Blame Greg Morrow for this one, and I’ll just quote him in the email he sent me:
You should write a “Why I should write LSH” about Starro. Pro or con. The Star Conqueror lies at the heart of DC Comics’ appeal, viz., it’s an adorably goofy idea that you can’t explain to a non-comics-reading adult without apologizing, but at the same time is amazingly effective and terrifying when played straight. (I’ve argued the same about Modok.)
What attracts me to the idea is that Starro is an alien invader. He’s intrinsically more SFnal than the usual run of supervillain, and the LSH should be more SFnal than the usual run of superhero comic. He’s also not a bumpy-forehead alien like the Khunds or the Skrulls, and, as Grant Morrison exploited, that makes him potentially a lot more alien, harder to understand and come to grips with as an antagonist, and therefore just plain scarier.
Greg is dead on with all of this, and until he mentioned something else in his email – namely, that we have no idea where Starro(s) come from – well. I’ll tell you the truth.
I’d considered Starro previously as an LSH villain, and dismissed him.
Not because I don’t love Starro. Starro is awesome. He is an evil space-traveling starfish. You don’t get more comics than that. But the problem with Starro is that the single most primal story from a comics standpoint that involves Starro – namely, that he takes over some of the superheroes and then the superheroes have to fight each other, Starro-controlled hero against still-independent hero – has been done quite a lot, and a new take on it has to be really brilliant, and I couldn’t think of one. Brad Meltzer did the “miniature Starros as mind-control agents” bit in his year on Justice League, so that’s out too.
And then Greg pointed out that we don’t know where Starro comes from, and that’s when I got the idea.
Why does Starro want to conquer, anyway? I mean, Starro is most terrifying when he’s so utterly fucking alien in motivation that he doesn’t bother explaining why he’s mind-controlling everybody with his starfish spawnlings. He just does it. Why would he do that?
Maybe it’s a biological imperative. Maybe Starro and/or his race feed off psychic emanations. A Starro creates the starfish spawn to serve much like tiny little suction cups. The mind-control evolved over time. First it was just a defense mechanism to keep people from tearing off the spawn, but it got finer and more astute over time, and then one day the Starros started getting smarter, and smarter, and smarter as they kept absorbing all that brain-juice, until they achieved sentience, and they realized that this was only the beginning.
Of course, Starro isn’t stupid, and probably after his nth asskicking at the hands of Earth superheroes he realized that straight-up conquest just wasn’t going to work. But here’s the thing about essentially immortal starfish: they can afford to play the long game.
Imagine a world, way off in a quiet corner of space, where Starro lives peaceably with an intelligent humanoid population. It’s a symbiotic relationship, much like the Trills in Star Trek. Starro gets to eat brain-energy, but in return he makes his hosts stronger, faster, healthier (and not everybody on the planet gets to be a host – the race considers it a privilege to carry a spawnling). A plain, quiet, orderly little world, polite and friendly – except over time Starro has become the absolute leader, and worse, he doesn’t have to force anybody this time around to let him be in charge. Think how goddamned creepy it would be.
A world where dissidents are punished – for their own good, of course, your loved ones will drag you to a faceful of starfish themselves if they have to, because they know it’s the best thing for you – with aggressive Starro therapy. (Dissidents tend to have more agitated brains. Nothing like a little Starro to sort that out and calm them down.) A world where every policeman has a starfish on his face that shoots a stun-ray from its central eye. A world where people compete for Starro’s attention.
This is a Starro who thinks beyond simple tactics like “take over everything in sight, then take over more things, then more, then more.” This is a Starro that’s figured out how to achieve his ultimate objective – soft tactics rather than hard force. The ultimate face of starfish fascism, brought about the way all good fascism is – entirely voluntarily.
And what is Starro’s ultimate objective? Why does he want to conquer everything, anyway?
Well, I can’t give it away for free, you know? 🙂
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If you were to do this, an openly bestarfished applicant to the Legion would be required.
Seconded
How much to find out?
Damn, BSD beat me to it. But yeah the LSH having to deal with the politics of someone from Planet Starro would be awesome…
And what *is* Starro’s ultimate objective? Why does he want to conquer everything, anyway?
Would it be utterly lame to make Starro a tragic character?
It might, but it could be fun anyway.
It’s good, but it reminds me a fair bit of the aliens from Stargate. Yeah, they’re conquerors and enslavers, but there’s a large segment of their populations that vie for the honor of hosting one of the aliens, too. I think yours might make for a more entertaining and subtle story, though.
A world where dissidents are punished – for their own good, of course, your loved ones will drag you to a faceful of starfish themselves if they have to, because they know it’s the best thing for you – with aggressive Starro therapy. (Dissidents tend to have more agitated brains. Nothing like a little Starro to sort that out and calm them down.)
G-yah-yAH-YAH! UGH! *shudders*
You’re an evil genius.
Starro has good card… hehe.
Chris, why the hell AREN’T you writing the Legion yet? Everything you come up with is golden.
What, doesn’t everybody secretly want to conquer everything? Now we got to have motivations? It’s just *there*, man.
when i was younger i always wanted to write a story where starro and brainiac merged.
mostly i just wanted to see brainiac argue with a starfish.
