What Is It About This Guy?

Back in the days of my youth, I fell in love with the Justice League of America right around the time that a bizarre villain named "Starbreaker" was making his debut. Perhaps wanting to grab some of the excitement that Marvel Comics had generated with their introduction of Galactus in Fantastic Four #s 48 - 50, DC brought us a "cosmic vampire" who feeds on the energies and fears of entire species as their world is destroyed around them (all he was missing was a surfboard-riding herald, wrapped head-to-toe in silver tin foil). He first showed up in Justice League of America # 96 (shown to the left) and would hang around through to # 98, making it one of the longest arcs for a JLA villain at the time (solo tales and two-part stories were the norm). One of the reasons that he lasted that long, however, was a strange bit of sleight-of-hand by the comic's creative team in the middle chapter (# 97).

There, after seeing their most powerful three members (Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash) beaten by Starbreaker as he threatened to destroy the Earth by pushing it into the sun, the JLA decided that the only appropriate response was to... relax in their headquarters and review how they'd formed as a team in the first place!?! As nonsensical as that was, it made sense from a publishing point of view because it allowed DC to insert a bunch of reprint material into the story (lifted from Justice League of America # 9, "The Origin of the Justice League") and not have to fill so many of the 52 big pages ("Don't take less! Only 25 cents") with new material. What was especially puzzling about this particular stylistic choice, however, was that several of the scenes from the origin story were actually re-drawn, by issue # 97's artists (Dick Dillin & Joe Giella), and used in place of the pages from # 9 (which had been done by that issue's artistic team of Mike Sekowsky and Bernard Sach about a decade earlier). I don't have any idea how that decision was arrived at, unless those pages were no longer available to be used, but it certainly made for a... unique... mishmash of styles, even within just the flashback portion of the story. And thanks to the extended origin re-telling, the Starbreaker story was advanced very little in the middle issue. Eventually it would wrap up in # 98, with the help of some positive thinkers and Sargon the Sorcerer (hey, it was the early 70s!).

So why am I thinking about any of this today? Well, not long ago, JLA # 29 arrived on the shelves, and who should the villain be but ol' Starbreaker himself! We hadn't really seen much of him over the intervening 35 years, and yet here he was, hogging the cover during "Faces of Evil" month at DC (during which the villains get the covers and more of a spotlight in each issue). As I started to read the comic this morning, I quickly realized that it was a re-telling of the story from Justice League of America # 96 - 98 (re-drawn by current artists but otherwise pretty faithful to the original version)! In other words, Starbreaker makes his second big appearance, three and a half decades later, and it once again involves an older tale being re-presented! What is it about this character that keeps causing that to happen?! Can't he ever just show up in a straight-forward yarn that's 100% new material? Is that prohibited by his contract?

I will say that I was somewhat disappointed to note, in JLA # 29, that they skipped over the whole "let's review our team's origin" aspect this time around. I was kind of looking forward to seeing them re-do a scene that was itself a flashback to an earlier story! But I guess they decided that that would be pushing it...