Hitting the Wall IX: Dreadstar

Sometimes a coherent narrative unit pens a character in, leaving one series of stories defining the span during which he worked - meaning he had both a meaningful context and a clear purpose. Outside of this context, in stories after his central tale ends, the character becomes increasingly troubled. Imagine, for example, if Shakespeare had decided to continue with the character Hamlet (rescuing him from his death at the end of the first play so that he could go on to star in twelve or twenty others). Having established in the first play that Hamlet avenged himself on his uncle and mother, yet never did become monarch of Denmark, what could Shakespeare have done with him?

Everything, we could answer, because limitless story possibilities remain; yet, with equal truth, we could say nothing, because the central tale that defined his character and the principal crisis of his life had passed.

Jim Starlin created a character in the early eighties called Vanth Dreadstar, a figure similarly committed to avenging the wrongs of another. And, when he outlived his original story cycle, the Epic Comics story anthologized as the graphic novel Metamorphosis Odyssey, he continued some sixty or so issues of his own series, increasingly losing direction and becoming less and less recognizable as the man Starlin created.

The Euthanist

The Dreadstar of Metamorphosis Odyssey and the earliest issues of Dreadstar - in its Epic Comics incarnation, before Starlin took the property to First Comics - had the most consistent and cohesive definition. This Vanth Dreadstar enjoyed an intimate relationship with death, first as a young man watching his parents killed by the snow-bears of his homeworld; again, after discovering the power sword that made him more than human, and using this implement very nearly to extinguish the snow bear species; then, driven offworld by angry locals who didn't care for his decimating their food supply, by the residents of another world at risk of destruction by the diabolical Zygoteans; and then, again, as the accomplice of the nihilistic Akhenaten, a fabulously old being who had watched his own species face extinction at the hands of the Zygoteans and resolved not to surrender the universe to this sentient cancer, however high a cost he might have to pay to stop them.

Something like halfway into Metamorphosis Odyssey, gauging by the reprint, Dreadstar actually appeared. In some ways the character seems like an afterthought who took over a much more abstract and epic story, particularly from the Clarke-like modified sentients Akhenaten used to create his new race. While a troika of nonhumans provided the substance of what would replace mankind (and its peers of the same galaxy), Dreadstar and Akhenaten sought a device of great power manufactured to handle the Zygoteans once and for all: the Infinity Horn (I choose to forgive Starlin for such dubious nomenclature when the story gets away with it).

Having an intimate relationship with death - not the personified "Death" of Starlin's Thanos stories, but the meat-and-potatoes of it in the real world - Dreadstar seemed equally fatalistic and helped Akhenaten bring about his principal aim, which resulted in the annihilation of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Afterwards, however, Dreadstar had some regrets, and, as Akhenaten and Vanth emerged from a suspended animation over ten thousand centuries long, he killed the elder alien. Whether we choose to view this as arrogant hypocrisy or not, we must admit that it fits well with Starlin themes of doom and blood-guilt. Dreadstar, after all, did not begin with the kind of moral innocence one would expect of (say) Adam Warlock or a variety of DC Comics characters. The taint of corruption, one might presume, remained central to his concept.

The Revolutionary

At the end of Metamorphosis Odyssey, Starlin set Dreadstar up to play the role of savior-and-slayer, to wear the particular hat based on the necessity of the situation. However, once he began to feature in his own series, one could note some drift in the character.

That Dreadstar should so soon begin playing out key plot elements from Starlin's Warlock saga of the seventies should stand as an indicator that trouble lay ahead for the character - not the sort of trouble good writers create for heroes to give them something to overcome, but the sort of trouble that accompanies conceptual drift. Dreadstar, at this point, moved to save a new galaxy from the menace of the Instrumentality and its Lord Papal, the former echoing the Universal Church of Truth and the latter combining salient traits of both Thanos and the Magus.

