Jupiter's Legacy & Happy! Frank Quitely on What Worked and What Didn't

Posted in: Comics, Netflix, Opinion, SYFY, TV, TV | Tagged: happy, jupiter's legacy

Jupiter's Legacy & Happy! Frank Quitely on What Worked and What Didn't

Artist Frank Quitely discussed the adaptations of Mark Millar and Quitely's Jupiter's Legacy, and Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson's Happy!

Published Sun, 03 May 2026 08:37:11 -0500
by Ray Flook
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During a wide-ranging interview with The Comics Journal, artist Frank Quitely touched on two comics-to-screen adaptations that we've devoted quite a bit of reporting to in the past. Running for one season, Netflix released the Josh Duhamel, Ben Daniels, and Leslie Bibb-starring adaptation of Mark Millar and Quitely's Jupiter's Legacy in 2021 to a less-than-enthusiastic response from viewers. We felt a bit of validation that a number of points that Quitely raises are in line with what we shared before the series came out (though we laid a bit more blame at Millar's feet based on how he went into and communicated about the project).

Quitely was asked for his thoughts on what is lost and gained when a comic book series is adapted for a film or television series, with Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy, Marvel Studios' Deadpool and Wolverine, and DC Studios' Superman offered as examples. In terms of a series adaptation, Quitely shared that Jupiter's Legacy was a "huge missed opportunity" that should've focused less on political satire and more on a "cross-generational" approach.

"The Jupiter's Legacy thing I think was just a huge missed opportunity. There was no point in trying to do what The Boys had done because that was absolutely its own thing and you can't kind of outdo something like that in the same way you can't really do political satire anymore. I did the two books, they came out first but they were the middle of the story. Obviously there was Jupiter's Circle before that and there was Jupiter's Requiem after it. So there was something like thirty issues or something like that," Quitely shared.

He continued, "I think you could have done a kind of cross-generational thing that ended up in a near future and you could have regularly killed off main characters and obviously there's a lot of political and family machinations. It could have borrowed a little from Game of Thrones and it could have been an ongoing thing that changed from the 1930s right through to the near future with a wee bit of inter-dimensional thing and our history of comics. It could have said something about the 1930s when Superman started. It could have had a Mad Men section like in the '50s and '60s, and get into the Beat generation. It could have worked really, really well. And the way it starts is there's a king and there's an evil uncle and there's the king's son and the evil uncle convinces the king's son to kill his father. The young guy can be king but he doesn't know what he's doing. It's always going with the uncle that takes over. I think that's the starting point of a pretty good and pretty familiar story. It's like Lion King."

"It's an archetypal story that also is spread over a lot of generations and it takes in aliens and future stuff. There was a lot of scope for doing something interesting with that that wasn't a standard superhero thing," Quitely added. Except there was one big problem with that approach. Apparently, the producers weren't looking to kill off Duhamel's Sheldon Sampson, aka The Utopian. "They didn't want to kill off the Utopian, the Josh Duhamel character, at the start and Mark Millar to his credit was like, 'Guys this is the way the story kicks off, this is how the story starts, he can't still be alive.' It's the main conflict and doing that at the end of season one, that's not gonna work."

Yet, Quitely says that the attitude was, "'You go away and write some new stuff. The TV guys know what they're doing." And then, we have SYFY's 2017 live-action series adaptation of Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson's graphic novel series, Happy!, starring Christopher Meloni and Patton Oswalt. "Grant Morrison had the same experience on Happy. Happy at its heart has an actual storyline that pays off. It works for a reason and Christopher Meloni, he really got the character and he's really good at ad-libbing which was brilliant and Grant was super happy with him but everybody else, particularly the writers room, they're like, 'Hey, we can just totally wing this. This is how you get the energy into it,'" Quitely said.

He continued, "Grant said, 'No, wait a minute. You can do whatever you like on the branches of the tree, but the trunk has to be like this.' They didn't take his concerns on board. Then the suits from upstairs come down and go, 'Wait a minute, where's this going? Where did this come from? This isn't what we bought.' I think there's a thing that happens when people take comics and it seems to be, with my limited knowledge of film and television, that when people start taking comic books to make them into something else, there's a disconnect between 'here's this floppy source material over here" and 'we're gonna make something big and brilliant out of it.' Actually, look at what makes that work first and then make that big and brilliant rather than be flat drawings on a page."

This is where we humbly disagree, though we do respect where Quitely is coming from. As much as I appreciate Morrison and Robertson's original work, SYFY's adaptation still stands as one of our favorite live-action takes on a comic book series. While the series didn't exactly hold back when it came to sex, violence (especially for basic cable), and all of the wonderful weirdness, it never lost sight of its humanity – even when that humanity was pretty dark and depressing. For example, the second season didn't take an "everything's great again" approach – quite the opposite. Meloni's Nick Sax may have earned a chance at redemption, but Season 2 showed just how hard that redemption can be to achieve. Medina Senghore's Amanda and Bryce Lorenzo's Hailey didn't just pick up the pieces and move forward – they had to face the trauma from the fallout from the first season. And sometimes, they didn't handle that trauma in very healthy ways – even as the weirdness continued to grow.

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