Times Past: What James Robinson and Tony Harris’ Starman taught me

I met them again, the men and women of the Justice Society of America, in their crude, colorful hoods, tights, wings, in James Robinson’s Starman. I may not have learned to love them, but I learned to respect them. At the very least, I liked them much more than I did the first time we met, in inarticulate, lumbering, wants-to-be-vast “Hush.” 

I’ve been thinking about “Hush” again, for obvious rea2on2. It’s not literary, adventurous or, frankly, good, but it is successful as a taste-maker, as a kind of guidebook to the entire DC Universe (one which tells you, not altogether wrongly, that it all revolves around Batman). It has told many people what to like about DC Comics, and how to read them. Its job is to map out its world with lines so thick and unsubtle that they stain its reader’s hands, to make them think the way it thinks – the way Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee do. 

Alan Scott, Gotham’s old hero, happens to appear in “Hush” in a passing (chronologically and geographically confusing) cameo. But to even allude to the Justice Society is a risk in a book that doesn’t take any otherwise. A jumping-on comic starring Batman, the Joker, Catwoman, has no risk: these are icons, saleable and safe – but schoolchildren do not sing variants of “Jingle Bells” about Hourman. 

So Loeb and Lee have a rare opportunity: to introduce DC’s bizarre, enormous history to a new reader, to model what to think of it. Looking back, the one success “Hush” did have for me was this. It told me what to think of the Justice Society.

I didn’t much like it. I was told to look up to them. 

Today, I have nothing against Alan Scott. His publication history is muddled, yes, but he intrigues me. I am charmed by his strongman suit – I think his coming out (very) late in life is a fresh and interesting spin on a character older than the word “teenager.” But that was not what I thought when I first read this page and first went to learn about Alan Scott. 

What I thought after reading about him was this: “Metatextually, why should Batman look up to a character cancelled in favor of Rex the Wonder Dog?”

I don’t want, and don’t intend, this to be a hit piece – I really do have an idiosyncratic appreciation for these rough-hewn heroes, if a newfound one. But it is a newfound one – and so I do have to explain what it is that galled me about them for so long. It starts there, with that simple feeling. Then it went on. Then it was their history which nagged at me. In the old Earth-1 / Earth-2 model of things, with one world was home to the Golden Age, another to the Silver and Bronze, it made a kind of sense to say that the Golden Age heroes’ lives had gone on – somewhere else. Now there were two Flashes, two Green Lanterns. They were parallels, mutual emanations of the same idea – partners and allies once in a while, but with no one superior or inferior. 

Then after The Crisis On Infinite Earths, they all shared one world. Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman were all given fresh starts – their careers began, if not in 1986, then only a few years prior (which pretty much immediately started to come undone, but that’s by the by). So now, ahistorically, characters which weren’t “original” were reversed into becoming originals. For all the JSA were meant to be a great and loving appeal to history, their existence was ahistorical. These characters were all created as loving (or cynical) riffs on Superman – and yet Superman was said to be their heir, when they were his. They’d never shared space the way they did in All-Star Squadron – they’d been from different, rival publishers. Pedantic? Sure, but so is the very idea of the retcon – which can go so far as to not feel like honoring something, but manhandling it. 

I guess there started to seem something a little unwholesome about the whole thing, about the the Greatest Generation coming back again and again, receiving our adoration and thanks, even as the mere fact of their survival grew more and more unlikely. And I asked, what was it for? If Atom Smasher has longed to join the JSA his whole life, why? Gardner Fox’s JSA boldly, triumphally, almost gleefully fought for FDR’s Four Freedoms, as every right-thinking Golden Age superhero did. And to his credit, in the ‘40s Gardner Fox had them denounce racism – though this ethos was frankly rarely reflected in the stories themselves.

In light of these beginnings it’s strange to me how peculiarly un-ideological the latter-day adventures of America’s WWII strongmen have been. The gist of them seemed to be that once America emerged from the dark days of McCarthyism, Earth-2 didn’t have many causes left to fight. But why were these characters so profoundly without ideology when Captain America has been locked in a deadly metaphorical struggle against the Red Skull for eighty years? It can almost feel offensive for these characters to still be fit and well when their ideals have withered in the face of resurgent fascism. I hate to say it, but these warriors for democracy might have to get back to work. 

