Thirteen Years Ago

One of my favorite stories in Starman isn’t about Jack Knight. It’s about his father and some of his old friends – Jay Garrick Flash, Alan Scott Green Lantern, Rex Tyler Hourman, and Charles McNider Doctor Mid-Nite. Starman #11: “13 Years Ago: Five Friends” has the ring of older folks telling stories about walking to school seven miles in the snow and cold uphill both ways.

We all have those relatives or family friends. These guys don’t seem bitter though; they’re just not up with the times.

In this installment of “Times Past,” the fearless heroes are up against Rag Doll and his cult. Rag Doll has seen better days, too. The villain in his in sixties. Once spry and deft, he’s now plagued by aches and pains. Arthritis is bad enough but imagine going through similar pain when you’ve got the gift/curse of being triple-jointed. His ligaments are so stretched that tubs of Icy Hot couldn’t make it better. On top of that, his mind starts to fray around the edges.

His crazy ranting (because those two words go together more often than not) draws a following. Rag Doll has a way with words. He builds a cult, and the members bend to his will. And what he wants more than anything is revenge.

Opal City became his playground – not the fun kind with jungle gyms. The kind with death and blood. His gang commits senseless and random acts of crime that stain the streets with red. The citizens of the glimmering city looked hopefully to their hero, to Starman.

Starman couldn’t face the devastation alone. He swallowed his pride and called in his tried and true friends from the Justice Society of America. They worked together as they always had and though watching them take down Rag Doll was satisfying, it’s satisfying because of the way these guys interact with each other.

James Robinson’s story makes you care. I haven’t read most of these heroes’ stories, but I could feel and see their histories. They carry their pasts on their shoulders. The art by Matthew Dow Smith communicates it too; the heavy style with a darker pallet fits. None of the heroes are necessarily in their prime, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve done the job for years. They’ve faced tons of villains. They’ve got it covered. They walk with swagger and confidence.

I especially enjoyed the way they discuss old times fondly. Villains used to be different. They were silly instead of dangerous. Alan Scott makes a fantastic comment about Batman and his mentally unstable rogue’s gallery. Starman #11 was published in 1995. The world has changed and like Scott says, villains don’t wear removable masks anymore. It’s brilliant commentary. The heroes from a lighter time in this darker, gritty setting works is unexpected but it works on every level. Just like the once silly Rag Doll becoming a fearsome bad guy works.

Starman and friends toe the line between the brighter world of old and the new heavier world right to the ambiguous ending. Even when Rag Doll is defeated, he threatens the heroes and their families. He reminds them how his followers will continue even after he’s gone. What happens next is fuzzy, but it ends with a dead villain. It appears as if our heroes of a different age were willing to do what heroes like Batman and Superman aren’t. Maybe it’s because they haven’t faced the decision as many times and maybe it’s just because they’re older and cranky.

A Star(Man) Is Born: Enter Jack Knight, Part VI

Previously: When we left off in our look at the brief but brilliant superhero career of Jack “Starman” Knight, the gentle giant Solomon Grundy had sacrificed his life to save Jack’s and repay the debt incurred by his accidental killing of the Star-Spangled Kid, and Jack had met and fallen in love with a woman named SadIe Falk, only to later learn what she’d been keeping from him: that her name wasn’t Sadie Falk at all, it was Jayne Payton, brother of fallen Starman Will Payton, believed by most to be dead, lost on a mission in deep space. His sister doesn’t think so, and wants Jack to go find him.

Oh, and Jack was taken to dinner by his dead brother, dining with all of his father’s departed superhero colleagues in perhaps the best issue of the series.

What next? Well, let’s find out:

Following the sentimentality and warm fuzzy vibes of Jack’s dinner in STARMAN #37, writer James Robinson switched gears big-time in the next issue with a solo Mist tale, in which the neophyte supervillain decides to earn her stripes in the big leagues by murdering a few superheroes. Her targets: the newly reformed Justice League Europe, just reformed after the JLA legacy was reclaimed by Superman, Batman, J’onn J’onzz and company a few months previously. Consisting of Crimson Fox, Blue Devil, Amazing Man, Firestorm and Icemaiden, the Mist (having infiltrated the group disguised as Icemaiden) manages to murder Fox, Devil and Amazing Man — Firestorm, she conceded, is still a little out of her league, no pun intended.

These days, killing off ex-JLI members is so routine you can set your watch by it, but back when this came out, it was fairly controversial, with some readers decrying the callousness of it. Which seemed to me to be the point: ratcheting up the Mist’s villainous cred with a body count. And as usual, characters like Amazing Man and Crimson Fox showed more personality and potential here, in a page or two of being under Robinson’s pen, than they had for years as perennial DC third-stringers.

Before Jack could deal with the revelation about Sadie, he was drawn into a case form his father’s past, in a four-issue crossover between STARMAN and POWER OF SHAZAM, in which another Golden Age hero of Ted Knight’s acquaintance, Bulletman, comes to Ted on the run, having been accused of being a Nazi agent during WW II. While Ted can provide an alibi for Bulletman, the now elderly Bulletman (a.k.a. Jim Barr) refuses to let him come forward, since the two were on a secret mission for the government at the time. Ted asks Jack to buy them some time while they head to Washington, D.C., since the resident superhero of Bulletman’s hometown is most likely on the way to the Opal looking for him. Unluckily for Jack, the hometown in question is Fawcett City, and the hero in question on the World’s Mightiest Mortal himself, Captain Marvel.

Vastly outmatched, Jack pulls out every trick in the book to try to keep the Big Red Cheese busy so that his father and Jim Barr can get away, including a few new tricks with his cosmic rod that his father had never told him about, including the ability to repel objects, the ability to levitate objects, and even the ability to control the rod mentally.

While Jack does manage to buy enough time, he never really had a chance against Captain Marvel, who’s about to put Jack down for the count if not for the intervention of some folks Jack himself had earlier said he never thought would truly have his back: the Opal City Police:

By issue #43, there was no avoiding it: Jack was determined to make the trip to outer space to look for Will Payton, no easy task for a simple collectibles dealer from the Opal. The timing couldn’t have been worse, either, as Jack only just finally managed to re-open his store, Knight’s Past, thanks to a generous gift from Dian Belmont after Jack’s adventure with Sandman.

Jack first goes to his superhero contemporaries in the JLA for assistance, but they seem at best unsympathetic, and at worst downright indifferent. To them, Payton is dead and the matter is closed, and they don’t seem willing to hand over a spaceship to Jack on a whim based on a sister’s “gut instinct.”

Still, they could’ve been a little nicer about it. Jack’s dilemma is solved by, of all people, the Shade, who remembers a story that his friend Brian Savage told him years ago, involving an inventor who was creating “a vehicle to carry him to the stars.” As it turns out the inventor was very close to discovering the same source of energy that Ted Knight had, and the craft can be powered (and protected from the vacuum of space) by Jack’s cosmic rod.

As for tracking down Payton, Ted uses his JSA connections for a meeting with the Justice League that goes considerably better than Jack’s, charming the New God Orion into loaning Jack a Mother Box, which when attuned to Will Payton’s energy signature, should lead Jack right to him. At least that’s the theory.

After having seen to his responsibilities, turning over his store to Sadie and asking Bobo Bennetti to watch over the Opal, Jack bids farewell to his loved ones (including Sadie, whom he asks to marry him before he departs), departing along with a surprising travel companion: Mikaal Tomaas, who, despite finding happiness in a relationship with an Opal City man, still longs to discover his forgotten past, and suspects this trip into the void may be his only opportunity. The two Starmen climb aboard the Victorian-styled starship (and how appropriate that Jack heads off into outer space in an antique) and are gone.

