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Jim Starlin: Midwife and Layer-Out

When we speak of comics creator who works through the entirety of the process, from idea to completed page, we actually describe something incomplete. Jim Starlin could tell you this, since he has created characters, drawn them, written them, and buried them. If later work (sometimes his own) refutes his completion and termination of a concept, we may blame the medium, the market, editors, and we readers with our insatiable demands to repeal the Law of Death. Starlin does not fret, in his work, to play for keeps.

We have in this man a talent rather underrated in the industry where he achieved his central fame, partially due to a typecasting that inaccurately depicts him as a hired gun that comics companies contract to dispose of superheroes past their shelf lives. This reputation derives from three stories in which Starlin disposed of second-tier characters unable to float their own titles; but Starlin has written many more than these three tales, however Assembled Readership chooses to interpret their relevance in forming an overview of the man's comics career.

Starlin as Artist

At the height of his Marvel Comics work, Starlin's style incorporated conceptual elements from Steve Ditko's style (mostly his Dr. Strange work) and some composition and perspective techniques that strongly suggest Gil Kane's work. However, throughout a penciling career dating from the close of the Silver Age (using Kirby at Marvel as a yardstick), Starlin has retained a number of idioms, including the squat proportions of all figures, his distinctive framing of faces, a characteristic use of deepset eyes, and his own approach to body language.

For some, Starlin's style seems to overmuscle his characters. Whether one praises or criticizes Starlin for this only demonstrates the pet theory of comics art that the observer holds. Some comics readers like a wide range of anatomies, and can turn to artists like Frank Miller, who stretches anatomy across an improbable bell-curve. Some readers prefer art that does not load muscles on a superhero like food onto a buffet plate, and enjoy the slender and rubbery bodies typical of Steve Ditko's approach. Some readers prefer John Buscema's anatomy, or Gil Kane's, or Curt Swan's, or Don Newton's.

Starlin uses anatomy, motion, and body language that identify him, even if his style does not venture into extreme territory in the fashion of younger, sometimes disturbing, comics artists whose often-surrealistic approaches sometimes suggest mental disorder. Starlin's trademarks, however, tend to involve his writing and character design.

The Cosmic Heroes

Starlin's work on Marvel's Captain Marvel and various titles containing Warlock stories have done more than any other body of work to typecast the man. The accusation does little justice to the man; although he seems very at ease when working "cosmically," other work either steers clear of comic-book metaphysical realms ("Death in the Family") or uses them more as explanation than setting (The Weird).

Nor should we, in fairness, overlook the issue of tone. Starlin's Captain Marvel work did not fume with the despondency and nihilism that characterized his work with Adam Warlock. Again, with the Weird, Starlin dealt more with the burdens of heroic obligation than with big vast regions of Ditkoesque swirly-space.

That Starlin should return to concepts like the (unfortunately) revived Adam Warlock or to frequently overused cosmic properties like the Silver Surfer tends to reinforce an anecdotal misinterpretation of his career. Granted, the better known items on his resume do include work with the cosmic heroes; but this argument moves in a circle.

Starlin did years and years of Dreadstar, under more than one publishing banner, a piece that veered from space opera (a medium only tangent with cosmic superheroes) to tales of a cynical revolutionary to occasional superhero-style slugfests. Furthermore, when he can stand to work for major comics concerns, his work as either a writer and/or an artist may appear in properties like Batman or Green Lantern, or even the retro-derivative Supreme.

His tastes seem to favor various types of science fiction, with an approach that likes to mix space opera, picaresque melodrama, and small samples of cyberpunk material.

By all this digression I only intend to contradict the claim that Starlin has only done one thing over and over again, a claim one might support by selective sampling that did miss the variety of other pieces that would appear in a comprehensive Starlin bibliography.

Starlin the Undertaker

Starlin proved that he could tell a story way, way back in the 1970s with his work on a fairly immortal run of stories about the fairly immortal Adam Warlock. Warlock, in this sequence, managed to achieve and reject godhood; defeat himself, turned evil; turn his messianic pretentions completely on their head (he played the role of advocate and accuser in a complex game against his future self); bring down a galactic church; kill himself in the future to dispose of himself in the further future; and watch all of his principles and friends go down in flames, one at a time, in a convoluted running conflict with several key players. Starlin reached an intensity in these stories that would have left most writers unable to follow up with comparable work.

