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Starman v2 #79
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black eagle
1. Although Starman VIII and Thom Kallor have been shown to be the same person, the details of the path between Star Boy and Starman is unknown, and they are thus tracked separately.
| General | Only pages 1-5 and 31 are dealt with here. |
| This appearance does nothing to answer the questions about when and why Thom adopts the identity of Danny Blaine, the name he is later known under as Starman, nor whether he gives that name up at some point. | |
| 1 | The starfield-clad man is Starman VIII, known from Kingdom Come as the adult Thom Kallor of the Legion (i.e., Star Boy) who succeeded Jack Knight in the Starman role. (Details on this were learned in Starman v2 #50.) In Starman v2 #79, Starman VIII picked Jack up in 1951 Opal City. |
| The globe they are in is a Legion time bubble. While such items were well known in the preboot continuity — which is also the design source for Starman VIII’s costume — they have yet to be created in the current continuity. On the other hand, this Starman is years, perhaps decades older than the current Star Boy, so there is lots of time. | |
| This is how Opal City is usually depicted: the city rising up from the plains, with nary a suburb to buffer it from the countryside. Very odd. | |
| 2:1 | The standard for time travel in pre-Crisis days was to retain a one-to-one ratio — spend a week in the future, come back a week later — which prevented characters from aging unusually vs. their peers. Jack was only gone a few days, though, so the main effect will be kind of like jetlag: it’s still months until Christmas, no matter how long he spent in the past. |
| 2:3-4 | As seen later in this issue, Jack’s immediate successor will be the Star-Spangled Kid, who already uses a cosmic energy belt created by Jack’s father, the original Starman. |
| Will Courtney be the one to bestow the title on Thom — and what relationship that might imply — or if Thom will simply assume it on his own (or pick it up after a sacrifice or retirement by her)? | |
| 3:1 | The details of this reincarnation were revealed in Starman v2 #73. |
| 3:3, 4:1-2 | It isn’t clear what the purpose — symbolic, presumably — of this black eagle is. Perhaps just representative of the death cycle? |
| 3:5 | Note what Thom’s speech says about the Linear Men, the self-appointed guardians of the timestream. From their vantage at the end of time, they see a single path forward toward them, and the need to channel time such that it always adheres to that past. They ostensibly cannot perceive or conceive of alternate, parallel timelines, although one would think that the very nature of their work would make such evident, since the effect of time leaving the prescribed channels would be to create alternates. (Perhaps they can’t conceive of simultaneous alternates. It isn’t that they need to preserve one stream, but they believe that if it isn’t their stream, it becomes someone else’s and they cease to be.) |
| Thom’s speech does, however, indicate that if Kingdom Come is an alternate future of the DC Universe (as opposed to the actual future), the divergence point has not yet occurred. From Thom’s points in the future (31st and 21st centuries), the past is deterministic: he can only go back to events which have occurred in his timestream. Only the future is variable (which raises all sorts of questions about someone from the future coming back to the past for an extended stay — as Thom did with Kingdom Come — and how that locks the future he came from into that past. Someone else can wrap their head around that one!) | |
| 3:7 | This bit of dialogue depressed some fans, who apparently wanted a very deterministic Legion future to come out of this meeting. Sorry folks, but we know this Starman only from the Elseworlds series Kingdom Come, which already marks him as not set in stone, and past experience with the stranglehold that the “Adult Legion” had on Legion continuity for many years should teach us better than to want such firmness. |
| While the comments about Thom dying or turning evil mean nothing particular in terms of past continuities, they could be used as jumping-off points for future Legion stories, teasing us with connections to this appearance. | |
| 4:1 | Speaking of possible jumping-off points for future stories, this “two lives” comment is surely one. We’ll see if Legion writers Abnett and Lanning use it any time soon in Legion Worlds or The Legion. |
| 4:3 | See page 31 for what this refers to. |
| 4:5 | <Do we remember? Did the Shade tell him? Dreamer?> |
| Hopefully, Thom goes out in glory, saving the universe. | |
| 5:2 | The source of these scars is unknown, of course, although the cover art for Legion Worlds #4 has Star Boy fighting to keep his face free of Robotica machinery, and the Starboy in Superboy’s Legion suffered massive facial scarring from Mano. This could be a new “fated” trend for the Legion, akin to a founder losing an arm. |
| 31 | In the 30th century, Jack purged the shadow Plague from the Shade. Doing that action here in the 21st century: will that purge it now and prevent the events of Starman v2 #49-50 from ever occurring, or does it merely stave things off such that the plague erupts in the 30th century rather than, say, in the 25th? |