No Time for Freak-outs!!!!

Comics:


Silver Star, written and pencilled by Jack Kirby, inked by Mike Royer, Mike Thibodeaux and D. Bruce Berry (1985-86; collected 2007): Silver Star started life as a Kirby proposal for a science-fiction film in the 1970's. Nothing came of that proposal, so Kirby turned the whole thing into a six-issue comic-book miniseries in the mid-1980's.

Like pretty much all of Jack Kirby's work which he both dialogued and drew, Silver Star can be a bit, well, loopy at times. Kirby had a pretty idiosyncratic approach to writing style, one with a lot of baffling "quotation" marks and emphases put IN strange PLACES! I think it's charming and occasionally far more effective than more traditional comic-book dialogue, but your results may vary.

Silver Star gives us Kirby's fundamental theme -- the conflict between freedom and tyranny -- played out within a tale of genetically engineered supermen, superwomen, and supervillains. Silver Star (he takes his heroic sobriquet from the medal he won in Viet Nam for, um, throwing a tank at a bunch of Viet Cong), the next stage in (engineered) human evolution, must protect his fellow mutants and humanity itself from super-powered killjoy Darius Drumm.

Drumm doesn't simply possess impressive mental and physical powers. He's also seized control of his cult-leader-father's doomsday cult of self-denying, individuality-denying jerkwads. Drumm's dream is to either turn every human being into a faceless drone, or maybe just to destroy all life on the planet. He's flexible on that whole issue.

World-shaking superheroics ensue. For some reason, Silver Star ends up driving around in a VW minibus for a few pages. Also, he really likes orange juice. And a super-powered stunt-woman. It wold really have made a helluva movie, though I can't see it being remotely filmable in the 1970's. Maybe now? A man can dream. Recommended.