The Golden Age Starman Archives, Vol. 1 by Gardner F. Fox

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book collects all of the Star Man comics drawn by Jack Burney (except for those done for the JSA Crossovers.) This book features Starman stories from Adventure Comics #61-76.

The Good: The art is marvelous, simply put some of the best Golden Age Art I've seen not drawn by Jack Kirby. Really some great stuff for the era. Starman is a cool design and I love the gravity rod (even though more explanation of the whys and wherefores of how it worked would have been nice.) The ride is what you'd expect from a book mostly written by Gardener Fox, with a nice mix of sci fi and battling mobster giving way to battling saboteurs as America moved to a war footing. However, Fox also came up with a very strong villain in the Mist and to have a villain turn out to be a keeper in these golden age books is rare.

The bad: There are a few nitpicks. The book struggles a couple times to be consistent about where Starman's rod was. In one panel, after being captured Starman brags that he had it attached to his wrist even though a previous panel showed he didn't. The personality of Ted Knight is annoying. It seems that Fox got tired of writing the same sort of foppish or nerdy secret identity and it was decided that Ted Knight would be an insufferable hypochondriac. Thankfully, he's usually out of the story rather quickly, ut it a quite terrible idea.

OVerall, a decent book that's a fun read for fans of Golden Age comic art.



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