This is one I've been wanting to write for a while. After rereading my old Justice League and Legion of Superheroes books, I moved on to Starman, by James Robinson and Tony Harris (eventually Peter Snejbjerg), which was another big favorite when I was in high school and then again when I was finishing up college.
Unlike the Giffen/DeMatteis League or Giffen/Bierbaums Legion, I was there at the start for Starman, having picked up Issue 0 as part of the Zero Hour crossover that restructured the DC Universe (again) in 1994. It was one of the first books where I followed the writer from his previous work, because it was a followup to James Robinson's Elseworlds miniseries The Golden Age, though thinking back now I'm not sure what else exactly drew me to it.
Having just finished rereading the ten issues of Justice Society of America Vol. 2 by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck (et al), I seem to recall not knowing anything about the JSA before I picked up that series. Starman appears in maybe two issues, is mentioned in a third issue, and only has a speaking role in the final issue. If anything, the character I found most striking from that book was the Sandman (Wesley Dodds), who had an equally small role.
Regardless of what drew me to the book - and it may have just been Robinson, and an appreciation for the art and proposed storylines before it was released - I was hooked from the start. Everything about the book was different, from the design ethic based on Art Deco to the main character, Jack Knight, who was completely different from other superheroes. Even the letter column was different, with James Robinson answering the letters each month for the first year or so and insisting that he wanted people to tell him about what they were collecting - and not just comics.
Now, another thing that bolted me onto the book for years after was meeting Robinson (and inker Wade von Grawbadger) at Wonder-Con, back when it was still held in Oakland. I stuck to him all day, as I recall, asking him about all sorts of aspects about the book, and in the end he gave me his PO box address and told me to write. I did, but too late - when I saw him again two Wonder-Cons later he said he'd moved.
Anyway. Another neat thing was that he and von Grawbadger both drew little sketches of Starman for my autograph book, which still makes me quite happy (Golden Age Green Lantern creator Sheldon Moldoff and DC legend Dick Giordano are also in that little book of mine, btw).
I continued reading the book each month until I went to college, and then started up again a year or so later, so that I have most issues with just one large gap of about 11 issues, and a few smaller gaps after that. From there I kept up with it to the very end. And then I let it sit for almost twenty years without rereading it or even thinking very much about it.
Like anything that you revisit after so long, things look different when you come back. To get the big one out of the way first, I'm not sure it's aged as well as I'd like. Tony Harris's artwork is quite rough in the beginning, and there are some spots where his sense of proportion is off. Though I'll try and take the sting off this critique by noting that his compositions were always ambitious and kinetic, to a degree not always seen in books at the time, so the odd failure can be forgiven.
The writing doesn't always hold up completely, either. The big thing that struck me was the weird spots where Robinson puts emphasis in the dialogue: the words that he puts in bold break up the flow of how the characters would be speaking the sentences in real life, and it actually got really distracting. There were also parts that seemed a little self-indulgent, even back when I was 14. The one I've always remembered is a character beating another to death while talking about movie portrayals of Philip Marlowe; another I'd forgotten about was a sequence where a bunch of mobsters are talking about Sondheim musicals, before they all get gunned down.
But if there's a few things that don't hold up, there's lots that still does. I generally remembered big storylines from late in the series, like Stars My Destination and Grand Guignol, and so when Robinson alludes to them in the first few issues, I was left impressed at how intricately he plotted all 81 issues of the book, as well as the fact that he got to play out every one of those storylines he teased, even as early as issue #5.
He also does a great job of populating the setting, Opal City, with a fascinating supporting cast, starting with Golden Age villain the Shade (who becomes an amoral "good" guy here). Even the villains are fascinating, most importantly Nash, the daughter of the Golden Age Mist, who becomes Jack Knight's arch-nemesis (and the mother of his child) as a continuation of her father's feud with Jack's. She has an arc, just as surely as Jack or other characters, and at the end it's tragic but mostly satisfying.
Jack's another thing that doesn't entirely hold up, but that's more because of the passage of time than because of any flaw in his characterization. What I think I liked about him then was his approach to crimefighting, and how it was portrayed alongside his normal life. DC specialized in stories like that in the 80s, which I still think was their greatest period. Ironically, one of the examples I always held out about this approach in DC's storytelling was the previous Starman series featuring a different and unrelated character who Robinson nevertheless brings into the narrative stretching back to the 1940s.
The reason Jack doesn't necessarily hold up, or hasn't aged well, is that he's a character that made a lot of sense then, but doesn't seem to anymore. Maybe it's because I'm less fascinated by old things, or I'm fascinated by different old things, but the idea of a quirky antiques shop owner as a superhero just seems so far from the norm today, when characters like Deadpool approach naturalistic storytelling in a very different way. And it doesn't help that his clothing, his sideburns, his tattoos and goatee all look like they belong in the medium-term past.
But again, I really loved rereading this book. I caught a lot of things on this second pass because I've now experienced many of them. The main thing that made me sit up in holy-shittedness was the last page of the first issue, where he's bleeding out from a fight and a bunch of rarities are flitting through his head - and among them is "Scott Walker albums on vinyl". I'd never heard of Scott Walker before then, but I sure did afterwards - and probably the real thing that separates now from 1994 is that Walker wasn't held up as a godlike genius yet back then. He was a faded pop idol from the 60s who'd disappeared after doing some really weird, avant garde music in his later career.
Back then Scott Walker in any format would have been a rarity - I remember in 2005 a record shop employee telling me his CDs were hard to find in the US. Now he's available on Spotify and anyone can listen to him. Just like you can probably find all of Jack Knight's stock of old clothes, old toys, old posters on Amazon or Ebay.
This was an interesting thought that struck me as I read it in the past couple of months. The internet means you can find most things and have them dispatched to you in no time, regardless of where you are or how old it is. The best example is a letter from early on in the series, where a man wrote in asking for help locating his father. Idly I went and googled the old man's name, and found him still living in Florida - which raises questions about whether the letter writer ever found his dad in these past 25 years.
Anyway, if we need another illustration of how much a product of another time James Robinson and Tony Harris's Starman series was, you just need to look at the publication month of the final issue: August 2001.
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