Almost exactly a month ago, Mark Millar put some enigmatic previews out for SUPERIOR, his new creator-owned superhero title with Leinil Francis Yu. The previews were pretty sparse, only showing the logo along with photos of real world troubles and ominous taglines like “He is coming to save us.” A lot of you suspected that this be a darker, more realistic take on the Superman archetype. Turns out you were partially right…
Bleeding Cool’s got some scans from the special issue of Wizard that Millar guest-edited just recently. It’s got some art of a Superman-like hero (who’s actually a 13-year-old with multiple Sclerosis,) as well as the nasty-looking bio-mechanoid monster, Abraxas (who’s described as Darkseid meets Brainiac meets Darth Vader.) The mad Scotsman’s saying he’s wanted to write this kind of story his whole life and the “high concept” is that SUPERIOR shows what Superman would be like if he came out of the Marvel universe. It’ll have the “usual insane amount of violence” but still a lot of heart. == TEASER ==
Here are the other pics...
What sticks out to me the most about this is that Superior (if that’s his name) seems to be wearing a huge pro-wrestling title belt on his waist. And then there’s also the revelation that Millar wanted to have the first issue of NEMESIS end with the president (that's right, the real president of the United States) getting decapitated, but it ended up running too controversial to print. That’d certainly following a theme he’s already established. I remember the first arc of ULTIMATE X-MEN ending with Magneto stripping George Bush naked on the White House lawn.
Anyway, now that you maniacs know a little more about this mysterious project, does it intrigue you more? Supposedly, Millar’s already got a movie deal worked out for this, so you just might be seeing it in theaters in a couple years.
-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Studios and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia. HYBRID BASTARDS! is available here and UNIMAGINABLE is available here for pre-order on Amazon.com.