Dreadstar underwent a costume change, itself not suggestive of trouble except in that it left him wearing the same sort of skin-tight multicolored stuff one expected of superheroes. Other changes, however, took much of the specialness of Dreadstar's concept away. Originally Dreadstar connected to his powers by means of an ancient sword he could evoke and dismiss, but at a point in his struggle against the Lord Papal, a blow destroyed this implement and the power it represented became a part of Dreadstar's person. This modified his abilities, giving him the power of flight and an attack he called the "power punch." Both changes made him more conventional, hero-wise, and, in the process, did much to undermine the tone that connected the character to a concept that began as stylistically very different from the normal stable of Marvel (rather than Epic) creations.

The Dreadstar premise pivoted on the events surrounding the final confrontation between Dreadstar and the Lord Papal. Starlin recognized that resolving the conflict by granting a victory would mean the collapse of the old dynamic, and he took the opportunity to redefine the setting and the relationships between characters.

The Cop

Starlin, showing some historical sophistication, realized that counterrevolutions frequently follow revolutions and that many a revolutionary discovers that, having won the war, he has lost the peace.

Instead of the Jubilee, the freed residents of the Empirical Galaxy found slightly less horror in their lives. Genocide and religious cleansing gave way to famine, unemployment, and a slave labor system; and the paranormals - Dreadstar and others with powers denied to normal men - became the object of fear and dread.

Dreadstar and his previous companions fell into the niche available to them, the capture and punishment of war criminals from the war of liberation against the Instrumentality.

This post-revolutionary period painted a very grim picture of what remained after the overthrow of a cancerous theocracy. Ultra-Violet took her own life after a failure to adjust to her new circumstances; Syzygy Darklock finally allowed death to claim him after destroying the twelve gods of the Instrumentality; Willow and Oedi became distant from revolutionary-period friendships; and Dreadstar, after a two-year coma recovering from injuries incurred defeating the Lord Papal, awoke to find himself weaker, older, and in a new and unpleasant milieu.

The strain already began to show, because in nine issues the aforementioned changes occurred, and no less than twice war criminals Dreadstar sought set up situations to force Dreadstar to kill them, then thanked him for doing it, just as Akhenaten had in Metamorphosis Odyssey. Dreadstar realized, early on, that he had become a goon for a corrupt regime with no particular moral credibility, in spite having overcome the murderous Instrumentality; but that problem resolved itself when Willow merged with the main computer that administered the decadent bean-counting (and misery-generating) policies of the Empirical Galaxy. Willow, as everyone's new boss, gave Dreadstar and company their walking papers when she decided their department had outlived its purpose.

We can note, at this point, that Starlin himself passed the art chores on his own creation to Luke McDonnell at this point, after a single transitional issue where Dreadstar begins the process of adaption. And, furthermore, this despondent phase of the concept lasted around ten issues = from 32 to 40, ending in January 1989.

Starlin, at this point, chose to move on, saying in his own letter to the readers that he had allowed the concept to continue but only under the condition that he could pick the new writer; and Peter David became the official writer for the remainder of the series. Starlin, in the meantime, had a few projects with DC that year, including the "A Death in the Family" stories that did away with Batman's sidekick Jason Todd, and the Starlin-Wrightson miniseries The Weird.

The Adventurer

Although the cop / special agent period of Dreadstar could have matured into something very interesting - an admixture of a Tom Clancy thriller, plus space opera, plus, perhaps, a bit of the life of Simon Wiesenthal - authorial exhaustion and better opportunities dragged Starlin away from his creation and he passed it on the Peter David.

In some ways, Dreadstar taking up a life of rogue adventurer - in some ways, a pirate - took him back a year or two to his days as a revolutionary; the mythical Robin Hood archetype can unite the two concepts. And, as a pirate, Dreadstar could stay just far enough on the wrong side of the law to stay in enough trouble to produce interesting stories.

Perhaps to help Dreadstar move on, and perhaps because he only intended a short tenure as the artist of this book, Luke McDonnell moved on as well at the end of Starlin's run as author, leaving the Peter David - Angel Medina pair more or less anchored to the title until its demise.

