Star Power and the Perils of Setting

"Your wings are tired
You cannot get there from here
Where you aspire
You cannot fly there from here"

Collide - Wings of Steel


After the end of Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire five or six years ago, I tried checking out the author's new project Star Power. The heroine's fifth-page apotheosis immediately put me off by reminding me there's a very good reason I stopped reading superhero comics when I was thirteen. Power fantasies aren't all that fantastic when power's cheap.

I've re-tried getting into it more than once since, for the sake of its predecessor. Despite often overindulgent storylines (traumatic backstories, orc rape, politically correct natives, etc.) Dominic Deegan's quick but rarely jarring shifts between farce, wordplay, fantasy adventuring and high drah-mah kept it fresh from page to page. It punned and dramatically revealed, toyed around with negative space and infinite canvases, introduced drastically non-human mage and archmages, etc. In short it exhibited much of the adventurous spirit which made web-comics such a welcome alternative to officially published newspapers and books two decades ago.

Star Power is instead very much a classic page-by-page, chapter-by-chapter comic book, with all the myriad foibles such crumpled old packaging implies. The quick rush to superheroism ignores the importance of Dominic Deegan's rambling, fumbling, introductory first hundred pages or so, dealing with petty crooks and angry knights and cute suicide girls... before whiplashing the audience into a cosmic battle against universe-devouring eldritch abominations. It also manages to be even less interesting than classic high fantasy "orcs and humans" characters, rapidly inundating the reader with pointlessly interchangeable wrinkly forehead aliens. Were this a 1990s TV series you might chalk it up to a low special effects budget, but in a medium of arbitrary purty pick-a-chures, it's nothing but insultingly, unimaginatively, aggressively low-brow, century-old stagnation even if aimed at children.

But most interestingly, the exact same style of expository banter which jazzed up one comic falls completely flat in the other. Dominic Deegan and his cohorts (especially his toothsome love interest Luna) would occasionally spend a panel or three excitedly rattling off nonsensical explanations of various magitek phlebotina to justify the current story arc. It was often engaging and almost always impishly adorable. Star Power makes the mistake of translating this same routine to a nominally SciFi setting. For a taste of how badly that works, try the last panel here where the heroine (supposedly an astronomer) flashing the camera a Joker-worthy manic rictus, exclaims: "making sense of strange light is an astronomer's job." This came in response to an earlier panel showboating a nondescript tangle of sinusoids which she immediately identifies as "light readings" from a specific star "Only these numbers are weird. really weird."

Fun fact: in the future, all university science departments will include a mandatory introductory 099 course entitled: "how not to talk like a valley girl." Tee hee! Not that there's anything wrong with writing SF about fields you don't understand. In fact, it's almost a given. But for the love of crap, keep the crap that's out of your league off-panel!

To their credit, Star Power's creative duo openly advertise it as a superhero comic and not science fiction, and yes, this does imply significantly higher suspension of disbelief. The genre meld also more properly fits "superheroes" in their distinction from old-school mythical heroes. Still, the authors' choice to set their comic in a futuristic galactic civilization renders it a case study in the incompatibility of "(1)science (2)fantasy" whether it's expressed as Star Wars or anime or high-flying pugilists in spandex. The mere phrase "supernova dragon lords" would've raised my hackles even without seeing the primitive tent adorned with a dragon skull guarded by tattooed mooks hefting laser rifles. Magitek can work for elevating primitive supernatural thinking via at least a veneer of rationality. Its reverse, science fantasy, wears thin much faster for degrading a presumably rational setting to primitive, infantile thought patterns.