The months after that were made up of a series of single-issue stories: first in STARMAN #46 was a charming Times Past tale from 1954 in which Ted Knight teams up with obscure DC mystery man The Jester, visiting the Opal on the trail of local boy Bobo Bennetti. Bennett, meanwhile, learns of a plot to assassinate Starman, and while he’s admittedly a crook and a thief, he’s no murderer, and is frozen by indecision. The beautiful art by Gene Ha accentuates the “once-upon-a-time”‘ quality of the tale from bygone days, as well as adding a wonderful touch of realism in the facial expressions, such as this moment when the Jester unmasks, and when we see him for what he really is, a middle-aged policeman just beginning to be past his prime:

STARMAN #47 gave us a glimpse of the Opal without Jack, with new heroes like the Black Condor arriving, heroes new to the business like Bobo stepping up to fill Jack’s shoes, and big trouble brewing on the horizon, be it in the bow-and-arrow murder of Dudley Donovan, a small-time crook who fancied himself Jack’s underworld snitch, or the much grislier murder by shadow demon of Opal’s Police Commissioner Sam Woo.

And finally came STARMAN 1,000,000, the series’ offering to that summer’s giant DC ONE MILLION crossover event. While the story is excellent, involving the arrival of Farris Knight, the Starman of the year 1,000,000, to Ted Knight’s observatory, trying to describe the backstory would take up far too much space here: suffice it to say that as usual, James Robinson takes underutilized and underwritten characters from another source and gives them back far more emotionally rich and developed than when he found them. And besides, I love this issue just for this scene of Ted Knight defending himself against an assassination attempt by paid supervillain hitman Deathbolt:

So as STARMAN neared its landmark issue #50, Opal City was without its Starman, and, it turned out, STARMAN was without its artist, as Tony Harris had left the series. Why?

We’ll take a look at the story we got then, and what may be apparent now thanks to a few years’ perspective, next time.

A Star(Man) Is Born: Enter Jack Knight, Part V

Last Time: Our coverage of James Robinson and Tony Harris’s STARMAN series has continued unabated, ending last time with the series’ big promotional push of 1997. However, as the series entered into the 30s, big changes were afoot that would push the series in a surprising direction:

Jack’s next continued adventure was “Infernal Devices,” which pitted him against “The Infernal Dr. Pip,” a mad bomber terrorizing Opal City with bombings in department stores and the like.

Jack receives some supernatural assistance in his investigation from Jon Valor, a.k.a. the Black Pirate, another of DC’s long-forgotten historical characters rescued from oblivion by James Robinson and relocated to the Opal. Valor had been a pirate and privateer wrongly accused and executed in Opal (long before the city had even been named) for the murder of his own son. With his dying breath on the gallows, Valor swore to walk the streets of the town, tormenting its people until his name was cleared, and it was that which he sought from Jack Knight, assistance in proving his innocence.

“Infernal Devices” is probably the weakest of the STARMAN story arcs, lacking a strong antagonist and a real themeline, but it does boast one of the most emotional moments in the series, when Solomon Grundy returns from hiding, having run away from Ted’s observatory after overhearing Ted’s misgivings about taking in the murderer of one of his friends. (Grundy, even then evolved into the gentler creature we see here, had been manipulated into killing Sylvester Pemberton, a.k.a. Skyman, the former Star-Spangled Kid, whose Cosmic Belt had been a gift from his JSA teammate Ted Knight.)

When Jack is trapped while trying to evacuate a department store during one of Dr. Pip’s bombings, Grundy emerges, literally holding the collapsed building on his back long enough for Jack to get the survivors to safety. It’s a heartbreaking moment:

Grundy is pulled from the wreckage, barely alive, and Ted calls in some friends to attempt to save him: the Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott and an expert in plant-based life-forms like Grundy, Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man. And since Woodrue had been incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, accompanying him to the Opal was a very special warden: Batman. Together, Jack, Alan Scott, Woodrue and Batman enter the mind of Solomon Grundy in an attempt to save the kinder Grundy they had known, before he re-evolves into another, possibly more vicious incarnation. Once there, they find themselves overwhelmed by countless evil Grundys before receiving assistance from the late-arriving Ted Knight, who, in the dreamworld of Grundy’s mind, appears a young man in his prime.

Unfortunately, they’re not able to save the Grundy they know, as his more evil incarnations have more sway over his subconscious. Grundy and Jack say their final goodbyes:

The battle for Grundy’s soul was the high point of “Infernal Devices,” not only for the heart of the Grundy story, but also for the appearance of a young Ted and the slow build of Batman gaining some respect for the brash new hero on the block Jack. However, the arc ends with something of a whimper, being forcibly shoehorned into DC’s summer crossover event de joure, GENESIS, probably the least-remembered of those types of things, and for good reason. Best to just move on.

Jack was certainly moving on, as “Infernal Devices” saw him becoming romantically involved with a young lady named Sadie Falk, who had been showing up here and there in the series as far back as his adventure at the carnival. Jack first quite literally bumped into her there, and then ran into her again a few issues later at the shop of Charity the fortune teller. As this storyline moved along, Sadie was slowly introduced as Jack’s girlfriend, a status made clear in this moment of the two of them on a date:

It turned out that Sadie had her own secret, one revealed in STARMAN ANNUAL #2, in a story entitled “Young Romance,” by Robinson and a crew of artists, including Steve Yeowell and Gene Ha. In the story’s framing device, Jack tells Sadie about how it seems that all the men who took on the responsibility of protecting Opal City have had to sacrifice the one they love in doing so, and he’s afraid of the same. We’re then treated to short tales involving Scalphunter Brian Savage in his days as Sheriff of Opal City during the Old West, Jack’s brother David and what he gave up for his brief time as Starman, and the full story behind Ted Knight’s affair with the original Black Canary. By issue’s end, Sadie gets up the nerve to tell Jack the truth, that her name isn’t really Sadie Falk:

Appearing not long after that was STARMAN: SECRET FILES AND ORIGINS #1, which featured a marvelous story entitled “Talking with Ted…Talking With Jack,” in which we get Ted and Jack Knight each telling the other’s history and backstory, with art on Ted’s story handled by Lee Weeks, and on Jack’s by Phil Jimenez.

With Sadie’s secret now revealed, Robinson must have felt it time to acquaint his audience with the Will Payton Starman, with a bittersweet Times Past story in STARMAN #36, “A Hero Once…Despite Himself,” in which the Shade looks back on the Starman that no one really remembers, and his one visit to Turk Country, on the trail of the murderous husband-and-wife criminals the Bodines. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is probably the best-written Will Payton story, with him dealing with his own self-doubt and general lack of respect as well as his vicious adversaries.

Next up was the best of all the “Talking With David” stories, and maybe my favorite single comic-book issue ever, “Talking With David ’97,” by Robinson and Harris, from STARMAN #37.

Rather than the unorthodox settings of their previous two meetings, this time David simply escorts Jack to an elegant dining room to meet their dinner companions: his father’s deceased teammates from the Justice Society and the All-Star Squadron.

The dinner guests are Rex “Hourman” Tyler, Charles “Doc Mid-Nite” McNider, Al “Atom” Pratt, Diana “Black Canary” Lance, Terry “Mr. Terrific” Sloane, Zatara the Magician and Rick “Red Bee” Raleigh. Each in turn gives Jack a piece of advice about his new career as a superhero, while reflecting on their own pasts. Robinson is at his best here in the dialogue and characterizations, capturing each of their characters perfectly while reflecting through Jack’s eyes the proper mix of affection and awe. As for Harris, in an issue with no fight scenes and practically no action, he does a bravura job on the visual storytelling, providing just enough motion and visual variety to keep the reader focused on the story. Harris understands that this particular issue is all about the dialogue, and reins in the artwork to complement the speeches and better serve the story. Not that Harris isn’t given a chance to shine; each character is given a half-page pin-up in what looks like an almost pointillist style, to give it the sense of the cloudy haze of memory, and in full color, to pop out against the black-and-white of David’s netherworld. In addition, Harris supplies a gorgeous full-color painting to end the issue.

