Starman #0

"Falling Star—Rising Son"
Sins of the Father, Part One
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

Starman belongs in a comic-book world, in the kind of fictional place in which a single billionaire can build a city and name it himself, one for which a hero inevitably emerges to keep its denizens safe and its streets clean.  "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, back 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" (Starman #0: 1).  Robinson's prose is crafted, though not stilted or purple, but his expansive epic beginning is, as it turns out, the postured, somewhat egoistic heroic self-fashioning of David Knight, Opal City's soon-to-be-dead Starman.

"Into the street the piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while..."  ("The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Robert Browning)

Robinson's Opal City is a fictional city with texture and history, one that exists outside and beyond the titular hero of the series even if their destinies are often irreversibly commingled.  For this reason, David's reluctant replacement, his younger brother Jack, is a hero much better suited to Robinson's freshly imagined superhero world, one as absorbed by its history as his elder brother though not as self-important or preoccupied with his own legacy.  And though his ascendancy to his family post is inevitable, since he already appears in fully re-imagined superhero garb with his preferred cosmic staff on #0's cover, the bloody beginning to his tenure as Starman is amazing to watch.

Issue #0 is an account of loss, which for Jack Knight includes a mental inventory of all the beautiful old things burned with his store—50s Dali-designed fabric, railroad workers' jackets, Thorne Smith, et al.—and the rest of the antique remnants of a lost time.  It's also simultaneously the story of how the Knight family is hit:  David's death; patriarch, astro-physicist, and former Starman Ted's hospitalization and his house's ruin; and the destruction of Jack's shop Knights Past along with his (wrongfully) presumed death among his things.  In doing so, it strips away the things keeping Jack from assuming Starman's mantle.

It also introduces the other family, the Mist and his children, Nash and Kyle, responsible for the events of the current issue.  It is a family feud, one whose members are each as pettily absorbed in its outcome as the other, and whose parties are just as snidely convinced of their own victory as the other, even if this confidence vacillates.  By the end of issue #0, it is the Mist who shows the piper's smile.

[October 1994]