InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "It's only time"

dr_hermes (dr_hermes) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-08-02 22:20:00

Entry tags:

char: starman/ted knight, era: golden age

Why didn't Starman win the war?
It's a problem with ongoing science-fiction series, whether pulps or comics or TV. If advanced technology is shown to be available and workable, why doesn't it change the world? Anti-gravity, matter transporters, telepathic transmitters.. any of these would start the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution. The problem is that following stories would have to incorporate these changes and the series would suddenly stop being the world of Doc Savage and look more like the world of the Jetsons. So the amazing new gadget has to be destroyed, the only prototype smashed and the plans lost. Or, if the hero is using the gizmo as his trademark, it must be the product of a freak accident that can't be duplicated. (Doc Savage used to regularly claim the villains' disintegrator guns or earthquake machines or whatever and just declare they were too dangerous to use. Rather than trust the human race to use the tech properly, he just took it on himself to lock him them away in his Fortress of Solitude. But then, Doc had a lot of nerve any way you look at it.)

Now, the original Starman (the one who appeared in ADVENTURE COMICS and ALL-STAR COMICS beginning in 1941)had as his main distinction something called the Gravity Rod. This was a sceptre that charged up with starlight and converted it into useful energy. Anti-gravity, concussive blasts, heat rays (and the occasional rabbit-out-of-the-hat application) made Starman an upper-level super-hero able to hold his own with the heavy hitters in the Justice Society.

(The above is from ALL-STAR COMICS# 11, June-July 1942.) Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Starman is seized with the same intense patriotism as the other JSA members and they all enlist in their civilian identities. (Why not in costume? Maybe because they thought of their civilian identities as their true selves, who they really were and saw their super-hero guises as something of a game. Just as they wouldn't get married as Hawkman or the Atom, they wouldn't enlist that way.) Anyway, Ted Knight somehow brings his costume and weapon along with him anyway and soon finds himself attacking a huge concentration of Japanese forces. In fact, he ends up seizing Formosa by himself....!The natural thought is, if he's this invincible against conventional fighter planes, why doesn't Starman go on to Tokyo or Berlin and just level those cities? For that matter, why only make one Gravity Rod? He repairs and replaces his gizmo a number of times, so it's not non-reproducible. Why isn't there a squad of Starmen in action? Is it just a case of "It's MY toy, I don't want anyone else to play with it?" Or that he fears the American military will misuse his technology? Wars don't last forever and when WW II ends, will America go on an imperialistic conquest using the Gravity Rod adventage? (In 1942, it would be an unusually perceptive person who worried about future possibilities like that.)

"let's erect a gigantic rod"

A few months later, we find Starman on the planet Jupiter in a typically implausible Golden Age epic. Here he has the Jovians build an immense replica of his Gravity Rod and its power propels his ship back to Earth. Leaving the war aside, imagine the uses for a device like this. Engineering, construction, transportation, rescue work in disasters... it would provide a leap forward as big as the telephone or the electric light. But this never seems to occur to Ted Knight. The Gravity Rod is restricted to his personal use for fighting super-villains, alien invaders and bank robbers...

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kingrockwell
2009-08-03 02:53 am UTC (link)

Ah, the Reed Richards problem. The meta behind it is obvious, since shifting the paradigm too far can rid you of any conflict familiar to the medium and would require entirely different sorts of conflict beyond anything we might be familiar with. The in-story explanations tend to be lacking, leading to frustratingly frustrated fans, and sometime short-sighted lampshades hung with little follow-through.

It's something that would be interesting to explore in a self-contained series, but for a long-running shared universe I only see it getting out of control before too long.

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dr_hermes
2009-08-03 03:19 am UTC (link)

In the old pulps, the mad science gadget was destroyed at the end of the story. If the hero kept it for later use, it either was one-of-a-kind and couldn't be duplicated or it was too dangerous to let the public in on it.

Silver Age Hawkman explicitly used ancient weapons because he didn't want Thanagarian tech to get into the hands of Earth people. Maybe this was official policy or maybe he just thought it would be like passing out hand grenades to a bunch of ten-year-olds.

	btravage.livejournal.com 2009-08-03 03:29 am UTC (link)
	For all its worth, it is acknowledged in DC 1,000,000 that Jack Knight's inventions are going to be the basis for a technological revolution at some future date. (Reply to this)