My favorite moments come toward the end of the issue, in Jack’s conversations with Mr. Terrific and the Red Bee. Here Terrific talks about why he became a superhero and what he’s remembered for, and Jack points out why, despite being thought of as a second-stringer, he may be the best of them all:

At that, the Red Bee bristles at his own lot, having always been considered a third-rate hero, and never asked to join the Justice Society:

Doc Mid-Nite interjects, and gives the Bee a moment of solace:

Everything that’s great about STARMAN the series can be found in this issue: the sense of family and legacy, the brilliant characterizations, the beautiful wordsmithing and the fantastic art, which expertly walked that line between legend and reality. You should buy the trade for this issue alone.

A Star (Man) Is Born: Enter Jack Knight, Part IV

Previously: It’s been all Starman, all the time around these parts in recent weeks, as we’ve turned our attention to James Robinson and Tony Harris’ landmark 1990s legacy hero, Jack Knight. At about two years into the series, the book was really hitting its stride. Let’s get back to it, shall we?

STARMAN’s second year kicked off with an odd little supernatural story arc entitled “Demon Quest,” which involved Jack and the O’Dares attempting to rescue the Shade and Matt O’Dare from an otherdimensional netherworld, having been sucked in through a mystical poster controlled by a necromancer whose life force depended on luring innocents into it. Eventually, Jack himself dives into the poster to try and bring Shade and Matt home:

Separately, Jack, Matt and the Shade all encounter a demon, who appears to them as a figure from their past, with occasionally heartbreaking results. The look on Jack’s face when he’s made to remember his last visit with his mother is wrenching; it’s a brilliant piece of storytelling by Harris, the emotion he’s able to invest in the expression:

Jack, Shade and Matt unwittingly defeat the demon though, of all things, simple nobility, and earn not only their freedom, but the freedom of the hundreds of souls that had been sucked into the poster over the centuries. The result: a sudden spike in the population of the Opal, a city that had always treasured its past, and now had some living examples of it in residence.

Jack’s extended family gathers at the O’Dare home for Christmas in STARMAN #27, followed up by another Times Past issue, this time going back to 1976, and a tale of Mikaal Tomaas in the age of disco, engaging in a final drug-soaked battle with his old enemy Komak, now sporting a Freddy Mercury mustache and dying from as sexually transmitted disease.

By April of 1997, positive critical buzz around STARMAN had increased to the point that DC decided to give the series a big promotional push, with merchandise, miniseries, the whole magilla. The center of the campaign was STARMAN #29, which opened up with a 7-page prose piece from “The Shade’s Journal” (text pieces like this, first in which the Shade would opine about Opal City and its protectors through history, and later consisting of a long serialized novel about the Shade’s adventure’s in 1930s Hollywood, appeared periodically in place of the letters column, usually every third month or so), catching up new readers on Jack’s story, his now-large cast of supporting characters, and what had happened in the series so far.

The feature story, “The Return of Bobo,” introduced yet another colorful resident of the Opal, Jake “Bobo” Benetti, an old-time supervillain (albeit a plainclothes one, despite his superhuman strength) who had tangled with Jack’s father back in the day, and was returning to town after a long prison stint, unsure whether he wanted to return to the life or not.

The issue also drops another bombshell, in a letter from the Mist to Jack: while Jack lay unconscious in the Mist’s lair during the events of “Sins of the Child,” Nash had taken advantage of him, and the result of their encounter was their newborn son, Kyle:

As for Bobo Bennetti, not seeing much of a future for himself out in the real world, he elects to rob an Opal City bank, only to find himself beaten to the punch by visiting supervillains the Royal Flush Gang. When Jack shows up expecting to face Bobo, the two team up and wipe the floor with the Royal Flush Gang, sharing an unexpected male-bonding moment in the midst of the chaos:

Bobo winds up with a full-time gig with the bank protecting its branches all over Opal, as Jack explains to his girlfriend at issue’s end? Girlfriend? Yeah, that’s what readers were saying, too. We’ll get back to that one a little later.

Also making its debut as part of the renewed STARMAN promotion was THE SHADE, a four-issue miniseries from James Robinson and a quartet of great artists.

While the initial expectation might be that the series would shed some light on the Shade’s mysterious origins, Robinson instead elected to go in an entirely new direction, telling the story of the Shade’s century-long blood feud with the Ludlows, an British family of killers and thieves that had intended to use the temporarily amnesiac Shade as a patsy for their latest bit of murderous larceny, only to be killed by the Shade when he remembers the existence of his powers, as gruesomely illustrated by the marvelous Gene Ha.

Only the youngest Ludlows remain at the end of the Shade’s killing spree, and they swear a blood oath to gain revenge upon the killer of their family, if not by they themselves, then their children, or their children’s children.

The second issue, with art by PROMETHEA’s J.H. Williams, begins to detail the various assaults on the Shade down the years from members of the Ludlow family, and in particular the Shade’s heartbreak when his newfound love reveals herself to be a Ludlow as well, after delivering to him a dose of deadly poison (also foreshadowing a bit of romantic betrayal that would come to Jack Knight as well in future issues, though of a different kind).

Issue #3 concerns itself with the Shade’s Silver Age days as a supervillain and his frequent clashes with the Flash of Keystone City, Jay Garrick, superheroic battles that the Shade quite enjoys. When Jay Garrick elects to retire in the 1950s, a new hero, an archer calling himself “the Spider.” emerges from obscurity to take his place. He’s met with the adoration of the public, but with some suspicion by the Shade, who elects to investigate and discovers that the Spider has a criminal past. He decides to locate his former foe Jay Garrick and inform his of his successor’s misdeeds, but, in a poignant moment courtesy of illustrator Bret Blevins, finds himself unable to do so:

Shade confronts the Spider himself, only to discover even more disturbing news: he’s a Ludlow.

The series concludes in the present, with the Shade meeting up with the last remaining Ludlow, not on the field of battle, but in a field of wheat owned by farmer Craig Ludlow, whose wife had contacted the Shade when Craig’s brother resurfaced and began fanning the flames of familial hate. Shade dispatches the brother, and talks things out with Craig, in a quiet, contemplative issue illustrated by Michael Zulli.

And like most things Robinson did, it set up threads that would be picked up again years later. THE SHADE was never collected in a trade, so it may take some searching to locate a set, but it’s well worth it.

Along with the SHADE series, DC released a number of other items in their big STARMAN marketing push that year. There was a nice STARMAN t-shirt that I was never able to find, as I recall, along with two other items that were particularly cool.

First up, in a move that somewhat anticipated their later line of prop replicas, was the Starman Badge, a really cool little piece that was the spitting image of the one Jack sports, and which I have to admit I wore on my black leather jacket for a good two or three years.

Also released was this gorgeous Starman wristwatch. This I absolutely loved.

I went through two different wristbands on it, then accidentally cracked the faceplate and had that replaced, at which point my girlfriend had the good sense to recommend buying a spare if I ever saw one again, just in case someday it was beyond repair. Which I promptly did. They’re nearly impossible to find these days.

And no, you can’t have one of mine.

A Star (Man) Is Born: Enter Jack Knight, Part III

For Those Who Came In Late: In recent weeks, we’ve been exploring the wonder that was James Robinson and Tony Harris’ STARMAN series, arguably the best comic book of the 1990s. Last time, we took a closer look at the art of Tony Harris, saw the first of the recurring favorite features “Talking With David” and “Times Past,” and examined some of James Robinson’s pacing technique. Let’s look now at Jack’s first major case since embracing the superhero life, one which, as usual, he’s not quite ready for…

Robinson and Harris put Jack Knight and company through the wringer in their next adventure, “Sins of the Child,” a five-part series appearing in STARMAN #12-16.

The story opens with Jack and his father leaving the Opal City courthouse, where Jack has just been cleared for the killing of the Mist’s son. We follow them back to Ted’s observatory, where his two new houseguests, the alien Mikaal Tomaas and the now childlike and harmless Solomon Grundy. When the two of them go missing, Jack heads out to look for them, during which two things happen: one, Jack spots a mysterious…something, which gives Robinson an opportunity to deliver another of his gloriously maddening little narrative teases toward the future (which, I might add, he managed to pay off all of eventually)…

And two, Jack gets jumped from behind.