Then there is, of course, the nature of that democracy, and the nature of the war it fought. Frank discussion of this may be beyond characters like the Crimson Avenger: Mister Terrific calling the bombing of Dresden “not fair play” makes one wonder if superhero characters and comics are perhaps underqualified for this kind of historical discussion. 

And yet the constant refrain of these stories is that the fight was less complicated “in our day,” back during the war. To say that in 2025 seems at best overly simplistic – at worst, wilfully ignorant. The fight against fascism was complicated, and it was fought by complicated men and women the world over. Garth Ennis has said he finds the entry of superheroes into military history distasteful – one can see what he means, but, on the other hand, superheroes were, in their way, part of that fight. Servicemen read The Phantom, Captain Marvel and Superman religiously, as comics tirelessly promoted the fight on the home front, often being forced to relinquish pulp paper to the government. Comics artists and writers served – Jack Kirby landed at Omaha Beach. Materially and ideologically, comics did indeed go to war – but they did not keep their hands clean while doing so, because no one could. 

For while the superhero has always been an antifascist ideological creation, it has never, never, never been an uncomplicated one. How could Jewish creators reworking and reappropriating the idea of the übermensch not be? How could they not mirror the hatreds and bigotries of their time and place, as they, swimming downstream of so much racist culture, sought to make it themselves? How could they not, in a real sense, recreate it, reify it? The history of American comics is complicated and often ugly – just look at the cover of Detective Comics #1 – for it is American history, and America’s history is ugly. America’s war, too, was complicated. How could the JSA fighting “For America and Democracy!” be in uncomplicated when in 1941, America wasn’t a democracy? 

Starman made me realize what this really means. When characters say that things used to be simpler, they really speak not to their own pasts, but to the writer’s, or the reader’s – or, rather the child’s. That past is the child’s imagined version of the father’s or the grandfather’s past – and so the aging superhero begins to stand in for an aging parent or grandparent. Read as using the Golden Age of Comics as a metonymy for the Greatest Generation, these comics emerge as a yearning, guilty, desire to understand fathers and mothers, to feel what World War II was like as a formative experience. The fact of the matter is that this is what Starman is about. Jack Knight, son of the third-string JSAer Starman, was, like so many of us, raised by superheroes, and cannot quite fit them into his own image of his father – a father who cannot quite talk about his own war stories. 

Viewed like this, it’s no wonder that most modern JSA stories revolve around the personal and not the political. It’s why Gardner Fox revived in the 1960s at the behests of fans like (sigh) Roy Thomas, who wanted to experience the sense of the past that they, for all their eager archive-scouring and bargain-hunting, only experience in part. Roy Thomas was five years old when bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – for him, these comics were a way to access his parents, to index their uncategorizable, miserable, war in the form of learning everything there was to know about All-Star Comics #3 to #57. I can’t hate that desire – but I can, and I think I should, name it.

For other, later creators, one wonders if it was quite as richly psychological – more practical. This same distance is why Paul Levitz made them soap opera, through the generational bickering of Wildcat and Power Girl, as broadly painted respective representatives of pre- and post-feminist generations – the war-gnawed old timer and the hauteur of a post-rock n’roll, post-Kennedy, youth. That gap is what people came to the JSA.

All of this made a kind of sense on Earth-2, even when Roy Thomas made them more like royal houses with viney genealogies than an attempt to capture America’s changing image in miniature. But with Crisis – again, there’s Crisis – they became kind of retroactive set of heroic dynasties unevenly stuck onto the same earth as everybody else. 

As superheroes able to live in the perpetual present with the rest of their kind, the personal ideal of them started to fray. It is difficult to talk of legacy when one cannot get older and die – how can Jade and Obsidian ever live up to the legacy of their immortal father Alan Scott? How can we, the younger generation, move on, if our imagined elders always seem to be coming back?

