Let's be honest: the Starjammers, characters spun off from the X-Men, are pretty much C-list all the way, and even those who have a fondness for them like myself wouldn't really suggest that the characters are going to set the sales charts on fire. That said, it seems silly to use the Starjammers name, which has little cache in the first place, as the place for a brand new space opera series with only sketchy ties to the real characters. It seems even more silly that novelist Kevin Anderson has managed to create one of the most generic by-the-numbers formula space opera stories I've ever read in the pages of Starjammer #1, eschewing the more interesting notion of playing around in the Marvel Universe setting version of space and creating instead a human empire the likes of which we've seen hundreds of times before and a protagonist who thus far seems as square-jawed and uninteresting as the thousands of other Flash Gordon clones who have come before him as well. Starjammers #1 isn't a bad story... it's just so relentlessly mediocre, a shame given that space adventure isn't a genre that Marvel tackles often, and there was an opportunity here to do something kind of different.
It's hard to accuse Anderson of violating continuity here, because that's really not the point of the whole thing. It hardly matters that the Starjammers who make their appearance here could realistically have had these adventures before they hooked up with Corsair in Shi'ar space, because the spirit of the Marvel Universe's space realm is completely lost here. Rather than playing around with the Shi'ar realm, as Grant Morrison did when he took on the notion of a space empire in New X-Men, Anderson has created a completely generic new human empire who have a xenophobic view of aliens and who hide that behind a fear-mongering PR campaign about space pirates. Not a terrible idea, but one that we've seen before, and Anderson's take on them brings nothing new to the table.
Everything in this book is just so by-the-numbers, it could be a Disney film. The eager young space cadet who doesn't see the corruption in the empire. The beautiful princess who seems destined to fall for the cadet. The corrupt government official who is secretly using the pirates to hide his own agenda. The military who are all too willing to engage in atrocities and take pleasure in murdering the enemies of the empire, while anyone with half a brain can see that their tactics mark them as the real villains. Anderson has potential for all kinds of interesting twists here, maybe exploring how the space empire maps onto modern U.S. policies and the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal, or even something less topical like making his hero a bit more clued-in, but he goes for the easy, predictable route every single time. More forgivable, but no less disappointing from my point-of-view, he passes up a rich and relatively unexplored aspect of the Marvel Universe for this generic space empire, and while I'm generally in favor of something new rather than trading on Marvel's copyrights, if you're going to play around in the Marvel sandbox, it's silly not to use some of the tools.
Ale Garza bailed out on this project, and that's pretty clear in the artwork. I've never been a huge Garza fan, but I was surprised to find in the first few pages a pretty detailed and impressive look at an imperial banquet or some fairly expressive characters in the princess or in our hero Tolo Hawk. However, even as early as page three, we're starting to see more sketchy work, and there are any number of pages that look very rushed, with bizarre anatomy or poorly developed backgrounds or characters. My guess would be that Garza was working out of order, because some of the pages later in are stronger than the earlier ones, but at any rate, there's an artistic instability at work here that doesn't help the book much at all.
Starjammers is disappointing not just because it's a mediocre comic but because it's a mediocre comic that could have been so much more. The space opera genre doesn't get a lot of play in mainstream comics, the space setting of the Marvel Universe is pretty much wide open for exploration and Kevin Anderson is a fresh voice for comics. Unfortunately, all of that potential is wasted on an utterly predictable and thoroughly dull comic.