After some disturbingly erotic dreams involving Julie Newmar (seriously), Jack awakens in the Mist’s bed, naked and weaponless, and greeted by the Mist herself (who has now given herself the same powers her father possessed, by the way), who makes Jack a proposition: he can either regain his clothes and equipment by running a gauntlet through her thugs, goons and henchmen, to see if Jack truly has what it takes to be Starman, or else she’ll just have him beaten to death then and there.

Jack’s response:

The next three issues take place at the same time as the events of issue #12, in a Tarantino-style bit of chronological agility that works well in conveying the breadth and span of the Mist’s operation. STARMAN #13 concerns itself with Ted Knight fending off the assault on his observatory by Dr. Phosphorous, a Batman-villain-turned-hired assassin brought in by the Mist to murder Jack’s father. In a nice touch, when Ted is attacked, the coloring subtly shifts to black-and-white, a subliminal reference to Ted’s age and Golden Age background:

The next issue focuses on the O’Dare family of cops, and their adventures on this day contending with the Mist’s crime wave on the Opal. There’s oldest brother Clarence, stable and happily married, the shallow womanizer Barry, Matthew the dirty cop whose crimes would shame his family, lone sister Hope, and youngest sibling Mason, a silent daredevil whose risk-taking has kept him still a beat cop. We get to know the O’Dares a bit better here — we also see some of Mason’s daredevil antics in action…

And Matt O’ Dare has a vision, one that finally prompts him to give up his own corrupt ways:

As we’ll later find out, and as the Shade had suspected, Matt is the reincarnation of Ke-Woh-No-Tay the Scalphunter, a.k.a. Brian Savage, a young boy stolen and raised by the Kiowa tribe, who in adulthood became Sheriff of Opal City. Scalphunter had been a long-running DC Old West character, with his use here another example of James Robinson subtly weaving his creation Opal City into the fabric of the DC universe.

In STARMAN #15, we discover what happened to the missing Mikaal Tomaas and Solomon Grundy, kidnapped by the Mist’s thugs and taken to the top floors of the Chandler Building, one of Opal City’s landmarks, where they’re beaten and tortured by the Mist’s goons, all while the goons engage in some very Tarantino-esque chatter about who the best big-screen Philip Marlowe was.

The brutality of the sequence is startling, a few notches above what had been seen in the series previously, with the thugs beating Mikaal and Solomon mercilessly for pages, until they decide to either burn or chop up the wood-based plantman Grundy, at which point Mikaal finally manages to overcome the drugs in his system and activate the amulet that’s embedded in his chest, blowing up the top of the Chandler Building.

“Sins of the Child” wraps up in issue #16, with Jack outwitting and outfighting all of the Mist’s thugs and assassins, regaining his clothes and his staff, and coming face to face with the Mist herself, who has the drop on him…

…and lets him go.

Declaring that she’s not quite the villain she wants to be, and that Jack isn’t the Starman he could be yet either, she intends to let him live so they can both grow into their next encounter. Jack secures a promise from the Mist that she leaves his father out of all future attacks, in return for continuing to work toward “becoming the one, true, best Starman.”

Throughout the five-issue storyline, we’d also seen the Mist committing six seemingly unrelated murders on Opal City senior citizens, innocent bystanders who had been shown the original Mist’s headquarters back in the ’40s by Starman after their first encounter, and one of whom she believed to be in possession of her father’s WWI medal of valor, which she desperately wanted to return to her Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Unfortunately, none had it, although it wasn’t enough to spare their lives.

The Mist departs, promising to see Jack again in 11 months, and leaving him confused and relieved.

It was back to some single-issues again after that, including a “Times Past” revealing Ted Knight’s first encounter with the Mist back in the early ’40s, and an excellent STARMAN ANNUAL, which featured a far, far-future Shade, still alive, telling stories of the past to the children of the descendants of Earth. Robinson uses this opportunity to give us our first look in this series at the fourth Starman by his count, the 1980s Ditko Starman, Prince Gavyn.

Robinson gives Prince Gavyn a far better sendoff here than he ever got in CRISIS, showing him making the difficult decision to leave his kingdom and his wife for a mission that most likely would mean his death, and making him a real person for these few scant panels, making his casually tossed-off death in CRISIS far more of a tragedy, especially in light of the fact that it was ultimately in vain, that had he not gone, the crisis would have been solved without him. And as with just about everything else in STARMAN, the story is told for a greater reason as well, one that wouldn’t be revealed for years to come.

Next up was the second installment of “Talking With David” in STARMAN #19, which set Jack and David off on a pirate adventure, while the two brothers talk about the events of Jack’s life over the past year. This issue in particular is one of Robinson and Harris’ best, with the pirate theme clearly inspiring them both, particularly in this sequence involving Jack and David’s ship attacking another galleon, while a Robinson-penned sea shanty plays in the background:

“Load the cannon and powder up, for the sea, this sea, is ours, boys.”

By the way, as an aside, re-reading the series as a whole now, and having met Tony Harris a few times over the past few years, I hadn’t realized just how much Tony was using himself as the visual model for Jack Knight, and with increasing accuracy and depth as the series went on. It really made Jack seem all the more like a real person, which made his emotional moments all the sweeter, such as here, when David reveals to Jack what the destination of their pirate voyage had been: a visit with their departed mother, who had passed on when Jack was still a child.

Closing out the end of STARMAN’s second year was “Sand and Stars,” in which Jack looks up his father’s JSA teammate Wes Dodds, a.k.a. the Sandman, in the hopes of locating the Mist’s father’s medal, Jack’s way of proving to the Mist that they’re not as alike as she thinks. Naturally, once the two meet, Jack and Wes wind up investigating a murder. Although the main mystery plotline is decent, the real meat here is in the characterization: in Jack’s awe and respect for the now octogenarian Sandman, for all intents and purposes the first superhero to don the mask and cape and in his hero-worship of Sandman’s lifelong love Dian Belmont, a writer and novelist Jack has admired all his life.

We also get to see Wes Dodds grappling with his own mortality and feelings of uselessness as he’s forced back into costume to save the life of his new friend Jack, a struggle highlighted by a lengthy flashback to Wes and Ted Knight in their prime, working together as young men in the early ’40s.

We’re also made aware of a startling bit of gossip from Wes, that Ted and his JSA teammate the Black Canary, both married, had had an affair, a bit of information that puts those BRAVE AND THE BOLD issues from the 1960s in something of a new light.

As the book began to deal more and more with Jack learning about his father’s past and embracing his legacy, I know I only grew to love the series even more. Luckily for me, this was a trend that would continue.

There Is a City

“There is a city.

A glorious and singular place. Old and yet pristine. Ornate and yet streamlined. A metropolis of now and then and never was…

And so Opal City stands glorious and singular.”

I was hooked on James Robinson’s Starman from the first page. How could I not be with an introduction like this?

Click to enlarge.

Those words hit me and I read them over a few times before moving forward. This page told me instantly that the city was just as important as our hero. I will give that to DC Comics – they have prime locations. Their cities are inherently cooler and more stylized because of the fictional aspect. Creators can take liberties with extremes; the locations can be grimy slums, sparkling beacons, and everything in between the two. I knew Gotham City, Metropolis, and now I’d get to know Opal City.

Sign me up.

Of course, it’s not just about the city. It can be a character but not the only one.

“The city had a champion. A gaudly-dressed “Quixote:” pure and true – but cursed with perpetual melancholy, as “Quixotes” often are. He used a device, this champion – a weapon that could drain power and light from the heavens and with this, he fought the bad and the wrong and kept his city free of fear.”

Well, as happens from time to time (but rarely with permanence), heroes fall. And the current Starman – David Knight – was assassinated not long after Robinson’s story began. His elder brother, Jack Knight, reluctantly took on the mantle that both inherited from their father, Ted. Jack is the quintessential rebellious type who fights his past and his father’s celebrity. But he comes around like those kinds usually do and makes it work in a way that suits him. He takes on the role of a the hero, but he does it with his own style and in his own way.

