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The team behind Icon and Rocket: Season One explains how the Milestone hero differs from Superman: “His cultural matrix is different.”
While Icon and Superman share a number of similarities, the two heroes couldn’t be more different.
CBR spoke to Reginald Hudlin and Leon Chills, two of the creatives behind Icon and Rocket: Season One, part of the “Milestone Returns” event which kicks off a new era for the DC-adjacent heroes. Icon has long been viewed as a riff on Superman, but Hudlin and Chills laid out how different the two are from one another.
“I feel like a lot of the threats that Superman handles are on a macro level — like someone’s trying to destroy the planet or take over the world,” Chills said. “Because Icon has lived in the skin of a Black man, what he goes up against is a lot more personal because he’s been oppressed… They’re actually going after societal ills. You don’t really see Superman or most other heroes doing this, and that’s a huge difference.”
“These guys are both aliens, and their main difference is due to how they grew up,” Hudlin added. “One grew up in Smallville in the ’40s or ’50s. The other man grows up on a plantation in Georgia in the 1850s. They have very different life experiences and life hacks. They’re both guys with a strong moral compass. They’re both genuinely great people. So it’s not that we’re knocking Superman, but he’s working through the cultural matrix that shaped him. And so is Icon, but his cultural matrix is different. It doesn’t mean that one is more moral than the other. It’s just that they see the world and how to make it better in different ways.”
For Hudlin, Icon has experienced an entirely different world and culture which shapes how he responds to things as a person and as a hero.
“This is not Superman. Icon is his own character,” Hudlin continued. “And one of the things that is important to me and the book is that we tell stories that you’ll never see in an issue of Superman. He’s not Superman painted brown. He’s a unique character with his own set of choices and storylines that reflect who he is. The point of Milestone isn’t to tell typical comic book stories with a Black character. We tell our stories from our own unique perspectives.”
Icon and Rocket: Season One #2, by Reginald Hudlin, Doug Braithwaite, Andrew Currie, Brad Anderson, and Andworld Design, is on sale now from DC.
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