For as long as I have been reading DC Comics, it has seemed to me that the JSA are always returning, given chance after chance to have their stories continued, to grow young again, when other, newer characters get no such chances. I hasten to add that often these are queerer, more female, less white characters. It makes one wonder what the point of a universe based on legacy is when a square-jawed white original in a crewcut is simply waiting for his cue to come back on. 

Even when one of their replacements sticks, as Geoff Johns’ Courtney Whitmore (a character based on his sister who died tragically young – this is a gesture I do not feel qualified to discuss) did, she is still waiting her chance. At the end of Starman, Jack Knight makes her his successor – as James Robinson seemed to appoint Geoff Johns his – by giving her his wonderful cosmic rod, and with it, one hopes, the promise of growing, of changing within a wonderful cosmic ersatz family. 

Instead, she took over twenty years to graduate high school. Her role in that family never changed: as my editor Dan Grote so elegantly put it, Stargirl’s is seemingly a midriff frozen in amber. For all that the JSA is a family, it can feel like a younger member of that family is frankly forced in – and so after a while, might they not well want out? 

The thing about Starman, though, is it was not frozen in amber – and it is about someone who wants out. When the JSA returned in 1999, it was to have been in Starman’s model – the model of change. 

The James Robinson/Tony Harris/Peter Snejbjerg run on Starman opens like this. 

There are two brothers, Jack and David, sons of aging, brave, underloved Ted Knight, the original Starman. David is a too-perfect replica of his father, overeager to take up his family obligation because he has no other prospects. Then there is Jack, the second, geeky, soul-patched son, who does not even look much like his father, all lists of Parker novels by publication year and Gen X ennui. Jack collects issues of Sugar and Spike and will debate the virtues and vices of the EC New Trend with himself as he fights crime (By issue 3, I realized that I am basically just Gen Z Jack Knight. It was sobering).

When David dies, killed by hereditary archenemy The Mist, Ted shames Jack into action: in shock, Jack Knight must become a kind of Starman. He finds his father’s old Flash Gordon suit absurd – and so he wears a well-loved leather jacket and a cereal box sheriff’s star instead. After a noble (chivalrous, even) stint as an adventurer, in which he unravels the mysteries of his city and of the six other Starmen, Jack retires in #80, leaving his beloved Opal City behind for what he can see on the road ahead with his new family. 

But to dwell on its plot is frankly to do the series a disservice. Robinson is in no sense a poor storyteller (though his subsequent career has been uneven). Even if an arc about Jack’s voyage to space rather drags itself out, what this series has in spades is mood, is atmosphere. For all that it is imperfect, Starman is elevated by its intangibles, by the feeling of reading it, the feeling that this is a fundamentally insecure story about an imperfect man doing his best, about a man who knows that he is a bit too cool to really be cool.

“I am not Starman,” grunts Jack Knight, the Starman. But he is renouncing something in a true way, not the standardly ritualistic Spider-suit-in-trash style renunciation of so many comics. This is a renunciation of ideas of what the superhero is. 

I don’t mean in the sense of costume and secret identity, because while Jack technically has neither, so do plenty of other superheroes. Rather, he renounces the idea of his centrality – he rejects the idea that he is the only hero Opal City (a city created for this run, for Jack) could ever have: he rejects, most of all, the central idea of an infinite run’s infinite, lonesome heroic journey. Instead, he will be, first and foremost, his own man. That means being, for a time, a superhero, but most of all, it means trying to be a good man. 

It may also mean not being a great man. To Farris Knight, haughty Starman of the 853rd century, Jack is a footnote at best. Ted keeps this to himself – but one wonders if Jack would be surprised, or even much care. But, then, Jack has won himself, and that is a victory poor traitorous Farris, secret thrall to Solaris the Tyrant Sun and key to its millennia-spanning plot to kill Superman, never will. Farris nearly kills his forefather Ted because he cannot be his own man, because of what Jack has and he does not. He hates Ted for what he began – a kindred, a line, imprisoned on a path of secret origins and supervillains for the next eighty thousand years. Farris – who loves the fame and glory, but loathes his predestination – snarls that he could have been great without Ted Knight. He could have been great if he had been able to choose what to be.