One death story, however, could not make Starlin's reputation as a comics hit-man out to dispose of unpopular or unmarketable characters. The Death of Captain Marvel followed "The Strange Death of Adam Warlock" by a few years and took an altogether different tack. The Kree soldier died of a common ailment that afflicts ordinary people: cancer. In fine unsuperheroic fashion, Mar-Vell passed on from the confines of a bedroom, not a battlefield, as a man would.

At this point, with two notches on his pen, Starlin had gained a reputation; and again, around 1989, he pulled the plug on a DC character, the second "Robin, the Boy Wonder." A combination of Robin's bad judgment and the results of a phone-in poll determined his demise, which represented a senseless murder by Batman's brutal adversary, the Joker; this event had personal, rather than cosmic, ramifications for the survivors, and didn't particularly echo earlier Starlin work.

Across twelve years, then, Jim Starlin killed off three superheroes, and the third involved a number of readers as accessories. I suspect other writers, such as Roy Thomas, managed to do in at least as many in some twelve-year span, but escaped the hype and stereotyping that frequently attach to Jim Starlin.

The Starlin Villains

A reader, if he make a judgment before reading enough of Starlin's work to form an accurate context, could develop an opinion about Starlin villains. If he anecdotally used Thanos, Mongul, and the Lord Papal, he might conclude that a Starlin villain must possess a fireplug body with an impossible musculature, a beetling brow, and a case of the uglies only matched by his megalomania. Newsgroups often ring with derisive comparisons of these three villains, and honesty forbids me to deny that a police lineup that included one of them might include all of them, perhaps with Jack Kirby's Darkseid also thrown in.

Where, however, does the Magus fit into this order? Or the villain from The Weird, a peculiar figure named "the Jason," who had a man's body coated, at various (sometimes strategically placed) points with green crystals? Furthermore, if we assume the truth of the unfair accusation this comparison points at Starlin's creativity, why do we not see more of a physical resemblance between other Starlin creations? His characteristic army-of-aliens art specializes in an approach with no two alike, as did the cast of creations like Dreadstar.

Readers may have right on their side when they grumble about some physical redundancy in these characters, but we need not carry this to the point of accusing Starlin of perpetually recycling the same villain. Someone might confuse Thanos and Darkseid in a lineup, and only become more perplexed trying to decide if the Lord Papal appeared on the other side of the glass. Then, should Mongul appear, the counsel for the defense would require little more to have the case thrown out.

To be fair, Starlin's evil overlords do seem fairly interchangeable. Some of this inheres in the evil overlord concept; for instance, George Lucas' Darth Vader bears much in common with Jack Kirby's Dr. Doom, though Doom, through years of development, has become a much more compelling character.

Starlin's recurrent themes of antiauthoritarianism, particularly as expressed through characters that wage war against giant organized churches (Dreadstar and Adam Warlock), may provide some insight into the lack of depth of these hyperthyroidic steroid overlords born of Starlin's pen. Starlin seems more confident acting out through his heroes rather than his villains as he forces them into corners where double binds make them pick the lesser of great evils (Dreadstar's destruction of the Milky Way Galaxy; Warlock's betrayal unto the death of all of his few friends).

Recurrent Themes

Starlin critics overrate the importance of the themes that recur in Starlin's work. Taken out of the greater context of the larger and more diverse body of his work in comics, some persistent elements might float an argument about redundancy and self-cannibalism; but these claims derive from the incompleteness of information rather than Starlin's work.

Sometimes elements of a Starlin story do, indeed, recall earlier work, and this gives an excellent toehold to critics who fail to recognize the depth and scope of his better work. For instance, Starlin has dealt with the aforementioned death stories; mortality provides his work with a frequently-evocable theme which, in other forms of literature, invests artists with depth.

In some cases, criticism remains difficult to deflect. One does not need a great acuity to recognize the family resemblance of Starlin villains Thanos, Lord Papal, and Mongul, although these characters, stripped of their visual treatment and described by their deeds and passions would become recognizeable as different entities with different goals. Starlin probably designed these characters with his own pencilling style in mind; the accompanying Marvel Super-Heroes art demonstrates Starlin's strength in detailing thickset giants with beetle brows.