Starman #4

"A Day in the Opal"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

Jack continues to bring his off-beat pop culture perspective to bear on his fledgling superhero career.  He may have grown up in a superhero family, but he never understood their world the way they saw it.  Instead, he makes sense of his own life through the things he loves:  pop artifacts from bygone eras, art house film, urban myth, and his city's art and architecture.

"What?  No.  Look, I hate to sound rude, but this is all a bit too...   ...Bergmanesque for me.  Weird, half-finished bits of sentences.  Strange stares.  Pregnant pauses.  That might work in a Calvin Klein commercial, but not with me.  Actually, I'm thinking of Felliniesque, aren't I?  Man, how embarrassing... getting my "esques" mixed up."  (Starman #4: 14)

And he's talking to just the right man:  the Shade, who also sees his own life in its relation to the art of his age, loves Opal City and its textured past, and suspects Jack might be something special that he doesn't even yet realize.

Robinson's prose can get a little purple; his description of the music of Opal City—admittedly in the florid imagination of Jack Knight himself—is humorously absurd.  But his ability to quietly give a fairytale tone to his superhero series is welcome.  This is nowhere more apparent than in his description of the mystical Hawaiian shirt, designed by mysterious artist Harry Ajax and supposedly showing the way to heaven.  Likewise, the shirt—never shown in the issue, but sold by Knight out of his new stock to a representative of Swiss businessman Albert Bekker, who disappeared (like Ajax himself) immediately after procuring it—is joined by another supernatural pop-art artifact, an animated street poster that sucks in a melancholy passerby.  Neither attracts much attention from Starman, yet, who's more preoccupied with re-establishing his shop.

[February 1995]