Issue(s): Marvel Premiere #32
Published Date: Oct 76
Title: "Monark Starstalker"
Credits:
Howard Chaykin - Writer
Howard Chaykin - Penciler
Howard Chaykin - Inker

Review/plot:
I'm tentatively including this in my timeline only because Monark Starstalker recently appeared in an issue of Nova, although that character may not really be the same one that appears in this issue (see also: Star-Lord).

In a far off universe a bounty hunter with a cybernetic connection to a mechanical falcon shows up on a frontier world...

...and gets into a number of battles while collecting his prey. He's a deliberately unsympathetic character.

The connection with the bird is a little complicated. Apparently Monark had been injured on a previous mission and in order to fix him up, a group of robots built the bird to serve as an artificial nervous system linked telepathically to him. It's not quite clear to me what the implications of that are.

This isn't exactly a great story. I suppose some points are deserved for creating a straight-up mercenary character, and it's worth noting that this was published before Star Wars, both because of the Han Solo similarity and coincidentally similar cover art. But it's not a compelling plot, and i've never been a great fan of Chaykin's art.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 2 - 1st Monark Starstalker

Chronological Placement Considerations: Assuming this is character really the one that appears much later in the Marvel Universe, there's nothing here that dictates placement, so we can put this at its publication date. Starstalker won't appear again until much, much later.

References: N/A

Cross-over: N/A

Continuity Implant? N

Reprinted In: N/A

Chaykin has a long history of giving us mercenary characters both before and after this.