We are taking a few days off from publishing new content for the holidays, so enjoy some of our favorite Christmas-themed writing over the past 11 years! Merry Christmas to all!
If you’ve been reading my work at Multiversity for long enough, it’s no surprise that “Starman” by James Robinson, Tony Harris, Peter Snejbjerg, and co. is my favorite series of all time. It’s a comic that has something for everyone, and also has one of the finest holiday-themed issues of all time. Pour some eggnog, fire up your DC Universe app, and give “Starman” #27, ‘Christmas Knight,’ a read. Then, come on back and we’ll talk about it.
Written by James RobinsonCover by Tony Haris
Penciled by Steve Yowell
Inked by Wade Van Grawbadger
Colored by Pat Garrahy
Lettered by Oakley/N.J.QIt’s the Christmas season and the O’Dares host a holiday dinner. Many familiar faces appear, but a wayward Santa Claus delays Jack Knight’s attendance in this stand-alone holiday issue.
The issue focuses on a Christmas gathering at the O’Dare house. The O’Dares are a family of Irish-American police officers who make up part of “Starman”‘s supporting cast. Each member of the family gets a little moment in the issue, but they are mainly there to stand in for a standard family hosting a Christmas party. This being a James Robinson comic, Clarence and Faith O’Dare are both referencing Dickens and making sex jokes at the same time while cooking a turkey. In this era, Robinson was constantly pushing the envelope while also making sure to involve lots of literary and film references. The clean cut, Norman Rockwell look of the family it a little unexpected, but adds a real charm to the characters.
Throughout the issue, just about every major “Starman” supporting player shows up, from Mikaal to Ted, the Shade, and Charity, herself a future O’Dare. All of them are waiting for Jack to arrive, but Jack has been delayed when he sees a homeless man dressed as Santa Claus crying on a city bench.
Pete, the homeless man, is a character that is designed purely for tugging on the heartstrings, and while a lot of the aspects of his character are cliched, Robinson gives everyone around him such empathy and care that it erases some of the more expected characterizations. He checks of all the cliched homelessness stereotypes of the era: alcoholic, veteran, lost his family tragically. There are certainly people from all of those categories who wind up homeless, but this paints him with the broadest possible brush.
But Jack isn’t asking why he’s homeless; he asks why he’s crying. And the bulk of the issue is Jack flying Pete around the city, looking for a locket containing a picture of his family that was stolen from him earlier today. Jack, along the way, establishes part of what makes his character so unique and enduring, despite not having appeared in a comic in nearly two decades. Jack is open-hearted, and tries to help everyone he encounters in whatever ways he can. Whether that’s buying food for a group of homeless people living by the river, or delaying his Christmas dinner to help Pete, Jack is trying to do good in more ways than just using his cosmic rod to blast problems away.
Again, reading this issue with 2019 eyes means that some of the rhetoric around homelessness is a bit dated. Rather, it is a bit ignorant. I think for a lot of people, this would be considered an ‘accurate’ portrait of homelessness, still. But the part that isn’t in question is how Jack reacts to the people he meets: he simply tries to make their day better.
Steve Yowell and Wade Von Grawbadger don’t focus on the visuals of homelessness as much as others may have. Their characters aren’t styled stereotypically, instead letting Robinson’s words tell their story instead. The one exception is a character they call “crab hand” who has a, you guessed it, disfigured hand. It doesn’t really add to the plot, so I’m not sure why Robinson and Yowell decided to create a character reduced to just their one abnormal quality. But that’s pretty much the only place where any of the other homeless characters gets anything close to a problematic representation.
Continued belowAnd that brings us back to Pete. Pete winds up a guest at the O’Dare Christmas party and, like Jack, they embrace Pete, no questions asked. There is a panel here that I think about often, and makes me choke up each time:
Coincidentally, I can’t keep Clarence’s words, as I’m a teary mess writing this.
I’m not exactly sure what about about the issue affects me so much. I think it is the sense of acceptance and love that radiates from the Knights and the O’Dares in this issue. We all have been in a situation, perhaps not as bleak as Pete’s, where we’ve wanted the warm embrace of kind faces. Re-reading this issue every year is one of my favorite holiday traditions. Happy holidays, everyone.
