zombie makeup may be or how gratuitous the gore, it's always the human element that will keep the series going, and when Glenn, the single most prominent avatar of the human element in TWD was taken out of the cast, I just completely lost interest in the show. 

Sweet Tooth marks my return to serialized post-apocalyptic narrative since I quit watching The Walking Dead nearly half-a-decade ago, and while it's definitely got its own issues, I really appreciated it as something hearkens back to the days when I still senjoyed The Walking Dead.  

Long story short, this series takes place in an apocalypse that has followed a global pandemic (sound familiar) but this one hasn't resulted in any zombies, just as disease called--prosaically enough--"the sick" and, coincidentally or not, the sudden birth of babies that are part human, part...animal.

The main character, Gus, or "Sweet Tooth" as he is dubbed by another character, is one such hybrid. Played by newcomer, Christian Convery, he is both a boy on a mission to find his mother and a fugitive, sought after by the "Last Men" the soldiers of the shadowy quasi-government that has sprung up from the ashes of a collapsed civilization. Fortunately for Gus, he has ex-Last Man and enormous former NFL player Tommy Jepperd (Nonzi Anozie) watching his back. Still, it may not be enough.

There's a lot going on in this series, even with only eight episodes. Running parallel to Gus's story is that of Dr. Adityah Singh (Adeel Akhtar) a doctor whose wife (Aliza Vellani) has the Sick, and for whom he would do anything, even things that go against his very vows as a physician, as well as that of Aimee (Dania Ramirez) a former couples' therapist who had decided to live out the apocalypse alone, until a hybrid baby was dropped off at her doorstep. All of these stories tie together by the eighth episode.

As I said, earlier, I really quite liked this series. I liked how it juxtaposed the darkness of humanity against the light, and the innocence of Gus and the other hybrid children against the murderous intent of those who view them as nothing more than puzzles to be dissected in the relentless quest for a cure for the Sick. There are no zombies here, but humanity is arguably much, much scarier. It just makes for really compelling storytelling at this stage. 

That  said, I have to be frank; as charming as Convery is as Gus, I don't see the storytellers sustaining this dynamic of wide-eyed innocence versus the evils of humanity for more than a couple of seasons at most. From a story perspective, it simply isn't possible to keep beating the same drum without eventually sounding monotonous, but from a casting perspective, it's even more complicated.

Christian Convery works as Gus because, well, he's a cute kid who effectively conveys Gus' utter guilelessness. The thing is, he will grow up, the same way The Walking Dead's Chandler Rigg did. That wasn't much of a problem from a narrative perspective considering that the focus was ever and always on the adult characters like Rick, Daryl, Michonne at al, but considering that the title character is a young child, whose cuteness and charm were an integral part of the narrative for the first season, I can't help but think that a surly, hulking teenager is going to be a lot less charming than a kid, and Convery's growth spurt can't be more than a season or two away.

So either the story has to reflect his growth and somehow keep up with it, or they'll have to recast him, or, in true Netflix fashion, the showrunners will have to end the show after a few seasons.

Whatever they ultimately decide, I've been won over by this season and I hope they get at least one more.  

8.5/10

The Gentleman Burglar: A Review of Lupin (Part 2)

 developed for television by 

George Kay

Francoi Uzan

Before the popular Netflix series Lupin dropped earlier this year I had no real idea who the character was and had only ever associated him with a popular Japanese anime series, Lupin III, which featured a gangly gentleman burglar sporting sideburns and his high-tech crew. It was popular enough here to warrant a live-action, localized adaptation and big enough in its native Japan to earn a computer-generated film update. 

I was genuinely surprised to learn, then, that Lupin was actually a popular French pulp hero whose origings date back to the early 20th century, when he was created by Maurice LeBlanc, a sort of "anti-Sherlock Holmes," and that the anime was derived from that work. 