He doesn’t wear spandex; he sticks to jeans and a t-shirt. He doesn’t always keep track of the cosmic staff – a weapon and the source of his power. You’d think he’d keep it glued to his side, but he doesn’t always get (or doesn’t want to) the seriousness of his duties. In fact, he’s one of the most careless heroes I’ve met. Deep under it all though, there are seeds of potential.

I don’t feel like he ever welcomes the role, but I like that about him. Of the handful of DC Comics I’ve read, this seems like one of the few heroes where the person is just as important as the power he wields.

I prefer it that way. I can find a small part to relate to and latching onto the qualities of Jack (good and bad) makes me enjoy the story more. And I actually prefer Jack Knight to Starman. At the end of the day, Jack wants to be left alone with his collectibles, with history. He thinks it’s the opposite of “just stuff” and his real passion is being around them. It leads to him owning an antique and collectibles store.

I don’t know if he’s an introvert, but I get the impression he treats dealing with humans as a byproduct of living – a necessary requirement to get through the world. I can appreciate that.

But now he’s responsible for keeping the humans of Opal City safe… the ones he’s never particularly embraced. It makes him a different person and witnessing his evolution is one of the shining parts of the the story.

A Star(Man) Is Born: Enter Jack Knight, Part II

Last time, we were introduced to Jack Knight, youngest son of original Golden Age Starman Ted Knight, who has reluctantly taken up the name and role of Starman (if not the costume), following the murder of his older brother David by their father’s longtime enemy the Mist. With the help of his father’s Cosmic Rod, Jack avenges his brother, murdering the Mist’s son, who had performed the killing, and makes an enemy of Nash, the Mist’s daughter, who had earlier spared Jack’s life, only to have Jack kill her own beloved brother. Where to go from here? STARMAN creators James Robinson and Tony Harris had an idea or two…

With the first storyline completed and the status quo of the series firmly in place, James Robinson introduced two new recurring features to STARMAN, both of which would become trademarks of the book’s 80-plus-issue run. First off, in issue #5, was the first “Talking With David” issue, in which Jack meets up with his departed brother in a shadowy dreamland and has the kind of heart-to-heart conversation they were never able to do when David was alive.

In this first installment, Jack finds himself in a graveyard, and is surprised and startled by the appearance of his brother, all bright and shiny color in a black-and-white cemetery gloom. In the only nod to comic-book cliché, the two fight at first, then settle down and really get to know one another, in a way it seemed they never had in the past, including a startling admission from David:

By the issue’s end, David promises that his visits to Jack from beyond the grave will be an annual affair, news that Jack meets with anticipation.

A word here about the artwork of Tony Harris. STARMAN was his breakthrough work, and this issue in particular was, I believe, where he really began to come into his own. Although issues 0 through 4 are quite good, there’s a certain stiffness in some of its storytelling that can probably be ascribed to anything from unfamiliarity with his own all-new characters to difficulty with the rigors of a monthly schedule to stage fright. With this issue, however, Harris really seemed to claim ownership of the book, improving his panel-to-panel storytelling dramatically, while bringing an all-new dimension in his ability to portray emotions thorough his characters’ expressions, such as in this scene where Jack and David are blaming each other for the damage they’ve wreaked on the cemetery. We really see Harris outdo himself in the next storyline, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The other innovation of Robinson’s made its debut in the next issue, STARMAN #6: namely, his recurring series of flashback issues, entitled “Times Past.” In the “Times Past” stories, we’d get glimpses of the original Starman, the Shade, and anyone who’d ever taken the name Starman, as well as various other protectors of the Opal over the course of its history. Not only did these issues help Robinson create a real sense of history and legacy, for both his neophyte hero and his newly created city, but from a more practical standpoint, these “Times Past” issues, which were always illustrated by guest-artists, would allow Tony Harris (and much later, his successor on the series) some much-needed breathing room, giving him a few extra weeks between the larger story arcs to catch up on the artwork. The “Times Past” stories would also allow Robinson to do some serious foreshadowing, introducing characters, themes and incidents that may not play out in the main storyline for years to come.

The first “Times Past” story, courtesy of Robinson and artist Teddy H. Kristiansen, involves the Shade, telling the tale of a job he took at the turn of the century, reclaiming an heiress from a sinister hypnotist and his carnival troupe, which resulted in the Shade’s acquisition of a piece of Opal real estate, cementing his bond to the Opal, a city he had already grown to love. Compared to later “Times Past” stories, this one seems particularly unconnected to the main narrative thread, but in typical Robinson style, even this tale eventually comes to have a bearing on the big picture.

Jack’s next adventure, “A (K)Night at the Circus,” in STARMAN #7-8, is significant for a couple of reasons. First off, the plot itself, in which a collectible-hunting Jack stumbles across a traveling carnival in Turk County (the creepy rural flatlands just outside of Opal City) and discovers a blue-skinned alien being held there against his will by the carnival’s demonic proprietor. The alien, of course, is none other than Mikaal Tomaas, the 1970s Starman we discussed a few weeks back.

From a characterization perspective, the tale is important in that it’s the first time we see Jack take up the role of the hero not from guilt or family obligations, but simply because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, freeing Mikaal and the other enslaved freakshow performers from their unwilling slavery. And as a consequence, Jack discovers the rewards of heroism as well…

Robinson was very clever in how he paced the storyline in STARMAN, especially early on. In between the longer multi-issue story arcs, Robinson would include one or two single-issue adventures of Jack, partly to give the reader a bit of time to recover and settle into Jack’s status quo, and partly to get across the sense of Jack living his life kind of the way you or I do — it’s not all big life-changing events, one right after the other; sometimes (probably most of the time) life is more of a comfortable monotony, which Robinson seemed to want to reinforce with his non-event issues.

For example, take a look at STARMAN #9, which is almost entirely a transitional issue, beginning with the denouement of his adventure at the carnival, and ending with Jack lounging on his couch, about to get the news that the Mist’s daughter Nash has escaped from prison. The rest of this issue is taken up with prologue for a story arc to come almost a year later, Jack’s adventures in collectible-hunting, and a surprising revelation from Ted to Jack about one of his never-revealed cases as Starman:

Luckily for us, we get to see this story in great detail in a future “Times Past” issue, only two months later. In “Five Friends,” by Robinson and artist Matt Smith (STARMAN #11, September 1995), we go back some 13 years, when once smalltime supervillain the Ragdoll has become a Charlie Manson-style cult leader, whose minions are terrorizing the Opal. With the crisis escalating, a worried Ted Knight calls in his friends: Alan “Green Lantern” Scott, Jay “Flash” Garrick, Charles “Doc Mid-Nite” McNider and Rex “Hourman” Tyler.

Doc Mid-Nite is assigned the task of recovering a pair of kidnapped twins held for ransom, while Hourman must by himself stop an army of goons who plant to ransack a retirement community. Meanwhile, Ted, Alan and Jay take it upon themselves to bring in the mastermind himself, the Ragdoll. Which they do, only to receive a most disturbing threat:

While they’re still reeling, Ragdoll tries to make his escape, and the already rattled heroes react suddenly and without restraint:

Robinson is at his best here, deftly combining nostalgia with his usual lyrical narration, making the middle-aged JSA here seem like legends stepping out of the past. And artist Matt Smith provides wonderfully moody, minimalist artwork, giving the whole project the feel of a fading but still vivid memory. This issue is an all-time favorite.

Another member is added to Jack Knight’s growing extended family in STARMAN #10, when he’s cajoled by Alan Scott’s daughter Jade into tracking down none other than Solomon Grundy, the savage swamp creature who had befriended her years earlier in the pages of INFINTY, INC., and whom was now rumored to be living in the sewers beneath the Opal. Jack agrees (mostly because Jade’s a hottie, a surprising realistic motivation for any guy to do anything he doesn’t feel like doing), and after a brief skirmish with Grundy, discovers he’s really not much more than an overgrown toddler:

At just about the one-year point of the series, Robinson and Harris had already established a mood, a style and a world for their new creation that was arguably more compelling and more real than books that had been around for decades.

And the cool thing is, they were just getting warmed up.

