Obsessively putting our comics in chronological order since 1985.
| 1976-10-01 00:10:10 |
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Marvel Premiere #32
Issue(s): Marvel Premiere #32
Cover 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 character really is 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
Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: N/A
| Previous: Captain Britain #1-2 | Up: Main 1976 / Box 11 / EiC Upheaval | Next: Inhumans #7-8,10 |
Comments
Chaykin has a long history of giving us mercenary characters both before and after this.
Chaykin started working in comics at the age of 19 and was about 25 when he cranked this one out. Had been tutored by Gil Kane, Wally Wood, and Neal Adams by this time in 1976. Chaykin never really caught my attention until he did American Flagg in 1983, which started out very strong but then after a year or three had sort of run out of new ideas & spent all its novelty IMO.
Thanks, Holt. Didn't know that. In addition to mercenaries, between this and an issue of Killraven, Chaykin was also niched as a sci-fi guy, which is presumably how he ended up doing the Star Wars comic. I wonder if he's still got any of the original pages...