The live-action Netflix series starring charismatic French actor Omar Sy isn't quite a reimagining of the story of Arsene Lupin, but rather the story of Assane Diop (Sy), a man so inspired by his pulp adventures as a gentleman burglar that he has emulated his lifestyle as a thief and a bit of a grifter.  There's more to Diop's motivations, however, than just boosting rich people's valuables; he's a man on a mission, and that is to uncover the truth behind the unjust imprisonment of his father, Babakar Diop (Fargasse Assande) who was framed for the theft of a valuable necklace by his employer Hubert Pelligrini (Herve Pierre) who faked the theft to claim the insurance money. Using his consummate skill and planning, the younger Diop actually steals the necklace, which belonged to the infamous French Queen Marie Antoinette and sets in motion a whole chain of events which, he hopes, will bring justice to his father after two and a half decades. It won't be easy, though, as Pelligrini has considerable resources at his disposal, including a police captain (Vincent Garanger) in his pocket, as well as a couple of armed goons, including the lethal Leonard (Adama Niane) and Pascal (Nicolas Wanczycki) to do his dirty work. And naturally, having actually stolen a necklace, whatever his ulterior motives may be, Diop has also got cops hot on his trail, especially fellow Lupin devotee Guedira (Soufiane Guerrab).  Things get really serious when Pelligrini has Leonard kidnap Lupin's son Raoul (Etan Simon) much to Lupin's consternation and that of his ex-girlfriend Claire (Ludivigne Sagnier). 

It won't be easy to take down Pelligrini, but with the help of his trusty sidekick Benjamin (Anthony Guoy), and Pelligrini's own daughter Juliette (Clotilde Hesme), Diop may yet prevail. 

I'm not reviewing "Part I" of the series but rather the last five episodes, or Part II, which came out a little under a month ago on Netflix.  "Part I" featured episodes directed by Now You See Me helmer Louis Letterier and as a result had the distinct heist movie vibe, like a French Ocean's Eleven.  I enjoyed most of the first five episodes quite a bit, especially as the storytellers revealed Diop's backstory bit by tantalizing bit.  Unfortunately, near the end, the series suffered from a serious case of plot-driven storytelling, in which the consummately crafty Diop basically forgot he had a brain and did something really careless to help move the story forward. 

I mention this because I'm quite relieved to report that there's no such storytelling faux pas here in Part II.  The storytelling is straightfoward and doesn't rely on any cheap, character-destroying tropes, and the cast execute their roles perfectly, especially Sy, who truly carries the series from the first episode down to the last, helped along qutie well by Mamaidou Hadara, who plays the fifteen-year-old version of him. Leterrier doesn't come back to direct any more episodes, but the remaining five still have that fantastic heist movie verve.  I was able to predict one of the twists (and I don't dare reveal which one it was) but I still thoroughly enjoyed the series.  Sure, if one really tried one could probably pick apart the logic of how the story played out, but as is the trademark of Lupin, the name of the game here is sleight of hand, and the way that the writers and directors keep the story moving along is just so clever that I really couldn't be bothered to think of any way that the plot make sense.

Given Netflix's proclivity for giving its series the axe, I'm really happy that Lupin is easily one of their most-watched series and sincerely hope it gets more seasons in the future.

 

9/10

The Filipino Komiks Adaptation We've Long Been Waiting For: A Review of "Trese"

 developed for the screen by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldissimo, based on their comics series

When I first read the black-and-white issues of Budjette Tan's and Kajo Baldissimo's brand new comics series Trese back in 2005, I was hooked. The story of a detective, Alexandra Trese, taking on supernatural mysteries of the underworld armed was immensely appealing and for issue after issue Tan and Baldissimo just kept the compelling stories featuring creatures from Filipino mythology coming.  

This was long before the days of such sprawling comics adaptations as the Marvel Cinematic Universe but I already knew I wanted to see this series adapted into another form somehow. 

Therefore, when it was announced sometime during coronavirus pandemic (I don't remember exactly when anymore; time kind of lost all meaning then) that Netflix would be adapting this series into an anime, I was greatly enthused. Animation was, to my mind, the perfect vehicle as the storytellers wouldn't have to worry about finding the budget for special effects to render the supernatural aspect of the narrative. I only wondered how they would manage the comics' English dialogue with its smattering of Filipino. A Western voice cast would simply not do this series justice, I felt.

It's been nearly two weeks since all six episodes of Trese dropped on Netflix, and having seen them all twice over I'm happy to say I wasn't at all disappointed. The series boasted topnotch animation, tight scripting, and an incredibly atmospheric feel that accurately captured the uniquely Filipino sensibility of the show. 

