Announced exclusively at Comic Book Resources as part of their Millarworld series comes the best news of the year: Frank Quitely is going to be illustrating a new comic book.
Originally teased back in April, Mark Millar’s new Millarworld project will be titled Jupiter’s Children, released through his Millarworld imprint and Image Comics, and will feature the great Frank Quitely on art. Opening in France in the 1920s, the book, as Millar describes it — well, why not just let him explain?
“We start on a bunch of explorers kind of like that opening from ‘King Kong,’ which I love, and they’re doing an exploration of the ancient world — these rich Americans who have put together an expedition to find something you’ll hear about in the story. From those first few pages, and a doomed expedition, we cut to the present day, and they came home from that trip altered and with a plan to save the American idea. In historical context, the Russian revolution is relatively recent and Europe is in a state of turmoil and they’re just on the cusp of the Wall Street Crash so they’ve gone on this trip to try and save America and then we cut to their utterly useless, meandering children in the present day essentially squandering their inheritance. It’s not crass and celebrity focused, although it touches on that stuff. It’s more Shakespearean, with the last of the old heroes, a King Lear figure, watching these teenagers and twenty-something with no altruism whatsoever. There’s a massive regret in his eyes as he looks around at the world he’s leaving behind, very much the world we see today with the Euro-zone collapse and industrial decline and six billion people worried about the future, he feels the children and grand-children of he and his friends just aren’t up to the job. But this is just the starting point. This is like saying that Star Wars is about Darth Vader boarding a ship and kidnapping the Princess. This is the first eight or ten pages and we just run with it from here.
Millar and Quitely have worked together previously on a fantastic run in the Authority following Ellis and Hitch’s original one, and it is incredibly exciting to see the two finally getting back together for some creator-owned content. One can only hope that this is half as good as the Authority was. Millar even hopes that this will be the biggest project he’s worked on yet, referring to it as his Star Wars and admitting that despite already receiving option offers, he refuses to let the project head to the big screen before even hitting stands.
To be honest, when we got to the part of the original article that said Frank Quitely was illustrating, we stopped reading. Didn’t take much more than that to convince us to put money away for pre-orders. Look for the book come September.
For the full interview with Millar about the project, don’t forget to head on over to CBR.