A Star(Man) Is Born: Enter Jack Knight

Longtime readers of my work may recall that I’ve often over the years referred to James Robinson and Tony Harris’ STARMAN series as my favorite comic book, bar none. There are plenty of reasons why, which I’ll be getting to over the next couple of weeks. But I’ve got to cop to the fact that there’s more than a little sentimentality to it as well, so please indulge me just a bit here as we all step in to the Wayback Machine, heading back almost 13 years or so.

It’s the summer of 1994, and I had just graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara, with a degree in English that I had absolutely no idea what to do with. I decided to roll the dice, and moved to Los Angeles with no job, no prospects, and only whatever I could carry and what little money I’d saved that year working as a copy editor for the university newspaper. Which is how I found myself that July and August more often than not eating Top Ramen and sitting in a lawn chair in my living room, which was largely empty because I couldn’t afford furniture. Admittedly, it was a scary time — days were spent either job-hunting or heading to the library, since checking out books was almost the only entertainment I could afford.

Almost, that is, because I still managed to keep up on comics, heading to a tiny hole-in-the-wall comic-book store in the upstairs of a sports-card shop near UCLA (it’s long gone now). The big DC crossover event that year had been ZERO HOUR, which had in its pages pretty much slaughtered the original Justice Society, murdering several members and aging others to the point of uselessness. As a longtime JSA fan, this hadn’t gone over real well with me. Any way, one week, I’m scanning the racks looking at the new books (and remember, this was pre-Internet, believe it or not, so you could still be surprised by what would be on the racks any given Wednesday), and the cover of a new STARMAN book catches my eye. To be much more exact, this is what I see:

“Hm,” I think to myself. “Where’s the fin on his head? Doesn’t look like Starman.” But I pick it up regardless, mostly on the strength of the writer’s name: James Robinson, who had the year previous written an excellent JSA miniseries entitled THE GOLDEN AGE, and so I was thus inclined to believe that he at least knew of the original Starman and might do right by the name.

As it turned out, I fell in love with the book, and as Jack Knight grew into his new life as Starman, I at the same time grew into my new life here in L.A., eventually finding work as an editor and even having enough cash to buy a furnishing or two. So, yeah, admittedly, the book means a lot to me; it’s always gonna remind me of that time in my life when I took a real chance, and nowadays, when I see all that’s come out of taking that chance, not the least of which are this very Web site, a readership that seems to enjoy listening to me blather on about comics, and comic books in the shops with my name on ‘em — well, it just makes me love Jack Knight all the more.

Enough sentimental sop from me, let’s get to why I liked the book so much in the first place.

First and foremost is Robinson’s writing. I’ve been re-reading the series recently to prepare for the writing of these pieces, and have been very pleased to discover how well the work holds up. But a large part of what made the book so unique especially early on, was the overall voice of the book, an omniscient third-person narration with an almost lyrical poetic quality to it, one that was certainly like nothing else DC or Marvel was offering. It’s kind of a combination of a Tolkien-style historical chronicle and an almost fairy-tale once-upon-a time feeling, but without any sense of being childish. Look at the way Robinson sets the stage for the new series on the very first page of STARMAN #0 (October 1994):

There is a city.

A glorious and singular place. Old and yet pristine. Ornate and yet streamlined. A metropolis of now and then and never was.

Burnely Ellsworth founded it in 1864, using the riches he’d amassed gem mining in Australia. With that in mind, he named his creation after that which had given him wealth.

And so Opal City stands, glorious and singular.

The city had a champion. A gaudily dressed “Quixote”: pure and true…but cursed with perpetual melancholy, as “Quixotes” often are. He used a device, this champion — a weapon that could draw power and light from the heavens. And with this, he fought the bad and the wrong and kept his city free from fear.

In times past.

For Opal City’s champion, no longer young or strong or filled with the same sense of righteous purpose of late had put the costume and cosmic power aside — turning, instead, to the heavens, to study them all the more.

With the need for a new champion … one arose.

His father’s son. Pure and true.

And God help the bad and the wrong.

Such a stirring and eloquent beginning, fooling the reader into believing we’re about to meet the hero of the tale, Ted Knight’s son David, as seen in the previous STARMAN series. As it turns out, for as much as David wanted to succeed his father, his time as Starman is cruelly brief:

We’re then introduced to David’s younger brother Jack, a collectibles dealer in Opal City who has a contentious relationship with both his father and his brother, and, as we see in flashback, proves that no one can hurt you quite as much as family:

Unluckily for Jack, someone else is looking to hurt the Knight family even more, not stopping with the murder of David, but also blowing up Ted Knight’s observatory in an attempt on his life, and setting fire to Jack’s collectibles shop as well. The mysterious assassin leaves Jack for dead, but not before stealing the cosmic converter belt that Ted had made for the Star-Spangled Kid back in the day, which Ted had given to his son for safekeeping. Jack manages to escape with his life, only because Ted had also left him his original gravity rod for safekeeping as well.

We also learn at the close of the first issue who’s behind it all: the father of the assassin, none other than Ted’s old enemy the Mist:

Despite his best intentions, Jack finds himself slowly drawn into the superhero life, at first only to protect his family and its legacy, but as the Mist’s crime wave grows, Jack finds himself more and the man he’d never expected to be: his father’s son. Along the way, Jack meets up with some unexpected allies, such as the O’Dare family, four brothers and a sister all on the Opal City police force, all of whom take it upon themselves to honor their father’s promise and protect Jack’s father, who’s been hospitalized following the Mist’s murder attempt. While on the run from the Mist’s killers, Jack meets Charity, a fortune teller newly moved to Opal City, who gives Jack an impromptu reading. Also showing his face is the Shade, the longtime Golden Age Flash villain, who, we discover in these pages, is not only practically immortal, but has always been a longtime resident of Opal City (or “the Opal,” as it’s often affectionately called) and always refused to engage in any villainous activities in his hometown.

Jack also has a run-in with the Mist’s other a child, a daughter, Nash, who can’t quite bring herself to obey her father’s wishes and kill Jack. It’s a first meeting that would have long repercussions for both.

Jack’s initial forays into super-fights aren’t exactly raving successes, considering all he’s got going for him is some jiu jitsu training from high school, a gravity rod he has no experience in using, and a very strong desire not to die. In fact, after his first skirmish with the Mist’s goons, not only does he barely escape, but he shatters the gravity rod in the process.

Stopping by his apartment after the battle, Jack hurriedly puts together what would be the basis of what passes for his “Starman” costume: a heavy leather jacket with an astrological symbol on the back, a CrackerJack-prize Sheriff’s star, and a pair of WWII-era anti-flare goggles.

Upon returning to the hospital to see his father about replacing the rod, Ted remembers that there was an earlier prototype Cosmic Rod he had built in the 1950s, which lay hidden away in storage. Jack goes to find it, and falls in love:

No sooner is Jack armed again when his father is kidnapped, and an ultimatum is made: Jack must meet the Mist’s son Kyle in battle, in the skies over the Opal, or Jack’s father will die.

Issue #3 is almost entirely devoted to the airborne duel between Jack and Kyle, interspersed with moments of Jack flashing back to the past, to memories of he and his murdered brother, some good, some not so good, but all treasured. Some memories also surprise Jack, proving that the disdain for his father’s life he thought he’d always had might not necessarily be so:

In the end, Jack prevails, although it’s not a victory he relishes:

Even worse, it’s clear he has new problems on the horizon when Kyle’s sister Nash sees what he’s done.

Meanwhile, the Shade proves his true colors, gathering the O’Dares on a raid of the Mist’s lair to retrieve Ted Knight. Ted is recovered safely, and there’s little satisfaction in collaring the clearly addled Mist, who appears to be suffering from Alzheimer’s.

In the aftermath, Jack and Ted have a heart-to-heart, in which Jack agrees to take up the mantle of Starman (although not to wear a costume) if Ted will devote himself full-time to science, putting the technology behind his Cosmic Rod to use for the world.

