Darkstars #4

Hey hey! It's the Nineties!

I sometimes wonder how people into fashion and fashion history can look at some item of clothing and know exactly when it was created. Same with experts on music and visual art and poetry. But then I realize that even though I'm hardly an expert, I could probably do a fairly decent job of looking at comic book art and guessing what era it was from. I'm sure if I studied a bit, I'd be excellent at it considering I've done so much pre-course work due to my comic book hobby. The only really difficult part would be guessing art from artists who have really long careers and their style doesn't change a great deal. Like maybe somebody like Curt Swan, you'd be able to guess when he started and maybe a decade or so after as his form improved. But at some point, Curt Swan is just fucking Curt Swan for, like, decades! So I'd probably be terrible at recognizing the minutia that would be the fingerprint of the decade he was working in at the time.

What I'm saying is, "This cover looks like if The 90s ate some bad oysters and wound up shitting and vomiting at the same time but got caught in the rotation so neither The 90s mouth or butthole were facing the toilet and the sick just sprayed out of both ends and landed on the cover of Darkstars #4." And that was one of my less tortured metaphors!

According to this cover, somebody is still trying to make "The Darkstars" happen. According to next issue's cover, it didn't happen. I knew I was on the right side of history when I refused to use the article!

This is the title of this issue:

Imagine how much more exciting George Lucas's movie franchise would have been had he chosen to put an exclamation point at the end of the title. What a tragic loss!

I want my legacy to be, "He wrote a thing that was as good as Lucille Bluth's 'Here's some money. Go see a Star War.'"

Evil Star begins destroying a city because he's evil. The star part of his name must be vestigial because he doesn't act like a star. Unless he doesn't mean the astronomical star but the Hollywood star. I guess the tantrum he's throwing because Green Lantern hasn't welcomed him to Earth is quite star-like. I take it back about the "Star" being vestigial but mostly because I was probably using vestigial wrong. And if I was, just know I was using it metaphorically which means you can't criticize me for using it wrong.

Evil Star calls Green Lantern "the green coward." In the last three issues, no character has actually said "Green Lantern." It's like when a star on a game show is from a show on another network, they don't mention the network because it's their rival. Although they do sometimes. I think it was probably a certain time where nobody would mention the competitors. Probably the 80s. And since I don't know as much as I thought I knew before I started typing this crap, maybe I should have stuck with the analogy of how Marvel and DC always refer to each other as "the competitor." Unless it's another word that's a synonym for competitor. See, I don't know much about that either!

The Eee! Tess Ate Chai Guarantee: "I might sound like I know everything but I'll readily admit to you when I absolutely know nothing (but only if called on it and can't deflect the accusation)."

Some cops pull up to stop Evil Star and one cop is all, "I'll show you power, jerko!" And the other cop is all, "No, don't!" Not because he's against lethal force but because he realizes Evil Star has even more lethaler force, a lesson the cop learns for himself rather quickly.

I'm not saying I cheered at this panel because that would open me up to a bunch of criticism from online jerks who don't understand fiction, satire, or hyperbole.

So with the cops dead, it's up to Darkstar and his sidekicks (one of which is a cop) to stop Evil Star! Unless Green Lantern suddenly appears but I think he's not allowed to show his face in this comic book and/or he's busy becoming Parallax.

So there's this big comic book fight and it's a lot like every other comic book fight you've ever read. Which really makes you wonder why some comic book fans only want to read comic books where there are big fights. Why would you want to read the same thing over and over again?! Some people just like to look at the different outfits, I guess. Anyway, I'm not going to describe the fight blow-by-blow. Y'all know how these things work! The good guys get beat up for awhile and maybe defeated after which the bad guy flees instead of killing them. Or the good guys get beat up for awhile before digging deep and defeating the bad guy. It all depends on how many issues the story is set to run. And since I think this story is over this issue, the fight will be of the latter sort.

