Starman #3

"Night F(l)ight"
Sins of the Father, Part Four
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Grawbadger

And so the career of a hero truly begins, with a nighttime duel in the sky:  Kyle with his stolen cosmic belt and Jack with his borrowed cosmic rod.  After several issues and several violent encounters with the Mist's two children and many faceless henchmen, Jack Knight finally begins to realize that once there was a time he wanted to be Starman.  David may have been the eldest, may have always aimed to please their father, may never have appreciated subtlety or finery or rarity, and he may have bullied him relentlessly—and sometimes quite cruelly—for that lack of subtlety, but he was his brother, and when it came to defending him he was equally relentless.  But Jack's memories of himself and his father begin to take a softer and more honest shape.  Jack was once proud of his father's profession and would play dress-up himself in his own homemade Starman costume, but years of being unappreciated for his uniqueness left Jack bitter toward those he once admired.  And, with conditions, he agrees to assume the mantle.

Nash too, after years being uncomfortable with some of her father's more self-interested and murderous schemes, assumes the family inheritance when Jack kills her brother in their aerial duel.  She once showed mercy, once stammered in conversation with all but her brother, but, in her own words, "that was somebody else" (Starman #3: 18).  The more physically powerful Kyle is defeated, and his doddering and senile father the Mist, once a great criminal mastermind, is overcome with the help of the Shade and the O'Dare cops, but as Jack notes, "it's all self-propagating kid stuff" (19).  One villain falls, another rises to seek vengeance.  One hero falls, another rises to find justice.  But Jack might have just the right perspective to keep his heroic ego in check.

Robinson wraps up his fine opening arc of Starman with two intriguing revelations:  alien Starman Mikaal Tomas, imprisoned and kept drunk and drugged in a circus freak show, and previous Starman Will Payton, previously presumed dead but also held captive in an alien test lab.  Robinson, like Jack, even in completely re-imagining his world, has a great fondness for old things, for things with a history.  And by all accounts, he intends to honor that.

[January 1995]