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jducoeurMark Grayson is a 17-year-old high schooler. He's perfectly normal -- but knows that his father is secretly Omni-Man, the world's greatest superhero, and Mark is rather impatiently waiting for his powers to come in.
Sheldon Samson is the Utopian, the world's greatest superhero. He's trying hard to make things good for the world, but his kids, Brandon (who desperately wants his father's approval) and Chloe (who wants nothing less), aren't quite living up to his ideals.
The first of those paragraphs is about Invincible (Amazon); the second is Jupiter's Legacy (Netflix). The first eight-episode season of each came out recently, and I've been watching them in parallel. For obvious reasons, they kind of demand a parallel review.
Both shows are adaptations of comic books from superstar authors: Invincible was a long-running (144 issue) series by Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) that finished up a few years ago, and Jupiter's Legacy is an ongoing series of miniseries by Mark Millar (Wanted, Kingsman, etc). Both are pretty faithful to their source material, but do a good job of adapting their stories to television.
Both stories are examinations of the standard superhero tropes -- in particular, the black-and-white good-vs-evil concept. But they take that in very different directions, and they have very different tones and styles.
On the one hand, there is Invincible. Mark's father Nolan (Omni-Man) came to Earth as an emissary from the benevolent planet Viltrum, a place of idealistic super-people: he is here to teach humans, to raise them up and make Earth a peaceful, loving, safe planet.
Some words in the previous sentence are true -- but not as many as one might hope. That's not actually a spoiler: by the end of the first episode, you know that there is a lot more to Nolan than meets the eye. It's also not really a spoiler to say that Mark does get his powers early in the season, and much of it is devoted to him taking his first steps as a super-hero, as the truth about his father comes to light.
Mark is very, very seventeen. Deep down, he's the good person he was raised to be: courageous, caring, all that jazz. But he's also awash in hormones, self-absorbed, desperate for love and respect and all that -- at times, he is every bit as dickish as the average 17-year-old boy. Working past that is the main character arc of the season, and it does that reasonably well, albeit not with a ton of depth.
(Did I mention that the look and feel of Invincible is that of the classic four-color comics? Think classic Spider-Man with better graphics tech, and you're not all that far off.)
OTOH, the television version of Jupiter's Legacy takes a broader view, without any one true viewpoint character. Unlike the comic (where I tend to remember the kids as being more center-stage), the parental generation is a bit more to the fore.
Sheldon (Utopian) and the rest of his team/family are old. The first season plays in two parallel timelines, one in the present with the tension between him and his kids, but the other 90 years ago, as a visionary (and not entirely sane) Sheldon, in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, traces his path across the Depression, leading a group of family, friends and strangers to a place that he doesn't comprehend but knows they must get to.
The good-vs-evil tension in Jupiter's Legacy is subtler than that of Invincible, and plays on the question of whether "good" is an absolute. The Utopian lives by The Code, and as the leading superhero he insists, quite forcefully, that the rest must do the same -- protecting the innocent at all cost, and never, ever taking a life. When the villains get more violent, and the choice becomes allowing fellow heroes to die or killing one of the bad guys, everyone begins to strain against those rules.
Rather like Mark, Sheldon is a basically decent person, but his flaws are those of an older man rather than those of a kid: his ego is deeply rooted in his beliefs, and he can't accept the possibility that the world could require more nuance. So while he is somewhat likeable, he's a somewhat less redeemable dick than Mark is -- the intersection of idealism and obsession as a particular flavor of toxic masculinity. (And like Mark, he is rather blind to some of what is going on in is family.)
Both series are basically chapter one of a considerably longer story. In the case of Invincible, much longer: the comic follows Mark for something like the next ten years, as he grows up, comes to terms with his own responsibilities, falls in love, has a family, and all that. It does not have a deep underlying message -- it is very much following him and his family through those years. The TV show follows the comic fairly closely, so I expect they'll play that forward for as long as they have an audience.