The Jester

Sometimes humor in a comic book flags a problem with the characters and / or concepts within. For example, Justice League of America had gone through some hard times, aesthetically speaking, when Giffen and DeMatteis took that book and recast it in a more humorous vein. So, also, when we reach the late issues of the Dreadstar series, we can see this approach to humor as something so distant from Metamorphosis Odyssey (or even Dreadstar #40) that it could serve as a confession of conceptual drift and loss of focus.

I've considered the possibility before that Peter David exists as some kind of polar opposite to Jim Starlin; particularly his feel for deflating superheroes instead of inflating them with pretension and self-importance. Yet his name keeps connecting with Starlin's - on Dreadstar and the recent Captain Marvel series - in a way that suggests David's quirky approach represents a complementary, rather than antithetical, feel for heroic material.

David can, sometimes, go overboard with the slapstick. His ability to contrive truly ridiculous situations, however, leaves him in a rather rarified company - perhaps including names like Steve Gerber, Tom Peyer, and, in better moments, Keith Giffen. That David's humor so intensely affronts the crowd that thrives on the despondent grim-and-gritty approach suggests, sometimes, that David flourishes on causing just such grief. Pomposity, after all, does a great deal toward the ruination of comics as a medium. Comics can deal with humorous material, ridiculous material, or somber material, but no particular authority exists to confine it to any one tone; therefore, the ludicrous approach of this sometimes-controversial writer can serve as a much-needed whoopie cushion in a room full of scowling fanboys.

If David could do nothing but humorous digs on the heroic, we could dismiss him as a one-trick pony. However, he has serious pieces on his resume that suggest no such limitation applies to him. Bizarre and clever premises infest his work, whether he takes the humorous tack or not. So, in general, I advocate a general amnesty for the imagined crimes of Peter David; he has yet to do anything in a comic book that has more negative effect than disinclining me to purchase it.

David, much to his credit, made his Dreadstar tenure very entertaining, even if the central character had become less and less relevant. The form of the subsequent issues - through the end of the series in the mid-60s of the title - acknowledges, through the back door, that Vanth Dreadstar had become a peripheral fixture. Skeevo, Oedi, Iron Angel, Willow, and Teuton carried much more of the storytelling load; Dreadstar's peculiar abilities only sometimes served to save the day; and "Dreadstar and Company" relied more and more on the company. In spite of Dreadstar's diminishing role, the David run does more to entertain, both in the serious episodes and in the sequences of humor; but for the purposes of this book, David could have created a new hero altogether and had these stories work.

Dreadstar came to adorn his title rather than anchor it.
/P>

Another Cheesecake Book?

Malibu Comics, in its eyeblink existence, also dabbled in a Dreadstar series. I have yet to locate any issues of this book, so I can't really track what happened from this point, but noting that Peter David still handled the character, I must assume either his humorous interpretation of the character (as evidenced by the ludicrous episode with the Roddenberry character parodies) or possibly his grimmer vision of the character applied here. The presence of a blonde on the cover trying to explode out of her costume does not bode particularly well for this incarnation of the concept, although one might express some gratitude for what few female characters from this era actually appeared in costumes more substantial than several feet of ribbon connecting key zones of skin.

Then again, one can see some promise in the format of this book as a six-issue miniseries. Such structures often make for better material in that having only six issues to work in can incline writers to think in terms of beginning, middle, and end of a story (the absence of the latter element often causing the distress that can ruin a character in the first place). The signs suggest, again, that some trouble attaches to the exhausted character himself - skeleton descriptions of this miniseries imply that Vanth Dreadstar appeared in person in perhaps two of the six issues of the series.

Dreadstar in the Future?

Recent reprints have, circa October 2000, brought back to light the original painted Dreadstar stories. Though the black-and-white format does much to disserve the original work, their very appearance implies some interest in the character as Starlin formulated him.

Why, at this time, should we see Dreadstar-related back-catalog items showing up on bookshelves? The lack of any recent attempts to resuscitate the franchise suggest that another one may await in the near future. However, if Starlin intends something surprising - like another Dreadstar miniseries - one would imagine that, somewhere in the back of his mind, he has direction and ideas for the character, rather than the simple dissipation of the concept that led him to leave the character to Peter David in the first place.