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Ragging on Roddenberry in Dreadstar

When comics recycle concepts, they frequently keep it in the family, either making five-finger discounts on other comics material or including parodies and tributes to material produced by the Loyal Opposition. However, nothing forces comics to limit borrowings to other comics for source material. Politicians and talk radio hosts alike sometimes make unscheduled appearances in comics, generally with humorous, if sometimes malicious, intent.

Comics may reach to nearby territory - the other domains of popular culture - for source material when going on recycling raids. We see one such example of this in the last days of First Comics' Dreadstar, a title that began as a tony Jim Starlin piece about freedom, destiny, and death and ended with a lampoon of two generations of "Star Trek."

A Concept that Outlived Its Purpose

One could argue that Dreadstar, early on, lost its purpose, as one might understand it from its origins in Marvel / Epic's publication of Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey.

What do you do, after all, after you destroy your home galaxy to thwart the schemes of a tyrant? So Dreadstar, as an ongoing series, had to find a point. The Lord Papal came back, and Dreadstar had to defeat him again. In the process - and for no obvious reason - Dreadstar spent a short period wearing costumes of a more conventional skin-tight character and even took to flying. Syzygy Darklock died. Dreadstar moved on, and eventually so did his creator, Jim Starlin.

Much of Dreadstar's remaining tenure, therefore, reflected this loss of purpose. Dreadstar watched more friends die, then considered suicide himself. Then he involved himself in politics. Then he returned to piracy.

Devoid of a purpose (of the sort perhaps best featured by the very metaphysics that villains like Lord Papal attempted to use as a tool for the hoarding of power), Dreadstar, both the character and title, came to wandering, and ultimately, at the tail end of the book, this wandering might lead them into the absurd.

In this context do we find the final confrontation between Dreadstar and company and the barely-concealed avatars of Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" in Dreadstar #64.

The Premise

While Dreadstar and company visit a planet named "Urth" (I assume no connection between this planet and Continuity Comics' "Urth 4"), invading extraterrestrials land and render great tracts of real estate into flaming debris. Once the landing aliens - a remarkably familiar-looking cast in their beige, blue, and red velour jerseys - pacify Dreadstar himself with a deft foot to the more vulnerable portions of his reproductive apparatus, they explain their mission: to invite the residents of "Urth" to join the "United Franchise of Worlds."

They only burned the city down to get everyone's attention.

This landing party - composed of Tiberius, medical officer Marrow, engineer Claymore, first officer Benjamin, helmsman Hikaru, and others with names based either on atrocious puns or obscure Star Trek triviata - explain to the Urthlings what options remain open to them.

Rather than turning on their prospective conquerors, the Urthlings instead blame Dreadstar, et al, for the appearance of the mouthpieces of the Franchise, and therefore opt to pelt them with a variety of handy garden produce, preliminary to the likely lynching of the scapegoats inheriting the blame for their upcoming misery. However, Dreadstar, in whatever incarnation, never particularly favored diplomatic approaches to troglodytic problems, and therefore launches an assault upon the invaders.

Many broken windows, bad one-liners, and inside jokes about the history of Star Trek follow, including an exchange between the Chekov analogue "Anton" and Oedi the catman and his female companion Cookie about the catlike animated ensign from the Star Trek cartoon of the early seventies.

The power of right and the story design in general cause the tide of the fight to turn against Tiberius and his underlings, though Tiberius admits no defeat, claiming that he has millions of followers to Dreadstar's handful (a bit of black humor about the persistence of Trekkies). Tiberius stages a last-minute escape, but a teleporter malfunction fuses his entire cast into a giant, hideous space-bird, which, after evoking the requisite awe from all onlookers, falls before the laser cannons of an even larger spaceship that arrives on the scene.

At this point, the razzing moves from "Star Trek" to "Star Trek: The Next Generation," with representative caricatures of the cast of the next show appearing to apologize for the arrestedness of their predecessors.

Dreadstar himself ends the story by observing that the new arrivals seem unthreatening; "They may be dull," he remarks, "but they look great."

Taking the Wind out of the Bombast

Much of the humor in this piece derives from the cruelty with which Peter David assailed the pretentions of two versions of "Star Trek." The pretentions to progress that characterize two generations of the show receive rough handling here, with David recasting the Prime Directive as the Prime Rule ("Do what you want, when you want, where you want") to justify the incompetent imperialism of the Franchise.

In Shatneresque overblown eloquence, Tiberius offers the Urthlings the opportunity to "Join us! Pay us your wealth, and in return, be treated like garbage!"

Nor does the pomposity of the first cast receive the only drubbing. A Jean-Luc Picard analogue (named "Jean-Paul DeGaulle") apologizes, casually mentioning that his version of the Franchise has eliminated all the essential vices inherent to the human character. "We are, in short, perfect," he remarks. Roddenberry would have winced at this barb had he read it.

A David Formula?

In some ways, this Dreadstar from around 1990 much suggested a later inheritance of a Starlin franchise in which David would work to air out the self-importance of characters and concepts. Though the barbs here point outward - not at Dreadstar this time, but at Gene Roddenberry's science fiction television series - we can see common themes. The absurd carries the weight of the story, as it does in David's Captain Marvel, and characters solve problems with a convenient foot to the family jewels (a recurring event in Captain Marvel and perhaps a David trademark feature).

In general, though, we see here the kind of tribute-through-parody that typifies pieces like Cary Bates' "Cap'n Strong" stories in Superman comics. The blackness of the humor connects to the guilty pleasure of even knowing what the joke means and not to the resentment of the success of a rival franchise, since Dreadstar and Star Trek merchandise did not compete for the same market share.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

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