Ted agrees, and says he knew all along that Jack would agree to play the hero. “After all,” he says, “if you’re not Starman…who else is there?” This leads us to two epilogues in response, each revealing a fallen Starman:

All that in only five issues. If you’re not hooked yet, don’t worry, there’s so much more to come.

The Men Who Wore the Star

Last time, we began our look at DC’s STARMAN, focusing on the original, the Golden Age Starman Ted Knight, as created by artist Jack Burnley in the pages of ADVENTURE COMICS. While Ted got a considerable promotional push from the publisher, including membership in the company’s trademark super-team, the Justice Society of America. However, Starman never truly caught on with the comic-reading public and faded into obscurity by the late 1940s, only to reappear with the rest of the JSA as recurring guest-stars in the Silver Age DC Comics of the 1960s. While Ted Knight himself only resurfaced occasionally in the DC Comics of the 1970s and ’80s, apparently the name itself was considered too good to lie unused…

Some ideas don’t even make sense after you explain them.

Take, for example, DC’s anthology series from 1975, 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL. Every issue would debut a new character or feature, in the hopes of generating enough enthusiasm to then launch them into their own series. However, it also placed itself in the awkward position of contradicting itself right there in the title, as it couldn’t really be a first issue if it were, say, #7 now, could it?

Anyway, among the characters to make their debut in 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL were Green Team: Boy Millionaires, Mike Grell’s Warlord and — wouldn’t you know it — Starman. However, this was a distinctly different Starman, as readers would see in 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL #12 (March 1976).

Written by Gerry Conway, and drawn by Mike Vosburg and Mike Royer, “Starman” introduced readers to Mikaal Tomaas, a blue-skinned alien from an unnamed alien planet, who has come to Earth to prevent its enslavement by his people, a race that “requires combat emotionally,” as Mikaal tells one of his human rescuers. A lone renegade on the run from his people, Mikaal has to contend with the leader of the “Enslaving Earth” project, Master Komak, as well as the First Guardsman of the alien race, Turran Kha.

Mikaal’s arrival on Earth is somewhat less than smooth, as he’s immediately accosted by a group of young toughs unhappy with the government’s expenditures on NASA (no, seriously), who decided to take it out on the hapless astronaut, paying no mind to the fact that his skin is blue. Mikaal makes short work of them, then passes out while exploring a grocery store, after using the amulet at his throat to dissolve the shopkeep’s rifle.

By issue’s end, Turran Kha had located Mikaal, and the two were about to engage in a titanic battle, with the very fate of the Earth hanging in the battle. Too bad this was 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL, because next issue would be an entirely new character and storyline (a revival of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, to be precise), and this dangling plot thread would be left to dangle for over 20 years.

The Starman name was left to Ted Knight’s annual guest shots in each summer’s JLA/JSA teamup for the next four years, until 1980, when DC returned the title ADVENTURE COMICS to its former multi-feature status after decades of being either a Superboy or Aquaman title. ADVENTURE #467 (January 1980) featured both the return of Plastic Man and the debut of yet another all-new version of Starman, this time created by writer Paul Levitz and Spider-Man’s co-creator Steve Ditko.

The new Starman was an outer-space royalty-type named Prince Gavyn, who was one of two potential heirs to the throne of the Galactic Empire, along with his sister, Clryssa. According to custom, when one sibling was chosen to rule, the other would be put to death, a tradition Gavyn naturally planned to abolish as soon as he took the throne. Unfortunately for him, his sister wasn’t quite as forward-thinking, so when it turned out to be she that was named Empress, she went right along with tradition and had her brother thrown into the vacuum of space without benefit of life support, or even a nice heavy coat.

So Gavyn was tossed into the void, where he in fact did not die, but instead was saved thanks to the intervention of an ancient alien named Mn’torr, who sensed great potential and power in Gavyn, bestowing upon him bracelets and a staff that allowed Gavyn to convert stellar radiation to bio-energy. Or something like that.

Anyway, in his new guise as Starman, Gavyn defended Throneworld from threats foreign and domestic for the next 12 months, until both he and Plastic Man were booted from ADVENTURE COMICS to make way for, of all things, DIAL H FOR HERO.

Prince Gavyn had two more appearances in the ’80s: the first was in an issue of DC COMICS PRESENTS, a Superman teamup that firmly established the new Starman as a part of the DC Universe, and which also killed off Gavyn’s sister at the hands of Mongul, leaving Gavyn as the new Emperor. However, Gavyn didn’t have much time to celebrate his new position, as his next (and final) appearance came a couple of years later in two panels of CRISIS IN INFINITE EARTHS, in which he’s shown once more in the Starman costume trying to prevent a wave of anti-matter from destroying Throneworld, and being wiped from existence for his efforts.

Doesn’t seem to be a lot of luck being in the Starman business, does there? Maybe our next contestant will do better, as we jump ahead to 1988, and meet yet another new Starman: Will Payton.

Making his debut in the premiere issue of his own new series, STARMAN #1 (October 1988) hit stands only a year or two after Ted Knight and the rest of the Justice Society were thought to be permanently put out to pasture in THE LAST DAYS OF THE JUSTICE SOCIETY, a one-shot which banished Starman and his JSA compadres to limbo, fighting the forces of evil forever in an endless loop, expected never to return. With the name now up for grabs, writer Roger Stern and artist Tom Lyle introduced us to Will Payton, a pleasantly average chap minding his own business camping in the Colorado Rockies, when he’s unexpectedly zapped by an energy beam searing down from above, seemingly drooping poor Will dead on the spot. Will wakes up a month later on the slab about to be autopsied by curious doctors, wondering why this average-looking male corpse was tremendously dense and heavy.

Payton soon discovers that the mysterious energy had given him a whole array of fantastic superpowers, including the power to control his body mass, flight, the ability to emit energy blasts, even the power to shapeshift, altering his face and body at will. Will’s sister Jayne encourages him to go out and start being a superhero, even making his costume for him, while Will remains hesitant to go public. Eventually, Will doesn’t have much of a choice, as we learn that the energy blast that empowered him was meant to hit a secret government project set on creating its own federal-controlled superbeings, and once they realize that he has the power that was earmarked for their own subjects, they begin sending all manner of baddies after him, trying to regain his power.

The new Starman found himself frequently working closely with STAR Labs, helping them out in exchange for their help in discovering more about his newfound powers, in particular STAR Labs scientist Kitty Faulkner (who would occasionally transform into the orange-skinned mohawked Rampage due to her own scientific mishap), with whom Will would eventually begin a romantic relationship.

Before along, yet another Starman would surface: David Knight, the heretofore unmentioned son of Ted Knight, who appeared on the scene in STARMAN #25 (September 1990).

Infuriated that someone had usurped his father’s name and his birthright, David, cosmic rod in hand, challenged Will to a public battle over it, only to discover that he was being manipulated by none other than his father’s old enemy the Mist. Chastened, David gave up his claim on right to the Starman name and faded back into obscurity. For now, anyway…

STARMAN was a decent if unremarkable series, with a likable but ultimately a little dull protagonist at its core, and stories and artwork that were steady but never spectacular. The series ended after 45 issues, and some six months after that Will Payton met his demise, sacrificing his life in an attempt to stop Eclipso in the pages of ECLIPSO: THE DARKNESS WITHIN #2, leaving the DC Universe once more without a Starman.

Luckily, it would only be two years later that the next Starman — and the greatest one — would come along.

Some Stars Shine Less Brightly

The year was 1941. National Comics was in a boom period like no other, practically owning the comic-book industry thanks to their unprecedented one-two punch of Superman and Batman. After some three and a half years of success, the company decided to put a big promotional push behind a new character, and even anoint it as the successor to the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader, claiming in a house ad that the new superhero “is certain to become as popular as the two great leaders in the comic field, SUPERMAN AND BATMAN.” And why not? After all, the creator of the new feature, artist Jack Burnley, had been toiling away on both Superman and Batman for over a year as one of their most dependable ghost artists, particularly on SUPERMAN. They knew he could deliver the goods, so a brand-new character from Burnley should be money in the bank, right?

