Starman #6

"1882 Back Stage, Back Then (A Tale of Times Past)"
written by James Robinson
art by Teddy H. Kristiansen
additional pencils by Christian Højgaard, Bjarne Hansen, and Kim Hagen

The Shade is something of a literary curiosity, a traveler from the milieu of Dickens and Wilde to Robinson's history-saturated Starman series.  He is, in Jack Knight's world, a man out of time, still donning his top hat and stylishly brandishing his eagle-headed cane.  He speaks with a thick poetry and writes with flourish, an aesthete with a particular fondness for the past.  It is perhaps for this very reason that Jack Knight—against his sometimes better judgment—finds him so compelling.  They are, in some strange, anachronistic way, of similar temperament.

But if Jack's defiance is motivated more by a sometimes misguided sense of independence, the Shade is morally slippery to be blunt, as comfortable slaughtering an entire theatre troop as defending a young woman from their predation.  He is a mercenary, if one doggedly faithful to his promises and sincerely invested in the future of Opal City.

"So am I, my boy.  Perhaps little if nothing more...  ...but I am a man of my word." (Starman #6: 6-7)

"1882 Back Stage, Back Then" is a dark little tale, a vaudevillian horror fable of deceit and retribution, of a gentleman who moves through the shadows.  Like Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, alluded to frequently and without much subtlety in the episode, it is a gothic fiction, a Faustian tale culminating in the greedy and lecherous Lune's dramatic death among the carnage of his conspirators strewn across the stage with the devil leering on.  Again, like Wilde, the details are suggestive but opaque:  the waifish, flaxen-haired boy; the lavish, French-styled theatre; the menagerie of carnival performers; and, most of all, the rose he demands as payment from young Wayville and, of course, the missing page in his journal.  Jack Knight is perhaps right in thinking he might not want to know, but the mystery is so tantalizing, we just can't help ourselves.

[April 1995]