First Look: Mark Millar's 'Jupiter's Children' (Exclusive)

Jupiter’s Children is one project Mark Millar is keeping away from Hollywood. For now, anyway.

Millar and his artist partner Frank Quitely are unveiling the 12-issue miniseries, a superhero sci-fi epic, early next year. Millar is hoping this will be his Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, a vast story involving a large cast of characters spread out over many generations.

Millar usually is eager to sell his creations to studios and producers, sometimes even before the comic is published. His Wanted and Kick-Ass went on to become hit adaptations, Kick-Ass 2 is in production, and several other comics, such as Nemesis and The Secret Service, are in development with Joe Carnahan and Matthew Vaughan attached.

But with Children, Millar wants to wait until he’s finished the first miniseries (he plans three volumes) before he opens the development door.

PHOTOS: Mark Millar's "Jupiter's Children" (First Look)

“It’s a story I've been thinking about for the past five years. It's a massively ambitious project and planned as an enormous trilogy, the first one being I think the best thing I've ever written,” Millar tells Heat Vision. 

And while Millar also is keeping the plot under wraps, we at Heat Vision are proud to exclusively show off Children's main cast of characters. (A note: Millar woudn't reveal the names of the characters or their powers.)

Children takes a multigenerational approach to tell a story of the offspring of superheroes who haven’t lived up to the standards of their parents, who first got their powers in the '20s after the discovery of a mysterious island.

“We have the last remains of these old-school heroes and their mainly vacuous children living in L.A., a massive disappointment to the first generation of super-people and just lost, no real direction in their lives beyond advertising gigs and opening night clubs," the writer says. "This is literally where we find everyone and then we go into the future, taking these guys on a journey like we've never seen in comics before.

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Millar says everything he’s ever written has been a prologue to this story, which he sees as vast and epic as Tolkien’s Rings or Lucas’ Star Wars.

“From Superman: Red Son to The Ultimates to Wanted to Kick-Ass, I guess I've been kind of training for this one. I love Batman and I love The Avengers, but they're either set in Gotham City with a solo lead or we're talking about maybe seven superheroes fighting a single antagonist. What I'm proposing here is a universe of characters, who have been around for a while and a vast network and world we can play with. ... This kind of scale, this event-level storyline, is something I don't think I'd have been ready for before. This is what I've been buidling to."