I have rather less sense of where Jupiter's Legacy is going: IIRC, the stories are still coming out, quite slowly, and I honestly have sort of lost any sense of arc in them. That said, the TV show is considerably better than I remember the comic being -- the comic has beautiful art, but always felt a bit detached to me, and I've never thought of it as one of Millar's best works. The TV show is better structured, with a tight first season that holds together well as a novel in a series; quite frankly, I find the characters a good deal richer and more interesting than the ones in the comic.
Content warnings all over in both cases, but particularly All The Violence. Let's use The Boys -- the other recent major superhero series -- as a benchmark. Jupiter's Legacy has at least one serious fight scene in each episode, and gets a little gory here and there, but is only about a quarter as gory-violent as The Boys. Invincible -- well, you remember how I mentioned that it looks like a four-color comic? It is therefore more viscerally shocking that it is wildly gory: you get blood, guts, and chunkily animated gore quite frequently, several times as much so as The Boys. If you dislike graphic violence I can't entirely recommend either show, but especially not Invincible.
Mind, I think this is a very deliberate statement -- the story has no interest in sugar-coating the violence that is usually swept under the rug in most superhero stories, and is instead intentionally showing the horror this inflicts, especially on the bystanders, who get killed by the hundreds in some scenes. There's definitely something to say for that artistically, and once of the deepest differences between Nolan and Mark is in how they react to it -- but it doesn't make it easy viewing. (The title sequence gets literally splashed in blood, moreso with each passing episode.) I will say that it never feels like it is reveling in the gore, the way The Boys sometimes does: there is none of that sense of violence-porn, just ugliness.
There's also some sex in both shows -- mostly implied in Invincible and slightly more on-screen in Jupiter's Legacy. In general, aside from the violence, the content warnings are stronger for Jupiter's Legacy, including themes of mental illness, drug abuse, family struggles, and probably a few others I'm not thinking of.
They're both very good adaptations, and reasonably strong shows on their intended terms. Neither is anywhere near Watchmen grade, but not much is; both are rather more interesting than the average superhero TV show. Invincible is more fun (the gore aside), a slice-of-life family drama with superpowers; Jupiter's Legacy is more interesting, and has more to say, but is notably darker in tone. If and only if you can stomach the violence, they're worth considering.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 11:42 pm (UTC)Watchmen the movie is so depressing, are you referring to the tv show or the movie? I get into the weirdest nihilistic mood after watching the movie, nearly as bad as Sid & Nancy.
Honestly, it's a ... not a relief, that is obviously the wrong word, but when superheroes battle and there is no blood, no one cares about the smashed windows, and there is no collateral damage it's unrealistic, and I think that it has contributed in its own way to the glorification of modern violence. There is this idea that comic book violence is just 2 guys in tights punching each other and there is no real damage anywhere, when more likely there are hundreds of cell-phone holding muggles getting squashed in dreadful ways.
Like Metalocalypse.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-06 12:29 am (UTC)Oh, I mean the TV show. The Watchmen movie was relentlessly mediocre: not precisely wrong, but never quite right.
But the Watchmen miniseries is on my list of the 25 best TV shows of all time -- a sequel to the comic that is both utterly loving and arguably better than the original. If you haven't seen it yet, you really should.
And yes, there's something refreshingly honest about the bloodiness of it. But it is still pretty startling at times...
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-07 12:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-07 09:54 am (UTC)https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a36614491/jupiters-legacy-season-2-netflix-mark-millar-supercrooks/
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-07 12:42 pm (UTC)And that was very stream of consciousness. Thank you for your patience.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-07 02:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-07 04:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-10 12:09 am (UTC)In that comic, two supers fight it out, with one (the presumed "bad guy") constantly yelling "Destroy!" as they're fighting. That's the limit of the dialog for the entire comic. Along the way, most of a city is destroyed by the two.
That's it; entire story. But really good fight scenes.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-10 02:02 am (UTC)Heh -- yeah, amongst my enormous comic collection, I have one enormous box, sized something like 18 x 36, solely for books like Destroy! to lay flat in...