Daily Breakdowns 015 - The Starr Report

Another Wednesday at the comics shop. I have to admit I'm enjoying the routine again after so long away from it. The only issue right now with me is figuring out what I want to buy as a floppy and what I'm likely to want as a collection, and can I wait for it? Also, I'm less apt to buy trades and hardcovers in my shop because I can get them cheaper with an online retailer. That's also true for floppies but I'm willing to pay a little extra for the immediacy. Plus, after thinking about it, a lot of comics aren't things I really need in a trade or hardcover format. For storage, it's great to have the uniformity of the floppies in a longbox rather than another box of different sized trades and hardcovers, and it's not like I'm likely to display collections of the comics below on my bookshelves once they're all done.

Starr The Slayer #1 (of 4)
Written by Daniel Way
Art by Richard Corben
Colors by Jose Villarrubia
Published by MAX Comics/Marvel. $3.99 USD

In my 30+ years of reading comics, many of them Marvels, I've never read any Starr the Slayer. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith created him in a '70s Marvel anthology and I think they moved on fairly quickly. Warren Ellis used him in his newuniversal, which I also haven't read. So I'm pretty open to whatever Way and Corben had in mind.

Way keeps the idea that author Len Carson created Starr as a fictional character, but that Starr really does exist in another world, on a planet called Zardath. The manner in which Way sets things up is both amusing and disappointing--it's narrated in rhyme, which is fun, but it makes the Starr stuff that much more fictional--if we're not even pretending he's real, why care? I suppose, as with the first incarnation of Starr, we'll learn this is real at some point in this series. The other odd thing is the meta aspect of Carson pitching a Starr story just because he's down on his luck and needing dough, and then he suffers from writer's block trying to get the story started. It's difficult not to read into this and think Way was maybe approached to revive the character and he's less than inspired, or maybe Way pitched something he hadn't thought all the way through and was now struggling to come up with four issues' worth of story. Not really fair for me to speculate, but I'm being honest that these were things I was thinking while reading the comic, fair or not.

There's some fun to be had. I'm not a huge Corben fan but he's certainly a good choice to depict the violent, sexy denizens of an alien world. There's something so weird about Starr next to his sister and uncle and they're all naked and with the same '80s hair band 'do. It's also funny that Starr escapes execution largely on his looks. I find the storytelling amusing and disturbing (the faces and textures mostly) but also unsatisfying as far as providing a thrill during scenes of violence. Corben often uses tall, narrow panels, even during fight scenes, which makes them cramped and almost more comedic than exciting, and then he may go widescreen for some more action but in such a way that there's too much dead space. He seems most engaged when he's depicting strange faces, gritty surface textures, or any time he can inject some eroticism (which could be in the strange faces, the textures, the languorous poses, tits, or ass). Even the gory violence seems related to sex. I don't know if I've ever read a comic where I felt Corben and the writer were totally on the same page, but even though I'm not sure Way and Corben are heading in the same direction, I'm curious to see where each ends up.