Andi Watson has generally done an excellent job of conveying the universal aspects of stories that all of us haven't really lived through. Romance in a world full of superheroes, the difficulties of being laid off from a pottery factory in England, that kind of thing has been very easy to relate to despite the more unusual elements of the stories. Given that I'm now the father of a little girl just shy of two years old, I actually thought that Little Star, about a father of a young girl, would be easier to relate to, but as it turns out, it's harder. Little Star is an entertaining read, with an effective look into the life of a busy young couple trying to buy a house and raise their young daughter, but it puts to lie the theory that parenthood is the same no matter where you are, because the experiences and reactions of Simon Adams (the lead of Little Star) are very different from my own, at least so far.
Don't get me wrong, Watson does tap into universal experiences of parenthood. The utter certainty combined with fear when you realize the baby is crying and it's not even light yet, and one of you is going to have to get up. The frustration that comes when your routine is to have someone screaming at you in the backseat while you're in traffic. The finicky, pattern-oriented behavior that kids can fall into which makes them impossible to deal with when they're tired or frustrated. Watson conveys a lot of the frustration of being a parent in the pages of Little Star #1.
What he doesn't convey, and this is the failing for me, is the joy of the whole thing. Breakfast After Noon and Love Fights both mixed the trials and tribulations of romance with the feelings you got from the high points, and Little Star mostly comes across presenting children as a burden. Even knowing that Simon is fictional, I was a bit dismayed at how easily he got mad or frustrated with his daughter. There is no moment in this first issue where we get the sense that Simon loves his daughter more than anything, that she gives him any kind of joy to go along with the headaches, and so I find him as a character to be very hard to sympathize with. Mind you, it's entirely possible that the story arc is meant to show Simon going from somewhat self-involved dad to someone who starts to realize what a two-way street parenting is. At the start, though, Simon does come off as self-involved, and we really don't get to see much of his wife or daughter that isn't seen within a narrow subsection of his point of view.
Structurally, Little Star resembles Watson's previous work, in that the main story is about one thing but it connects to other things going on in the lives of the protagonists. So the title comes from Simon's fascination with space from a young age and how that ties into his daughter, and the notion of growing into the role of a father goes along with the everpresent growth we're all doing of growing into an adult. The uncertainty of when you make that switch into a parent, who knows everything, is something we all go through, until of course we all figure out that our parents were probably just as confused as we were most of the time.
I've long been a fan of Watson's art, and the work on Little Star is no exception. I'm constantly amazed at how much Watson can convey with just a few lines, and his terrific design sense, always seen on covers, is clear in his design for the logos in the comic (like the one for "Little Stars Day Nursery") as well. This issue seems to make more use of blacks than I'm used to from Watson, whether it's the sequence of Simon waking up early in the morning or watching him gazing into the sky at night. To be honest, it comes across as a little too heavy in contrast with Watson's otherwise light and stark style, but it's an interesting divergence from his usual work. 8/10
