Maxwell Grant

Halloween

Arabic

Desert (Californian)

Desert (Australian)

Indie rock in disguise

Beach Ken

Jupiter’s Legacy is, for all its many sins, interesting in part because it's built around the idea of a Superman figure who’s powerful, beloved, and connected enough in Utopian that he can basically single-handedly force everyone to keep toeing the line and refuse to let that moment come when it otherwise might have; Skyfox is the only one capable of trying to force the issue and he’s dismissed out of hand because they’re assuming his problems are purely about their Ivy League soap bullshit. 100 years of pure classic-style cops and robbers, no Krakoas or Miraclemen or Injustices or Ultimates, or even the evolutionary turnover old Jack Hobbs was figuring on. By the time Utopian’s old, unpopular, and physically weak enough that everyone sick of his shit can gang up and kill him, any tyrants or ideologues or maniacs who might’ve done something interesting with taking over the world are long out of circulation, it’s just a bunch of moron failsons and a creepy old wannabe trying to seize his moment. They can’t really accomplish anything but do a bad enough job at running the world to stoke some righteous anger and inspire a new generation of true-blue capes via Great Depression 2.

(Green Lantern: Blackstars as a stab at much the same concept makes it even more explicit: Superman is going to make them do this bullshit forever so that the DC Universe never has to change how it works, so they gotta kill him. The comparison here made me realize for the first time that while obviously Blackstars Jon Kent maps to Brandon Sampson as the manipulated son, he’s just as much if not more so Skyfox, everyone thinks this is about his pet bullshit and that’s 100% a motivator but he’s also objectively right in a way the powers that be would prefer to ignore.)

This also makes an interesting conceptual inverse to my beloved Irredeemable, where rather than keeping the traditional superheroic model going way past its sell-by date, its Superman is the loadbearing wall that was always going to crumble under the pressure of anyone less composed and ideologically on-point than your Clark Kents or Sheldon Sampson's having that job. Waid and company make a point that when he snaps superheroes have only been a thing for five years, and none of them are remotely on his level with its responsibilities until Cary gets Scylla's powers; they were doing perfectly fine in the classic routine and none of the rest of this had hit a wall yet. Every 'deconstructive' beat with the rest of the cast is in direct response to him, whether feeling out early on that he's not what he seems, or trying to fill the vacuum left by him, or having to make unthinkable compromises to contain or clean up after him. And of course while all the aforementioned tyrants and ideologues and maniacs had been subdued or retired by the time Utopian's number came up, they were all in their prime and plenty ready to try and take advantage of Tony going ripshit. Altogether an interesting note in how much the functioning of a given 'superhero universe' ultimately just come down to, as you note in the adjoining post, where the 800 pound gorilla sits.

Anyway all this was inspired because between Superman's new suit and probably-Zod, calling it that someone on the My Adventures With Superman staff loved Utopian's design.

A serious version of Michael Kaluta's Shadow Fish.

I have worked in scicomm for a decade, some of that at a paleontology. I would ask you to trust me that evolution is popularly mischaracterized like a kind of smart investment rather than a game of chance and circumstance and that every day I had to find ways to delicately correct guests’ misunderstandings, but you can literally just watch almost any dinosaur or prehistoric animal documentary with an ear for the language and framing around it. You could probably make a drinking game out of it but I think you might die if you took a shot every time a dinosaur documentary invoked the concept of monarchy alone.