In the show, as in the comics, Trese (voiced in the English dub by Shay Mitchell and in the Tagalog dub by Liza Soberano) is a private detective who investigates, with the help of her supernatural muscle the Kambal and her trusty man Friday Hank , crimes of a paranormal nature. More than being just an investigator, she is essentially a warrior-shaman, a "babaylan" of exceptional ability and, courtesy of her late father Anton, with extensive training in the arcane arts. She maintains a tenuous balance established by her father between the world of humanity and that of the many supernatural beings that live just beyond human sight. With the sudden uptick in horrific crimes perpetrated by denizens of the underworld, however, Trese fears that this fragile balance may soon be destroyed, 

I've already waxed lyrical about this show in a Youtube video but I still have other thoughts on this series that I didn't get to articulate on in the video, which was bit more free-flowing and extemporaneous than my written reviews tend to be. 

As an adaptation of the first six issues of the series, Trese works like a charm. Inevitable liberties may have been taken, but they are surprisingly few and none deviating in any substantial way from Budjette Tan's and Kajo Baldissimo's original vision, and the writing team captured the very best part of the comic: the incredible world-building.

I love the character of Trese, how she bears a terrible burden along with her responsibilities but isn't terribly emotional about it, until the weight of her burden starts to get too heavy. She's believably deadpan, but every now and again her very human fragility shines through. Both the writing and the animation work together wonderfully to bring this to life. More importantly, though, they introduce the viewer to Filipino folklore in one of the canniest ways possible: they tease it, bit by bit, episode by episode, and draw the viewer in with each new glimpse of this fantastical world and the creatures that inhabit it. 

My two beefs, however, are with the voice acting, particularly in the English track, and specifically with the Filipino accents, which, to my mind, worked on a 50/50 basis. Some of them were knocked right out of the park, but others came across as more Latin American than Filipino. Regardless of whether the actors' accents constitute their real-life Filipino accents in America or Canada, they owed it to authenticity to give genuine Filipino accents and not merely Fil-Am or Fil-Canadian accents. At least half of the cast got it right, but others rather notably didn't. 

This latter half, unfortunately, includes lead voice actress Shay Mitchell, who gave Trese her English voice. Mitchell is a capable actress and I thought she nicely captured Trese's inner strength and the conflict bubbling within her, but whenever she spoke Tagalog I basically cringed. She could get away with the relatively short phrases, but as the spells she recited got longer and longer her Tagalog made me shrink deeper into my chair.  All I can say here, as I did in my video review, is that she needs a full-time dialect coach, and not just the producer giving her notes, which, based on the "behind the scenes" special that Netflix aired, appears to be what happened. If she had a dialect coach for the first season, then she needs a better one next time, hopefully one from Manila and not LA.  

This quibble notwithstanding, I still enjoyed the series quite a bit.

I also enjoyed the Tagalog dub, which I watched on my second viewing, and I have to respectfully disagree with the critiques of Liza Soberano, who dubbed Trese in the Tagalog language version. She has widely been accused of being "wooden" but in truth, she was being true to Trese's deadpan nature, which dates all the way back to her appearances in the comics. I'm no Liza fan, and in truth I couldn't even listen to her speak during the "making of" special as I fast-forwarded through all her parts, but her voice acting was not a problem, nor was that of any of the other Filipino actors in the Tagalog dub.

What I did find problematic, though, was an abrupt and ridiculous exposition dump that took place in the first third of the very last episode, the kind of monologue that would put even some of the more exposition-indulgent Japanese anime to shame. The story, which had been moving along with a nice, brisk pace at that point ground to a halt, and in an oddly "meta" moment, the setting literally went from day to night in the course of the speech. It was not a shining moment for anyone involved. 

My issues with accents and last-minute exposition aside, though, I am very much a fan of this show and I dearly hope it has a future with Netflix, who are notorious for giving even popular shows the chopping block. The production value of this show is right up there with any other anime Netflix has produced, and it deserves to live to see another day.  

