The Re-Read: Star Brand #7
Sunday's Child Is a Brief Complicated Failure With a Glimmer of an Interesting Idea
In 1986, Marvel Comics launched a new series of comics that weren’t in the Marvel Universe that were intended to be more “realistic”. This “New Universe”, as the Wikipedia entry notes, was in some ways a dress rehearsal for the later launch of the Ultimate Universe, which was commercially and aesthetically more successful and has had a substantial influence on the Marvel films in many respects.
The New Universe, on the other hand, only survived three years, with most of the launch books being cancelled by the end of the first year of publication. This, apparently, was not due to poor commercial performance, which I find interesting to read now, because back then that’s what I assumed had been the case. (Though the Wikipedia entry also observes that this was a difficult financial moment in Marvel’s history overall and that did play a role in the weak launch of the initial line-up.)
I remember being kind of interested—that sense that you were going to be reading something from the start was still enticing in comics, whereas at this point, almost every ongoing character has a soft reboot every three or four years and the numbering starts over. Most of the character concepts didn’t grab me (a team of ex-football players? Vietnam-vet mercenary?) but I did pick up Star Brand, written by Jim Shooter initially.
Shooter has a pretty complicated history as a comics writer. He started writing for DC Comics at the age of 14, which always made him kind of an icon for kids who read comics and thought about writing them. After a few professional twists and turns, he ended up as the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in 1978. There’s been a lot of post-facto debates about his tenure, but creatively and commercially it was one of the strongest eras in the company’s publishing history. On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of agreement that he decided that the pretty damn awful Secret Wars series that he wrote (that were big hits) meant that everybody else at the company needed to follow his aesthetic guidance to the letter.
That’s why I was kind of wary about reading Star Brand: I thought Secret Wars II was in particular one of the dumbest things I’d ever read. But I was kind of surprised because Star Brand was messy in an interesting way and probably tried the hardest of all the New Universe titles to “grow up” a bit.
It’s essentially a gloss on Green Lantern: a guy is given the most powerful weapon in the universe by a mysterious, apparently dying, alien. Green Lantern domesticated the unnerving possibilities of that premise back in the Silver Age by making Hal Jordan a fearless, honest, derring-do fighter pilot, by making him part of a universal police force headed by wise immortals who (almost) always chose moral paragons who would not misuse their power, and also by making the most powerful weapon in the universe incapable of dealing with the color yellow. (It is astonishing how long it took for the comic to acknowledge how completely goofy that is as a limitation.)
Star Brand, on the other hand, isn’t out to provide reassurance. The guy who gets the weapon is an ordinary guy from Pittsburgh. He’s not a particularly good person, nor a particularly imaginative one. Like most real people, he hardly knows what to do with power at that scale, whether he’s defending himself against various attackers or trying to do something good—he decides spontaneously to go off and attack Libya, for example, and realizes afterwards that for all he knew, he just started a war without meaning to. He’s indecisive, he’s trying to juggle relationships with two women at once, and nothing works the streamlined way that it usually does in superhero comics. He gets in a fight with the “old man” who gave him the weapon (and now wants it back) and ends up in space and as issue #7 begins, he realizes that now that his antagonist has fled he doesn’t even have the faintest idea where Earth is now or how to get back to it. (His solution in the end of flying towards the Sun, waiting until it’s about as big as it is from Earth, and then throwing himself into orbit around the Sun until he finds Earth? That maybe isn’t the world’s best example of “realism”.) This issue is actually sort of unpleasant in some ways because the protagonist is such a weak person (in multiple senses) but there’s something there in it that I still find interesting.
I liked the attempt at least to have a character who is a regular-guy mess try to figure out what to do next when he’s embroiled in struggles he doesn’t understand with a power he doesn’t really control. The pity is that Shooter was fired after this issue and when other writers grabbed the reins they decided that this aspect of the premise was the least interesting thing in the book, when in fact it was the only interesting thing. I’m baffled that Marvel has kept playing around with the Star Brand itself creatively, bringing it into their regular universe: ultimate power is such an ordinary comic-book thing that there’s nothing in the idea itself worth saving.