Ted reminds him of something very simple. He may have chosen to do something monstrous, but, for the first time in his life, he has made a choice. He is his own man.

Farris Knight cannot kill Ted Knight after that; or, rather, he chooses not to. 

Later, he chooses ultimately, to repent, to sacrifice his life and save 1997’s Justice League and the 853rd century’s Justice Legion alike. He chose. That is what Starman is – the act of perhaps resenting and choosing anyways. A key moment comes to mind: when Jack, enraged, in shock, kills for the first time. It is for his brother’s sake. No, he admits, Jack never really liked his brother. They were too different to really like one another. 

David Knight was still his brother, though. 

If Jack Knight is a flash in the pan hero, so what? He was himself when he was asked to be, and he did what he had to do. It’s a bold and brave thing to step down and say goodbye. Most actors hate playing supporting roles – their egos are too big. For all his faults, for all that Jack is a shallow snob, an edgy shit, an annoying jerk, he does not mind that his heroic destiny was to help someone else, whether it is another Starman or ogre Solomon Grundy.

The question is raised, towards the end of the run, whether time-lost Jack and Mikaal first made Jor-El aware of the Earth? But the question is never if the stars led Superman – it is if the Starmen owe Superman their meaning. By being a supporting player here most of all is Jack Starman – for here he restores his true history. Here, craftily inverted, we see the lesser, dimmer, superheroes, owing their light to Superman. It makes things right, in a sense, that Superman is the core, the center of the history of the Starmen.

After all, isn’t he a star man too?

And indeed there are other star men, other heroes. Opal City, therefore, receives more than just Jack as its hero, because Jack knows his role is in fact to be the center of a phalanx. When he rejects his centrality, his endlessness, it is precisely for this: for the honor of playing an individualistic role in a new heroic community. In that community is, of course, Ted Knight, trading in the red and green for a new role as Jack’s man in the chair (though he proves himself as a fighter more than once). There is fascinating Mikaal recovering a warrior heart after his first and only appearance in a perfunctorily disco issue of First Issue Special – a true testament to how any character can thrive if given the proper love and time. True, Robinson’s treatment of Mikaal’s queerness evinces the comic’s age (Mikaal is apparently bisexual because he is an alien), he and his lover Tony are treated with affectionate respect, as the other couples are (It is regrettable that James Robinson would end up taking this equality to its logical conclusion: like many a love interest, Tony was cheaply killed off for a quick gutpunch).

Opal has other champions, too, in jazz cat hood Bobo Benetti, and the mysterious Shade, always solicitous of what he sees his city and his people, which includes the fittingly-named O’Dare family of policemen. Is a lineage of brave, honest cops copaganda? Sure – but it was 1994, and it’s a comic about the family problems of a man with a flying stick. We have to suspend our disbelief, even if the cops seem more implausible than the superheroes.

And, of course, there is the JSA. In its modern manifestation, it is in fact the final, reified legacy of Jack Knight. Starman essentially served as the post-Zero Hour relaunch for this roster of characters – a proof of concept that they could be cool, that they could be a franchise among franchises. And it worked – as Geoff Johns can attest. 

Yet for all that, the JSA of Starman is not the JSA we see in the title that would succeed it. Something changed in-between – the new JSA was colder, more artificial than its prior manifestation glimpsed in the pages of Starman. The idealized reader of this title is someone so convinced of the virtues of the Golden Age that they will buy a book called JSA. Geoff Johns attributes his love of the Golden Age to, fittingly enough, James Robinson’s Golden Age miniseries – but he and David Goyer seem to have read it and looked up to the old mystery men. 

In that book and in Starman, though, we are made to look at them. They may have been our fathers, but they were also mortal, also human. Though they fought like gods, they were men.