8/10

Netflix Does Superheroes: A Review of Jupiter's Legacy

created for TV by Steven DeKnight

from the comic books by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely

I have to be honest: I have mixed feelings about a lot of the work of famed comic-book writer Mark Millar. Apart from his early stuff for Marvel, including his phenomenal first run on The Ultimates which has explicitly been acknowledged as a huge influence on the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general and on The Avengers films in particular, and a yearlong run on Spider-Man that I genuinely enjoyed, his work has been somewhat hit-or-miss for me. I definitely had issues with the original  Civil War comics and I enjoyed the movie far more, and I have also had my share of issues with his original work, of which I have read a smattering, like Chosen , Supercrooks and Kick-Ass.  What irks about Millar's work is that too often, it feels like it's written primarily for the shock value, or is nothing more than shock for shock's sake. 

That's not always the case, though; some of his original work stems from his genuine love of the superhero genre that he grew up with, and feels like an attempt to put his own spin on it, for better or worse.

Jupiter's Legacy, the recently released Netflix adaptation of one of Millar's original creations, which, I'll wager, was created with either the big or small screen already firmly in mind, strikes me as one of the latter kind of original work. 

For eight episodes, showrunner Steven DeKnight and his team of writers and directors guide cast members of Josh Duhamel, Leslie Bibb, Ben Daniels and Matt Lanter, among others, through an engaging tapestry of stories that mix golden age superheroics and a more cynical, modern -day superhero narrative. 

Duhamel and Bibb play spouses Sheldon and Grace, better known to the world by their superhero aliases the Utopian and Lady Liberty, who, together with Sheldon's brother Walter (Daniels), his friend George (Lanter) and a couple of other people founded the superhero team the Union of Justice in the 1930s. Nearly a hundred years after they first received their superpowers, the couple, having aged more slowly than most people but having aged nonetheless, find themselves grappling not only with a resurgent supervillain threat but with their own somewhat difficult, super-powered children, son Brandon aka Paragon (Andrew Horton) who is eager to follow in his parents' footsteps but is somewhat headstrong about doing it his own way, and Chloe (Elena Kampouris), who has turned her back on superheroing altogether for the fast-paced,drug-fueled life of a supermodel. When a new type of ultra-violent supervillain kills members of their team and forces Brandon to do the unthinkable, Sheldon and Grace find themselves confronted with difficult choices on how to proceed, and Sheldon finds himself looking back to where it all began: in the Great Depression, when he and his brother Walter were struggling to keep their father's flailing steel company alive. 

I'll admit that the intertwining narrative of past and present was sometimes a chore to sit through, and that it isn't always smoothly handled, but all told, I sincerely liked this approach to superhero storytelling, not only marrying the Golden Age narrative with the more modern, darker take on the subject matter but making this marriage one of the central sources of conflict.

One of the main drivers of conflict in the story is the "code" of the Union of Justice, which really boils down to one simple rule: no killing. It's not the newest subject of debate in superhero storytelling; DC and Marvel have been pretty much doing it for years, but I really enjoyed the presentation of the characters' journeys from the Great Depression to nearly a century later. 

It also turned the narrative on its head a bit; rather than the 30s era superhero being deprived of his virtuous parents, Sheldon instead discovers that his late father, who killed himself when his company went belly-up, isn't quite the hero he imagined him to be, which makes his journey as the scion of a failed steel tycoon one of redemption rather than revenge. I appreciated that it was this journey towards becoming a superhero that shapes his values, which eventually form the Union's code. Duhamel's committed performance makes it work.  His code isn't born out of idealism, but out of the knowledge of what it means to live without a code, and I liked that. Duhamel, Bibb, Daniels and Lanter are at the heart of the story, and their synergy makes even the more out-there aspects of the narrative work, because they really give it a human core. 

Given that this is a TV series, the seams in the visual effects tend to show fairly often. The super-speed and flying effects often made me wince. The production value on the whole is decent at best, and certainly nowhere near the much slicker Netflix offerings like Altered Carbon, but considering how Netflix has spent big and lost before, I get where they're coming from.

Jupiter's Legacy is a long way from being one of my favorite superhero stories, but it is a welcome distraction in these times and something decent to pass the time until the stuff I'm really looking forward to, like Trese and Lupin: Season 2 finally hit Netflix. 

7/10