Starman Volume 7 - A Starry Knight

Solomon Grundy, got dentures from a horse on Monday.

Volume 7 is the beginning of Jack Knight's space adventure to find the lost brother of his girlfriend Sadie. A lost brother who also was the '80s Starman, Will Payton. Who I know nothing about, other than he had a mullet, I think. That's fine, Jack doesn't get anywhere close to him in this volume.

Instead, he, Mikaal, and a projection of his father from the Mother Box helping to power his Gilded Age spacecraft first stumble on an extremely verbose version of Solomon Grundy, then are drawn into the 30th Century for a quick team-up with a couple of members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Their return trip is a little off the mark, so they end up on Krypton, where they (naturally) run into a adolescent Jor-El.

The strain may be starting to tell on Jack. (This posting comic panels out of context is great. I should have started this years ago).

I'm curious how that story would have played out with Silver Age Krypton, with all it's weird rainbow fountains and whatnot. Jor-El still has the curious explorer streak here, but I imagine it's being discouraged more than it was in the Pre-Crisis version. After all that, they get back to the proper time and wind up on Rann.

When DC published Rann-Thanagar War as part of the run-up to Infinite Crisis, and cripes, that was a dog's age ago now, I remember some of the comics blogosphere taking mock-sides in the struggle. Most of the blogs I read seemed to favor Thanagar, on the basis of Rannians being a bunch of uptight weenies. Not all that different from the version of Krypton Byrne gave us, I'd say. I didn't have much of a horse in the race, other than Hawkman's an asshole, so I'm not siding with him. But given what they gave Jack and Mikaal as formal wear, Jack might have been better of staying dead.

This story is also the point when Peter Snejbjerg takes over as the regular artist, Steve Yeowell having handled the first issue in the trade and the third (the Grundy issue). Yeowell's Grundy is kind of freaky, not just because of his enormous teeth, but also how much more cruel he seems than normal. It actually feels like Yeowell's doing a bit of a Tom Mandrake look at times in that issue, which they heavy shadows occasionally blurring details or linework.

Of course, this Grundy is a lot more cunning than any Grundy I'm used to. Interesting how different this one is from the one Jack befriended, or the one that helps Culp in the big battle for Opal in a couple volumes. Well, Robinson spent a lot of time on the legacy of Starman, all the different people to carry the title, why not a legacy of Grundys, since he keeps popping back up?

Snejbjerg's first couple of issues, I feel like he's still getting a handle on Jack, but most of his other character work seems on-point. Granted, I don't have much room to judge most of these characters, like Mikaal's old foe, or Star Boy and Umbra/Shadow Lass, but they seem fairly recognizable to me.

So it's the usual sort of quest storyarc, where the character lands in places that are alien to them, but familiar to us. Convenient how that works, but we could always blame it on the Mother Box. That thing might not be in any hurry to go back to hanging around Orion, the big sourpuss. And Jack's enough of an oddball to make it interesting to see these places through his eyes. He's unphased when you might expect him to be, but gets shaken or stunned at the most unexpected times. Him grossing out Jor-El's dad by discussing, gasp, sex, was kind of hilarious. Although I'd half expect post-Crisis Kryptonians to use some incredibly damaging mind probe on what they'd no doubt consider lesser species.