It takes almost a year’s worth of stories for us to really learn how to do this – and when we are first show how to, it begins subtly, in Starman #9. When Ted sees Jack wearing a shirt with a stylized Raggedy Ann on it, he winces. We know already, from the Shade’s enigmas, that Opal is a city of secrets – but here one is revealed before it can even prove sinister. On Jack’s shirt is Ragdoll, “Opal City’s Charlie Manson” – now almost “hip.”  But once he was a dangerous lunatic menacing the city – “a petty thug turned killing messiah.” The memory of it all is so bloody that it even makes Ted Knight swear. 

Starman could not handle him alone. So the survivors of the JSA – Green Lantern, Flash, Hourman, Dr. Mid-Nite – came to join him. At first it seems like this will be Ted narrating one of the great old superheroic legends: Rex Tyler, the Hourman, even has a Homeric aristeia, a supreme hour of battlefield triumph. 

But this was no triumph. It was not really as simple as it was in the old days. 

Robinson, too, adores narration – so much so that in fact that we are told this story twice. Next we see it as objective fact in Shade’s diaries in Starman #11. Now the death of Ragdoll passes from one man’s self-incriminating recollection to being history.

Here, the world looks different – guest artist Matthew Dow Smith makes sure of it. 

The first thing you notice about Smith’s art is that it is not pretty – his angled faces are somewhere between Giffen and Miller. His superheroes show their age. They have weight. Their costumes do not fit so snugly anymore. 

Four friends have come to Opal City. They miss the past – again, “weren’t things simpler back in the day?” But they must know they are lying – and anyways it is no longer back in the day, during the war. These are grown men, fathers and husbands. They have grown up – as have their old dance partners. The Ragdoll is not one of the new breed of maniacs, after all. Nostalgia cannot bring the past back, bring back the old Ragdoll. Now it is today and today there is only blood, and to meet it, weight, and muscle, and sweat.

Weightest of them all is Rex Tyler, the Hourman, whose pharmaceutical powers are indeed the most troubling, the fleshiest, of these “Five Friends.” Ted and Jay and Alan are things of magic, of electricity and starstuff and wonderful smoke. Doctor Mid-Nite hunts, stalks; a prototype Daredevil, more than human, criminals do not even know exactly what he is. 

But then there is Hourman. Hourman pops a pill and feels wonderful even as we can see him grunt and sweat on the page. 

It was this second panel, I think, that taught me how to rethink the JSA. It made me see that their blood could run red, that we could look them in the eye and treat them as nothing so much as what they are – strange, flickering heroes, too rough and unsculpted for Jet Age revival. Their charm comes because they are imperfect first drafts. And here, for all that the JSA triumphed, it was not a noble victory. 

There is no suspense to this story, remember. Everything happens precisely the way Ted told Jack. The heroes fight bravely, but they have grown old: they can no longer change the rules with a spit curl and a left hook. Besides, we know this is a flashback – the golden days that the old men long for are even further gone now. But there they are, the Justice Society of America, reassembled once again, in a moment of true splendor – prepared, we know, to do something that would have appalled them during the good old days of America and democracy. 

And even here, muses the Shade in his journals, even here, they “came close” to being gods, to what Ragdoll fancied himself, even before they finally fall from heaven. It is not over when they capture Ragdoll, like how it would have been “over” in 1938.

Ragdoll has planned for his imprisonment – for the rules and the grammar of his world. Putting him away – playing by the rules of the game – will only make things worse. He has grown up – and the JSA, now men with lines on their faces, must stop playing pretend.

So Ted Knight kills the Ragdoll, to protect his sons, his city. He was a very bad, a very evil man, and, in time, he will come back to life, back to Opal (thanks to a pact with Neron) – but Ted killed him. That will never not be true. You can see it in his face, in his guilt. A victory – but a deeply flawed one. Things are imperfect now. 

As I have said, imperfection is the operative word of Starman. It is not a perfect comic, and that imperfection is only made more frustrating by the mediocrity of its successor titles – not just JSA, but the rest of James Robinson’s work in comics. Its women – loving wife Faith O’Dare, tough cop Hope O’Dare, psychic Charity, love interest Sadie, villainy’s heiress Nash – all are thinly sketched; Nash most of all. She and Jack are their fathers’ unchosen children, who both choose to become like them. Nash chooses her father’s way: she chooses, rather psychologically improbably, to sexually assault Jack and thus have a child by him, a child whose symbology will torment Jack. 

