...First Star I See Tonight
I picked up Starlight #1 because the Midtown Comics employee (at the location on 45th and Lex) wouldn't stop flirting, and so I finally interrupted and asked, "What's this like?" He hadn't read it, but my question had created a narrow window that I jumped at; his mouth was moving back towards the direction of an unrequited invitation when I excused myself and went to the register. I went to the register absently still holding onto the book--and my other purchases (Saga, Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight, a back issue of G.I. Joe)--and got the hell out.
I didn't get a chance to read anything until a couple of days later. I focused on my other purchases, but then I got to Starlight. It was great! Even Duke McQueen's name is evocative of manly manliness, echoing John Wayne machismo and Steve McQueen high adventure. The contrast between his life on Tantalus and the years after his return to Earth are poignant and as heart-wrenching as the first eight minutes of Up. I immediately decided to pick up the second issue...
Issue 2 was as fun as the first. God, it is fun. The first issue introduces the readers to Duke McQueen, and this issue cements us in the conflict: Tantalus, McQueen's adopted home, is being exploited by a race led by the mysterious Kingfisher, and our hero is indirectly responsible because he killed the one deterrent that kept the race at bay decades earlier (kind of like that episode of Adventure Time when Finn and Jake save the village of house people from the douchebag grass ogre, but it turns out his presence was forestalling a more terrible danger...). Ahem! Anyway, it had a Gran Torino kind of feel, but without the main character being a racist. His 12 and 1/2 year old sidekick looks like Rocket Girl. Just sayin'. I don't want to disclose too much of the story, because you are more apt to fall in love with it if you discover it for yourself.
Goran Parlov's art looks like a marriage of Howard Chaykin's with Fiona Staple's, perfect for the two-fisted McQueen and alien backdrops native to Edgar Rice Burrough's science fiction or Alex Raymond's celebrated Flash Gordon. The story is a total departure for Mark Millar, when you compare it to efforts like Wanted, Kick-Ass, and Nemesis... So Far. However, what happens when you transplant an aging swashbuckler with nothing to lose and put him in a conflict against an entire race bent on conquest with a whole world at stake, a world where the hero knew love? If wholesale violence doesn't make an appearance, color me surprised.
I am grateful to the fanboy for inadvertently directing me towards this comic. I hope he finds happiness with some bespectacled hipster chick with a penchant for Iron Man ["Omigod! He's drawn just like Robert Downey, Jr.! I have to have this!"]. I'm not really a karaoke girl, anyway.
$2.99 from Image with covers by Sienkiewicz and Parlov.
