Starman #2

"Mercy"
Sins of the Father, Part Three
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

"Is it me, then, growing old?  Or do all the costumed do-gooders begin to blur into one annoying mess after a while" (Starman #2: 5), the aging Mist quips to the ageless Shade.  He might as well be talking about the entirely ordinary Theo and David Knight, but Jack Knight is proving to be something different, a reluctant superhero with a fondness for antique trinkets and an eye for practicality, less dogmatic and more feeling than his predecessors.  Jack is beginning to find his way as a superhero.  Or at least his costume...and his cosmic staff.

But "Mercy" is mostly about two women:  the Mist's stammering daughter Nash and the mysterious new fortune teller Charity, culled from her own early-70s DC title Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion and clever enough to verbally spar with Jack.  Nash, however, proves the more tantalizing prospect, more poetic in her metaphors and hostage to their fathers' self-perpetuating feud.  She lets Jack go, against her knowledge of her father's wishes and even though she has him easily trapped on a rooftop.  She is—among all the loud, self-important men running around Opal City, swelling their egos and verbally fortifying their self-identities, and bashing one another where it hurts—a quiet, soft spot, not exactly vulnerable but susceptible to other rules and an idea of another world, neither war nor opera, much better than the one the men are playing out.

If Starman had a puppetmaster, it would be the Shade, who after seemingly allying himself with the Mist to annihilate the Knight clan, promises instead their safety.  For unknown reasons, he seems invested in Jack Knight becoming a hero.  And, by force of circumstance and not a little temperamental inclination, Jack is well on his way to doing so.

[December 1994]

Note:  Although release date and interior copyright dates read accurately "December 1994," the cover incorrectly lists Starman #2 as December 1995.

Starman #1

"Oil (Paint) and Water"
Sins of the Father, Part Two
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

Still reeling from the Mist's full-on assault on the Knight family and the ongoing criminal chaos in Opal City, wounded younger son, Jack Knight, seeks out his father's hospital room.  Unlike his obedient brother David, who assumed without questioning or alteration his father's mantle of Starman, Jack is far more independent.  He's sees, for the most part, their actions for what they are and their devotion to an outdated idea of superheroics as somewhat foolish and not a little misguided.  Yet, Jack takes his father's undue criticism hard, and it's this family dynamic that makes Starman's universe so relatable.  Jack's struggle with his father's legacy—his current enemy, whose personal vendetta has enveloped the city, and his paternal disapproval at Jack's disinclination to be Starman—is the thematic center of #1.

However reluctant he may seem (to himself and his father), Jack continually seems to find himself being the hero...not playing it as David was accustomed.  His motivations, mostly family and devotion to the memory of his dead mother, still may be selfish or at least self-interested, but they are heroic.  And though his father may not see it, since his only idea of what a hero can be is the one that he once was, Jack may very well be the hero Opal City needs.  It takes an astute and charismatic former villain to realize it.  The Shade makes his debut in Robinson's Starman early, though with the Shade it can never be too early.  Unlike Theo Knight and the Mist's thugs, he sees Jack Knight for what he can be, and he sees something far better than his predecessors.  He's a hero, one who doubtless would decline the "superhero" moniker, but one who might deserve it for that very reason.

[November 1994]

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]