But she is not ultimately strong enough to pervert the Knight line for long. When she dies, unknowingly sacrificing herself for her father’s ambitions, she is not much mourned – she was a failure of a daughter, a mother, and a villain. The hope that her son, Teddy, symbolizes – that is embraced. But not Nash – not Jack Knight’s unequal opposite. If there is one aspect of this book that does not work, and by its not working makes the work as a whole not work, perhaps it is her (Nash’s story is probably reason – good reason – to opt out of Jack’s story).

But Starman always wears these imperfections so openly. At least we can always know that there’s rust on Opal’s gleaming spires – not too much to make their beauty fake, but just enough so that the shine means something. We see it in Ted, too: he grows in Jack’s estimation – and ours – by being imperfect. By knowing his father was lesser than he thought, Jack appreciates his father more. We come to feel for this man by knowing his regrets, his mistakes. Robinson turns an obscure pair of Brave and the Bold issues into an affair between Ted and the first Black Canary – and so turns Ted into a vastly more interesting character through it. He was not a perfect man, only ever a demigod, and so capable of making amends. 

Most of all, he is capable, like his son, of knowing when it is time to depart the stage, when to tie up old wounds and end old feuds. When it is time to end the war between the Knights and the Kyles, the first and greatest Starman does what he has to do. 

He says goodbye – without a second thought. He does what is asked, and needed of him. He asked as much of his sons – he does the same himself. 

“Me too” – no doubt that was what the Mist intended to say. He never gets the chance – vaporized into bright white.

I read comics pretty cynically – Jack is a pretty cynical guy. But what we learn, paradoxically through grime and blood, is that there’s a time to stop, to believe, just for a moment, in these characters’ mortality. We can learn that, sometimes, even paper and ink and Ben Day dots can die and say goodbye, and it can be made to mean something. It doesn’t happen often – and a character being far too old to plausibly be a warrior helps. 

But we learn that gold tarnishes when adulterated with other metals, and that the heroes of the past are mortal. We are doomed, yes, to be in our fathers’ shadows – but we can learn not to let those shadows consume us. Those who shed them are human too – and they say goodbye, perhaps before we are ready for them to. But it is by knowing this that we know them. By knowing loss, and age, and even death, we live. It comes from vibrancy, from change.

That, finally, is what this book taught me. That comics sometimes really do change, like life does. We just have to let them – maybe even make them change. We can’t just let things stall out. One of my favorite moments in the whole run is a typically Robinsonian exchange between father and son, where they discuss… the things they like. This is a book obsessed with aesthetics – in a comic, after all, an aesthetic is a worldview. Jack Knight views the world through the lens of the art he loves and consumes – so do we. 

Jack asks his father how he views the world – what artist does he like best? What is his worldview?

This, most of all, is what Starman teaches us. If superheroes are to ever be something more than historical curios (the kind Jack loves) they can’t just be like Wyeth or Hopper. Melancholy, nostalgic Americana is frozen – but the best of the Golden Age comics were, like Pollack, pure spontaneity. They were never frozen, ever – they were too much lightning in a bottle, drawn with too much passion. They were the collective realization that four color printing can be a tool for a remarkable form of self-expression, both extremely intimate and extremely extroverted. They taught us to be bold – to do something impossible, like pick up a car or punch Hitler in the jaw.

So to pedestalize the mystery men is not to honor them. Maybe we need to make them fail and kill and bleed. If they are always stiff and stern, then how can they be something anyone can really care about for too long? It is necessary to say that our fathers failed, that they were not necessarily the men we think they are. We can always reminisce about childhood, but remembering should never be replication. Nostalgia can too easily become the act of replicating an idea too many times, with more flaws each time – that is cancer. 

The superheroes after Superman, it’s true, were copies – not always good copies. But sometimes they were – and sometimes, they were very good. Even the ones you didn’t expect could get to be in the Justice Society of America. 

Maybe even some of them could take to the stars.