I know! When Starro slaps a little mind control starfish on someone’s face, it’s like sex to it. Think about it for a second.
Hell, if I wasn’t already sold, brain-sex with a starfish would’ve done it for me.
Excellent! I’m glad I could convince you.
Yeah, a Starro-enslaved applicant to the Legion would be interesting.
Maybe he or she could join the Substitute Legion.
I always enjoy your Legion posts. I would buy your Legion comic in a heartbeat.
Wonderful stuff, as ever. A whole planet full of shiny happy Starro-people is horribly, entertainingly chilling.
It may be worth noting that Universo is already partially occupying the traditional Starro niche, in that he turns ordinary citizens and even other Legionnaires against the Legionnaires, and puts them on the run against the forces that normally support them. A Starro/LSH story, while it should probably include the threat or actuality of Starro-controlled innocents attacking the Legion in order to be a Starro story, ought to focus on other kinds of conflict, in order to avoid stepping on Universo turf. Fortunately, as soon as you get off Earth, Starro’s story possibilities open up more than enough to accomodate that need.
If you make Starro a brain sucker, might I suggest that you instead of making it feed directly upon any neural impulses, that you only make it those neural impulses that are the result of the irrational, objective hatred that comes from long standing war and bigotry. This way you can make Starro the ultra-fascist mind controller, but not for reasons of conquest, but just to create long-standing conflict in otherwise peaceful regions.
In short, don’t make him feed off the one he controls, but rather make him feed off everyone involved in the conflicts that his mind controlled puppets create. That way, whether the mind-controlled puppets win or lose a battle, Starro still wins.
Niiiiiice. You really should be writing LSH.
Very nice. I’d read this. Probably enjoy it more than I enjoyed the last couple issues of DC’s LSH too.
Why are you so awesome? Is it because Canada?
So, what are your opinions of the Legion in Action Comics?
MastaP: I’m enjoying it a lot, and it’s nice to see the old preboot Legion again (well, sort of, it’s pretty clear they’re not exactly the preboot Legion). But I’m enjoying it for the novelty it is, and I explicitly don’t want to see a return to what’s been done before, which puts me in a somewhat different position than a lot of the Legion fans extolling its strengths.
I’m sure I cannot express all the frustration that we feel because you are not actually writing LSH. This is really cool stuff, and your interpretation of Brainiac 5 still makes me break down in twitching love.
They had Starro looking things in Batman Beyond.
The problem, I’d think, with this idea is that there might not really be all that much cause for conflict. Why would the Legion oppose people from a world that is peaceful and productive who choose to be mind-controlled by a starfish, to their benefit? It would be creepy, and maybe disappointing that some people are taking the “easy way” out, but there’s not much you can do without making the Legion look like great big jerks for wrecking paradise on purely xenophobic ground – i.e. because it’s weird for people to be all happy about being mind-controlled by star fish. The punishment via “starfish to the face” is, as presented, a very humane and productive form of punishment – it’s going to cost less than imprisoning someone in a contemporary prison system (and, really, eliminate the need for such things), and there’s going to be no risk of the nasty things that happen to people in prison happening while they’ve been Starro’d.
If you make Starro a bad guy, you can’t really have the Legion walk away. They need to get all the Starro gone. If you don’t make Starro the bad guy . . . well, I don’t think in a post Civil War comics-scape that you’d be able to get away with the Legion doing things for people’s own good. The ship’s sailed on superheroes doing the right thing even if other people don’t want it (this isn’t to say that Civil War was the right thing – just that after Civil War, heroes doing stuff to someone that doesn’t have a big flashing “I’M EVIL!” sign isn’t going to fly).
I remember your Lj Why I should write legion posts and the genius that they contained. I have treid to get into LOSH but just never last more than a couple of issues before I lose interest.
However if you ever got the gig, I would buy every issue of your run. It’s clear that you have genuine love of the characters and I think you could bring that through in your stories and make people (like me) who are not fans of the team, grow to love them.
Plus your ideas are just brilliant
I still smile at the Karate Kid one (fighting a planet of Space Pirates if I remember correctly?)
Creepy? Fuck, depending on what the taxes are like, I’m thinking about moving there.
“Starro For President. Fewer wars, lower crime rates, and at least it’s just your face he’s kissing with his slimy tentacles.”
The one hole I see in the setup is that direct subjugation is both the highest social goal AND the “punishment” for misconduct.
Andrew brings up a good point, but I think I have a good solution: The problem is when the Chief of Science Police decides that Starro’s solution to criminal behavior is a great idea, and before you know it Karate Kid is fighting a planet’s worth of mind controlled criminals.
“The one hole I see in the setup is that direct subjugation is both the highest social goal AND the “punishment” for misconduct.”
It may be the difference between true symbiosis and body-jacking. Those rewarded are allowed to commune with the Star-father, gaining strength and knowledge beyond humanoid ken in exchange for letting Starro take the reigns every now and then. Those punished are locked away for their own good- benevolent Starro takes a firsthand approach to their rehabilitation- psychic therapy sessions- while their bodies are still active in the community.
And that’s assuming that when one of the Starro-blessed is talking to you, it’s not Starro on the other end play-acting.