James Robinson's Starman is a lot about legacy, but it starts with a legacy almost cut short. The eldest son of the original Starman is killed, just an hour or so into his first patrol. There's the younger brother, Jack, but he derided the costume and his brother not long before, so it seems unlikely he'll be able to fill the void, assuming he even tries.
Tony Harris is the primary artist for the first 4 years of the book, drawing around 3 dozen issues. He was spelled periodically by Steve Yeowell, or the guests artists who drew one-shot issues set at some point in Opal City's past. Harris' Jack Knight is a bit of a scarecrow, all wiry limbs and scruffy hair. Sort of a perpetually weary look, with his face lined with deep shadows. Aviator goggles and tattoos, a leather jacket he doesn't wear to his big showdown with his brother's killer because he doesn't want it to get torn up.
Maybe that fits for a character who seems to love the past. Jack's an antiquities or collectible dealer, depending on where the line between the two is drawn. Things with some age, made rare by time or circumstance. Stuff with some history to it. It fits for a book that is so concerned with history, be it Jack's, his father's, the Shade's, Opal City, or even the name "Starman." Everything in the book builds on something from the past, starting with Starman's history with The Mist and expanding from there.
The Mist is probably the main villain of Harris' run. The series opens with an all-out assault on Opal by the original and his two children, Kyle and Nash. From there, it's Nash who engineers another attack later on and haunts Jack for long stretches of the book. Jack makes a trip to New York, teaming up with Wes Dodds and Dian Belmont to track down a memento of the original Mist, all in an act of mercy towards what appears to be a shattered old man. Some of that works better than others - Robinson's build-up of Nash ultimately ends with kind of a wet fart - but it generally serves to highlight the sort of Starman Jack's going to be.
Robinson sows a lot of seeds in the early going, introducing the Starman of the '70s, a Talokkian named Mikhail, plus a gentle version of Solomon Grundy. A theater poster that draws people into Hell, one of whom is a Sherlock Holmes stand-in. The ghost of a pirate wrongly executed. Most don't conclude until after Harris has left, save for "Solly's" arc, and even that only so much as any arc ever concludes for Solomon Grundy.
Opal City itself is a big part of the book, and Harris does his best to make it feel, again, like a place with history. A harbor town, with bridges spanning the waters. Some of the taller skyscrapers, the high-end apartments and business sectors, wouldn't necessarily look out of place in Batman: The Animated Series, albeit a bit brighter. Opal's got some shadows, but it's not that kind of dark. But there's also older neighborhoods, the ones Jack tends to frequent. Smaller structures, stone archways and bridges. Homes that have space for hanging gardens in them, but also steep rooftops with little clock towers scattered about it. I don't know architecture, but Harris' art gives the city some personality.
But like I said, Tony Harris leaves the book after 4 years, right about the time Jack leaves Opal for a somewhat shorter period. . .
2 comments:
When I was getting back into comics in the late 90s, Starman was one of those series that was being talked about as being consistently good, but I never tracked it down. I think it was coming to an end around then, or was at least halfway through, and DC's collection policy back then was... erratic.
By the time I decided to hunt the series down, DC had some their omnibus editions, but those were pretty pricey, so I went with the tpbs they originally released and, yeah, really annoying. They always skip those "Times Past" issues set decades earlier, even though that stuff always ends up being relevant later on. So you get issues 10-12, 14, 16 and 17, and then have to track the gaps down as single issues later.
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