Ask any comic aficionado about James Robinson’s Starman, and most will paint it in a very positive light. But ask many of these same experts for a superhero recommendation, and you’ll hear all the (admittedly well-picked) standards: All-Star Superman, The Immortal Iron Fist, Green Lantern: Rebirth, etc. Don’t get me wrong, each of these are great (and are some of my personal favorites), but Starman is at least equally deserving of a read. After all, nothing since Crisis on Infinite Earths has shaped the DC Universe quite as much as this epic.
J
ames Robinson’s incredible saga tells the tale of reluctant hero Jack Knight, who has inherited the title of golden age hero Starman from his deceased brother, David (who in turn inherited it from their father, Ted). While Jack uses a staff-like version of his father’s cosmic rod (yes, yes, get the giggles out of your system), he abandons the bright tights for a leather jacket, goggles, and whatever else he is wearing at the time. However, the new Starman soon learns that being a hero now is a lot more complicated than it was back in his father’s day: the villains are smarter, the stakes higher, and the line between good and evil is blurry, at best. While the story is brilliant, I don’t want to give much more away to prospective readers (this is a recommendation, after all). I, unfortunately, was a victim of such spoilers before I read Starman, which ruined the effect of some of the would-be big reveals.
So then, why read it? Well, I made the ballsy claim that the only thing that exceeds Starman‘s influence on the DC Universe as a whole is Marv Wolfman’s massive Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I intend to stand by that. Admittedly, some events may have affected the status quo in a more visible manner (Infinite Crisis brought back the multiverse, Zero Hour fuddled with time, and so on and so forth), but Starman‘s incredible influence is far subtler. The first Crisis brought the DC Universe out of a storytelling hole, allowing the characters and the universe to finally grow and develop in ways that only a few titles had previously attempted (New Teen Titans, by the same creative team, serves as a stark example of this). Every book being published by DC was changed forever, and I’m sure everyone would agree that were it not for Crisis on Infinite Earths the DC Universe would be completely different now.
I maintain that Starman is just as influential. Rather than having a direct meddling in other books, Robinson (unintentionally, I assume) set the tone for the DCU from then on. Starman was notable for taking the golden age characters that had more or less been forgotten and dragging them back into the mainstream DC Universe. Other attempts had been made to reignite fan interest in these characters (such as the wonderful Sandman Mystery Theater), but by involving them in current stories, rather than flashbacks, Robinson was able to secure a foothold for them in the present rather than the past. Up until this point, the only characters of the golden age who were still getting much page time were the original Flash, Jay Garrick, and (to a lesser extent) the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott. Upon the end of Starman, fan interest in these characters had increased an incredible amount, leading to the launch of the new Justice Society of America (a team made up of these same old-school characters and the younger heroes who had taken up their respective mantles). This attention towards older characters and their legacies is one of the biggest driving forces behind the DC Universe today, setting off a chain of events that had led to almost every major event since then. Indeed, I am certain that had Starman not been written then we would not have ever gotten to Green Lantern: Rebirth, and Blackest Night (DC’s current blockbuster) never would have happened. Pick up the first trade (or one of the fancy new omnibuses) and pick up a piece of history.