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way for Burnley’s new character, the quintessential Golden Age also-ran, Starman. Let’s take a look at the Astral Avenger’s debut in ADVENTURE COMICS #61 (April 1941), and see if we can pinpoint where it all went wrong.

Drawn by Jack Burnley (although the identity of the writer is lost to the ages), Starman’s inaugural appearance opens with a wave of destructive sabotage across the United States. Everything from telegraph wires to power-generating dynamos spontaneously and mysteriously burst into flame.

At his wit’s end, the FBI’s “ace troubleshooter” Woodley Allen decides to call for the one man who can help:

Not exactly the Batsignal, but, hey, it’s something. Woodley there better hope he’s been wearing a lead suit.

Meanwhile, foppish hypochondriac Theodore Knight is sniffling his way through a high-falutin’ dinner with girlfriend Doris Lee, when the city unexpectedly goes dark. At the same time, a metal cylinder Knight carries within a hidden holster begins to vibrate, alerting him that he’s being summoned.

Knight makes his excuses and looks for a place to change clothes, transforming himself into — wait for it — Starman!

This, by the way, is all the origin we ever get for Ted Knight:

Ah. Superman gets “rocketed to Earth from an exploding planet.” Batman gets “parents were murdered by criminals.” Starman gets “solid scientific research.” How exciting. It’ll make an excellent movie. Ted definitely gets rooked in the origin department.

Anyway, courtesy of his invention, the amazing Gravity Rod, Starman flies out to his secret meeting place with Woodley Allen: an old abandoned shack. There, Woodley tells Starman who’s behind the wave of sabotage: a sinister band of conspirators known as the Secret Brotherhood of the Electron. Sounds like they have to pay dues and have weekly lodge meetings. Starman somehow deduces from this that the Brotherhood must have some sort of device that allows them to nullify ordinary electricity.

Hovering above the city, he conveniently notices some electrical discharge coming from a mountain range below, and investigates, discovering the secret lair of the Secret Brotherhood of the Electron, who have helpfully painted a large lightning bolt on the heavy steel door of their compound.

Starman busts in and interrogates an Electron thug, who quickly gives up the name of the operation’s boss, “an old guy known as Dr. Doog.” Starman locates Dr. Doog, but falls victim to Doog’s powers of hypnosis, finding himself “pinioned by a thought wall.”

Starman manages to resist the hypnosis, and evades Doog’s even more sinister scheme: a trap door. Ooooooooh, scary.

Next, Doog falls back on the old reliable hired goons, but Starman makes short work of them, although we’re not shown exactly how.

However, it’s been long enough for Doog to ready his final weapon, the devastating Ultra-Dynamo, but it’s no match for Starman’s Gravity Rod. And unluckily for Dr. Doog, in trying to escape, he forgets exactly where he’d installed his trap doors, and, well…

The crisis averted Starman changes back to Ted Knight and drops in on Doris for a little more abuse:

So what could Starman do exactly? Well, thanks to the Gravity Rod (later replaced by the Cosmic Rod), Starman was able to manipulate and control energy that the Rod somehow drew from stellar radiation, allowing him to fly, create force fields and protective spheres, expel destructive bursts of energy, levitate objects, and even manipulate the energy into shapes and forms, kind of like Green Lantern’s power ring. Otherwise, he was just a regular guy, with no real powers without his Cosmic Rod, although over time he gained the ability to manipulate the Rod mentally from a distance and even summon it to him, later explained as his having keyed the Rod’s frequency to his brainwaves.

A word about his costume: Granted, it’s a little silly, and definitely old-fashioned, but there’s an almost art-deco elegance about it that’s always appealed to me, particularly the headpiece and the cape. I also always liked the very utilitarian detail of the leather holster for the Gravity Rod on the belt — it seemed like something he picked up at Sears after a mission where he needed both hands for something.

Unfortunately, as cool as his uniform was, Starman himself was pretty bland. The whole business of pretending to be a weak-kneed milquetoast around your girlfriend at least made some sense with Clark Kent. After all, he had real superpowers to try and hide. Ted Knight didn’t even bother wearing a mask, yet he had no problem completely eviscerating his own relationship in the hopes of allaying suspicions. Self-loathing much, there, Ted?

Burnley’s art was definitely well done and leagues better than most of the other work seen in comics of the time, but it too was a little staid, having neither the noirish moodiness of Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson’s Batman or the dynamic crackle of Kirby’s Captain America.

The biggest problem, though, were Starman’s enemies, an endless parade of nondescript scientists and saboteurs with no real flair or panache, there was The Light, Captain Vurm, Baron X, the Green Arab, the Singapore Stranglers, and the list goes on and on. The only real winner in Starman’s rogues’ gallery was The Mist, who made his debut in ADVENTURE COMICS #67 (October 1941.)

The Mist, another disgruntled scientist, had attempted to sell his “inviso-solution” to the U.S. Government during the previous World War but was turned down, and as a result was scheming for revenge. And I gotta side with the Mist on this one: seems to me an invisibility formula just might be something the military would want to invest in. The Mist went on a traitorous rampage, not only stealing all kinds of government secrets thanks to his inviso-solution, but going so far as to coat planes with the material and prepare them for a bombing run over factory districts in Pittsburgh and Bethelem, Pennsylvania (an oddly specific plan for comics, I might add). Starman stumbles across the plot trying to rescue a sightseeing Doris from a cave-in, that just happened to also be the location of the Mist’s secret lair.

Apprised of the situation, Starman downs the Mist’s invisible planes, then goes after the Mist himself, who had re-kidnapped Doris and fled the scene in his (surprisingly visible) “space-ship.”

Starman melts his way through the hull, then takes out the Mist rather easily with a right cross; after all, he is just a floating head.

It’s the Mist’s visual design that sets him apart from the rest of Starman’s rather pedestrian antagonists. The floating, scraggly-haired head hovering above a swirl of mist and air is an innovative and creepy look for the comics of the time, even if it was revealed that he was only wearing an invisible cloak. When the character returned decades later, it would be revealed that repeated exposure to the inviso-solution had rendered him completely insubstantial rather than merely invisible.

National Comics clearly expected to go all the way with Starman, booting Hourman out of its popular Justice Society of America series in ALL-STAR COMICS to make room for him (also joining at the time was new character Dr. Mid-Nite, replacing Green Lantern, who had been awarded his own self-titled series).

However, if you’ll pardon the expression, Ted Knight’s star fell rather rapidly. He was booted from the covers of ADVENTURE COMICS after about a year or so, but remained a monthly feature in its pages for four more years, until 1946, when he was ousted in favor of Aquaman and Superboy stories. At about the same time. Starman found himself (along with the Spectre) unceremoniously and without explanation bumped from the JSA roster as well, their spots taken up by the returning Flash and Green Lantern.

When the JSA returned to comics pages in the 1960s, Starman was one of the first to be brought back, in part because he wasn’t a duplicate of a then-published DC hero like Hawkman or Flash, and no doubt also thanks to his unique and classic look.

Starman was really the perfect character for those kinds of guest appearances: a flashy, colorful costume and a simple, visual power, but not much characterization to have to contend with. He had another brief moment in the spotlight in 1965, when he and Black Canary were given a two-issue teamup stint in BRAVE AND THE BOLD, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Murphy Anderson, a couple of handsomely drawn but deadly dull stories that failed to set the world on fire.

They did, however, serve as inspiration for an intriguing connection between the two characters that wouldn’t be explored until decades later. By the 1970s, Starman was bumped again from the JSA, suffering a broken leg and handing over his Cosmic Rod to new JSA member the Star-Spangled Kid, for whom Ted later made his own version of the Rod, recrafting it into the Cosmic Converter Belt. The worst bit of retroactive history came with Roy Thomas’ handling of the character in ALL-STAR SQUADRON and INFINITY, INC., in which he declared that Ted Knight didn’t even invent the Gravity Rod himself, that he merely bought it. Fortunately, this idea would be dispensed with and ignored in the STARMAN series to come.

“STARMAN series to come,” you ask? Indeed, Ted Knight was far from the last to bear the name Starman — which we’ll begin to discuss next time…