Nothing at all to do with David Bowie (Starman Comics in general)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Starman Comics in general
Date:	10/01/02 (76 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: blah

Disadvantages: blah

Starman was a comic book series published by DC. (DC, owned by AOL Time Warner, is one of the big mainstream corporate superhero comic publishers in the States.) It ran for 80 issues (with various specials and annuals and what have you) between 1994 and 2000. It has nothing to do with David Bowie, sadly. It is, in fact, about superheroes. I normally avoid mainstream superhero comics, as they're generally quite dull and aimed at 12 year olds. But this one has a good reputation, so when I found about 60 of the 80 issues for 50p each in Notting Hill I decided to give it a go.

It's not at all bad, most of the time. One good thing is that it avoids the most annoying feature of superhero comics - it ends. Superhero comics traditionally only end when people stop buying them. Batman has been going since the 1930s, so you'd expect him to be pretty old by now. But in the comics he still looks about 30, just as he always has. And in the entire 60 years he's been going, nothing important has ever happened to him. OK, yeah, he gets to fight some silly looking villains and what have you, but nothing permanent ever happens. If he were to die then they couldn't sell any more comics about him, so you know he won't. Most other superheroes are exactly the same. I think Superman may have got married, and maybe he died a couple of times (always comes back to life, though). But that's about it. I can't really summon up that much enthusiasm for stories that don't have an ending, that just drift endlessly. Starman is different - important things happen to the main characters all the time, and the story ends properly.

One bad thing about it, though, is that it's mired in geeky superhero continuity that extends back for decades. It's usually written well enough that the frequent references to old characters don't irritate too much, but there's still perhaps slightly too much use of characters that maybe appeared once way
back in the 1940s or something. This is either "nostalgia" or "irritating fanboy drivel", depending on your point of view. As I say, the whole thing is generally well written and entertaining, so I tend to regard it as the former. And to be fair the sense of the (fictional) past is an important part of the story, so without all the obscure old superhero references it would be a completely different comic anyway.

So apparently there was a character called Starman in comics in the 1940s. He wore a red and green costume and fought crime using a device called a "cosmic rod", which allowed him to fly and shoot laser beams and stuff like that. In this version of the comic, that character (his name is Ted) is an old man. His son David has replaced him as Starman, but he gets killed very early on (page 2 of the first issue, in fact). There has to be a Starman, so Ted's other son, Jack, has to take over the mantle. This he does with some reluctance, as he's trying to live a normal life, away from his father's obsession with colourful crime fighting. At the start of the series Jack regards the whole superhero thing as a bit silly, although as the series progresses he grows a bit more enthusiastic about it. The main theme of the comic is Jack's gradual acceptance of his role as a superhero (although he refuses to wear a costume or have a secret identity or any of that sort of thing). The continuity referenced in the comic is fiendishly elaborate: there have been quite a few other Starmen over the years, and all of them show up here eventually, although the blue-skinned gay alien Starman is the only important one apart from Jack.

The whole thing is set in "Opal City", one of those fictional cities like Gotham City or Metropolis, where superheroes live. Almost uniquely in a superhero comic, the location is actually brought to life quite well, and is important to the story. There's also a much more well
-rounded and interesting cast of supporting characters than you usually get in these things. Chief among them is The Shade, an immortal sometime supervillain who acts as narrator for large parts of the story and provides slightly sinister humour throughout.

There's a whole theme about fathers and children running through the thing. Ranged against Starman and his retired father, and providing an obvious contrast to them, are The Mist, an ageing, senile supervillain, and his murderous children. Mist as an old man tries to continue his war with the original Starman through their children. There's a lot of stuff about families and obligations and duty and honour and all that corny stuff. But it's usually handled well enough that it's neither nauseating nor laughable. For instance Jack, the hero, gets to meet with his dead brother every year for a nice chat in the afterlife. That sounds like a dreadful idea for a story, but it's done well enough to work.

The series was written by James Robinson, a British writer. He had a co-writer called David Goyer for a little while (between issues 48 and 60, I think). The art was initially by Tony Harris, and later by Peter Snejbjerg, although there were various guest artists for individual issues here and there. The writing is good, especially the dialogue. The art is very good at first, although when Snejbjerg takes over it becomes a bit more generic.

As a general rule, if a writer stays with a comic for too long, it will eventually go off the rails. Just look at what happened to Neil Gaiman's "Sandman", or Garth Ennis's "Preacher", or Peter Milligan's "Shade the Changing Man". They were great for the first three years or so, but then suddenly just went wrong and became all but unreadable. This does start to happen with this series. There's a story where some of the characters go into space for about a year which drags on and on and on. But
after that finally ends, Robinson manages to get the series back on track with a fairly epic final storyline which ties up most of the loose ends and leaves the way open for a satisfying end to the series.

Actually there are faults with the final storyline - it seems that every single thing that happened in the series up to that point, no matter how small or trivial, has some relevance to what happens in the final story. This strikes me as a bit lazy, somehow. And using the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as a plot device isn't terribly original, either. But bits of it work brilliantly - the sudden appearance of an evil, French-speaking, immortal occultist dwarf is a masterstroke, like something out of The Old Dark House. And because the characters have been well written throughout, when bad things happen to some of them it carries more emotional weight than normal. The aftermath of the final battle leads to some surprisingly poignant moments.

The series is in the process of being republished as graphic novels - about three quarters of it are collected so far, and the rest will apparently follow. There was also a nice "miniseries" (four-issue self-contained story) about The Shade and his war with successive generations of an evil family which has sworn his destruction, which will hopefully be included with the reprints.

I guess if you don't like comics, or superheroes, then you should forget this opinion completely. If you do, and you have a few quid spare, you could do worse then pick up one of the Starman graphic novels.

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