Friday, February 10, 2006
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Posted by
Tony
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2/10/2006 02:49:00 PM
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WWW – Starman
Boy, I hate to do this one.
“Starman” was one of the two or three series that got me back into comics in 1999. There’s a lot that I liked about this book. It stars Jack Knight (son of original Starman Ted Knight), who was always just a cool character. Jack himself was all into retro (like me!) and the series had a real reverence for the past. Also, it was kind of the high-water mark of late 1990s “character-driven” storytelling. For someone who started reading comics in the early 1990s, “character-driven” storytelling was a whole world of new possibilities.
But as writer James Robinson focused more on the characters, he completely forgot about the plot. Many issues aren’t much more than character sketches, held together loosely by whatever Robinson was into that month. I dropped the book midway through the interminable “Stars My Destination” arc.
Spoilers coming
But Andy said I should check out the next arc, “Grand Guignol,” just to see the death of Ted Knight. Andy was correct as usual; Ted’s death was indeed touching. Trying to wade through this book, however, made me want to kill myself.
The story is about an evil dwarf who takes over the Shade’s body, using his shadow powers to build a shadow dome around Opal City. Jack Knight must lead the city’s heroes to save the city. This arc covers about two days, and takes up 271 pages of book. Two hundred and seventy-one.
- The whole thing drags like a ball and chain. There are at least two dozen named characters, most of which have a subplot or a recap. At least half of the book is flashback or exposition.
- Ted’s final battle with Dr. Phosphorous is told through about a half-dozen exterior shots of Ted’s mansion. You never see the battle, just the same shot of the mansion. You follow the fight by seeing larger flashes of light from inside the mansion.
- Robinson takes half a page to explain the dwarf can’t lose his lower-class British accent, so sometimes he speaks in French. Except when he’s controlling the Shade, when he speaks in the Shade’s upper-class accent. Got it? Aren't you glad we straightened that out?
- While Ted’s lying in the hospital and Opal City is still in peril, Robinson takes 11 pages to tell a story of the Golden Age JSA. The story is when the JSA was incapacitated and their girlfriends had to come rescue them. We now return you to your story.
- The Elongated Man says several times he’s a detective, not a fighter. We see him in several fistfights, but he never makes any deductions. He “solves” the case by finding another detective who knows the score.
- It’s revealed that anytime the Shade did something particularly evil (or particularly goofy), the dwarf was controlling him. Yep, the whole thing’s a retcon.
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