I'm not saying, after looking at this panel, I subsequently wrote a fan-fic story that went into way too much detail describing Colos's cock and how Detective Beer-Guzzles' mustache felt rubbing against the thick, pink skin because that would open me up to a bunch of fan-fic writers who would try to befriend me so we could swap dirty stories.

Meanwhile, Carla White learns that you can't quit family. Or mob bosses.

He's from America. Another thing you learn in America: if somebody doesn't respond to you being polite, you have every right to become a violent asshole. It's the major defense on Judge Judy. "Yes, your Honor, I smashed up her car. But she wouldn't move it when I asked her politely to move it for no reason at all except that I wanted to park there!"

Evil Star retreats to a junk yard to engage in an existential crisis. Why is he evil? Why does he do bad things? Why does everything have to die? I mean, on a metaphorical level and not on an evolutionary level where death drives evolution, creating room for offspring more and more capable than the parent of living in specific environments through the recombining of different genes and sometimes through lucky mutations. Darkstar feels like it's a good time to wait and see what Evil Star winds up doing but Detective Mustardstache has a better idea: beat the living crap out of him and maybe kill him if he gives him any fucking excuse at all!

Detective Darkstar gets his ass kicked by the Starlings and Darkstar has to rush in to save him. They then retreat to observe Evil Star.

Every right winger on Twitter who thinks they're the greatest debater since some famous person who could debate well. Napoleon, maybe?

Detective Pork-chops-as-an-appetizer apologizes for getting carried away. Notice how Homeless Mo didn't get carried away and try to kill the perp even though he hasn't had nearly as much training as the cop?

Carla was kidnapped by her ex-client, the guy being used by the aliens to run the Loco drug ring. Kidnapping a lawyer seems like a bad idea. I mean, kidnapping anybody seems like a bad idea but kidnapping a lawyer seems like it would have extra consequences. I used to do cabinet work for my cousin's cousin David. He was a train wreck of a human being but he did good cabinet work. At one point in his life, he had a lawyer working on his DUI case to try to get it dropped and he was juggling his bills. His solution was to bounce a check to the lawyer. I don't know how that all worked out because I tried not to work with him too much (only enough to pay for comic books, really) but I'm assuming his lawyer decided not to argue the charge down and David wound up in jail.

This is the argument of everybody who has ever kept the world from becoming a better place.

Carla refuses to keep working for the mob boss so now he probably has to kill her or else he's facing kidnapping charges which are as bad as murder charges. Which seems like a bit of a mistake, in my opinion. I mean, sure, you want kidnapping to have a steep punishment. But if kidnapping is equal to murder, every kidnapper is just going to murder the person they kidnapped because it does away with the main witness. I guess the point is that people that wouldn't murder won't kidnap either because the penalty is so great. But if somebody is kidnapping somebody and the penalty were only a year in prison, they'd still probably murder that person in the hopes of getting away with it and not having to spend a year in prison.

Darkstar, using his super computer on his ship orbiting Earth, learns that Evil Star's mind shackle that keeps him from turning into Evil Star is on the fritz. So he's occasionally feeling like a genocidal maniac while mostly just feeling scared and guilty about his terrible thoughts. To stop him, Darkstar inundates him with images of all the people he killed on his home planet. I guess Evil Star was the original Lobo, committing planet-wide genocide.

Earlier I mentioned how he laughed while his wife and son died not because I'd read ahead but because, probably like the author of this story, I read the Who's Who entry on Evil Star.

Evil Star collapses from the guilt and Darkstar takes him into custody. He encases the Starlings in scrap metal and, I don't know, sells them at a yard sale. Carla gets extra-kidnapped by the mob boss whose name I probably should have learned four issues in.

Darkstars #4 Rating: B+. This issue was better than the previous three but I can't explain why. Maybe because there was a super villain and most probably not because some cops died and the other cop got harshly reprimanded for immediately resorting to violence. The Darkstar Colos has turned out to be far more diplomatic than I was expecting. I wouldn't have guessed that Hal Jordan was more temperamental than some testicle-headed alien in a 90s costume called Darkstar.