Wednesday Comics: The Price

We continue our examination of Jim Starlin's Dreadstar Saga with The Price. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

The Price

Eclipse Graphic Album Series #5 (October 1981) Story & Art by Jim Starlin

Synopsis: The Empirical Galaxy is in the midst of a 200 year-old war between two super-powers: The Monarchy and the Instrumentality. Altarix is a world of the Instrumentality, home to its mystic Order of Vieltoor. It's also the home of Lord High Bishop Darklock and his brother Ajar'l Darklock.

Ajar'l is a tax lawyer, ferreting out those who seek to defraud the Instrumentality. Where his brother is interested in the mystical, Ajar'l is concerned with the practical. All things considered, Ajar'l doesn't get the sort of death he would've expected:

Darklock senses his brothers death and quickly goes to the scene. The police tell him it was a murder committed by fringe religious cultists. Darklock is skeptical that it was a human crime. The police assure him that supernatural involvement was ruled out by one of the cardinals of the Papal Council who has already been there.

Darklock does to the Lord Papal to request a leave of absence:

The Lord Papal know's Ajar'l's death smacks of demonic attack, and he warns Darklock against engaging in unauthorized vengeance.

When he's gone, Cardinal Spyder asks Lord Papal why he granted Darklock leave. He knows he plans to seek vengeance. Lord Papal did so because he senses what Darklock sensed--and more:

Darklock is a powerful and ambitious man. Lord Papal sees this as a chance to get read of a potential rival.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Things to Notice:

• In the Dreadstar-verse, the Earth was destroyed in 1980.
• The original story was in black and white. It was later colorized and reprinted as Dreadstar Annual #1.

Commentary: 
This graphic novel is billed as "A new Metamorphosis Odyssey book" thought there isn't anything in its setting or characters to tie it to that other work (yet).

An oppressive church state is a trope Starlin has worked with before. The Church of Universal Truth was the main bad guy of Starlin's "Magus Saga"  at Marvel. The use of the term "Instrumentality" may have it's origins in Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind.

The Future of Superheroes

Most superheroes (and superhero rpgs) are set in the modern day. There's no reason superheroes have to be limited to that era, of course. At least as early as 1955, we got a glimpse of Brane Taylor, the Batman of the year 3000. Just a few years later, the preeminent group of future heroes made their debut: The Legion of Super-Heroes. These guys were big enough to get supplements of both editions of the Mayfair DC Heroes rpg: Legion of Super-Heroes vol. I and II and 2995: The Legion of Super-Heroes Sourcebook.

Marvel's answer to the Legion was the Guardians of the Galaxy. These guys were not the super-group of b-list characters about to get a movie; this was a group of freedom fighters against Badoon tyranny in the 31st century. They were (originally) mostly from the Sol System, leaving one to wonder how they were going to guard the whole galaxy. They got a series in the 90s, but then their name was given to another group. No rpg supplement for any Marvel game.

There are a number of future heroes in dystopian futures--enough that I think they are really a separate subgenre. Most of these are at Marvel and the lion's share are alternate timelines from the X-Men. Marvel did have a whole 2099 line that was slightly less dystopian than most X-Men futures.

A more science fictionish approach to the future supers is Image's Prophet. The story isn't particularly superheroic so far so maybe a superhero rpg wouldn't be the best system for it, but it is completely tied to the modern day Extreme comics universe and does feature future versions of Prophet, Diehard, Troll, and Bedrock.

Anyway, there's a lot of inspiration to be had in the above works, I think.

What's that Aurogov Talking About?

Well, he may be filling that Wanderer avatar in on the fact that the Strange Stars Index has been updated. So, if you missed the posts about the amazon hive of the Sisterhood of Morrgna, some odd artifacts of the Strange Stars, the Radiant Polity, the ngghrya trackers, or the hwuru, you might want to check it out.

You can also find out about Wanderer remote avatars and Aurogov there, too.

Hall of Fame

Thanks to Jay at Exonauts! for pointing this out: Leigh Brackett got inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame this year, along with the Frank Frazetta, Olaf Stapledon, Stanley Kubrick, and Hayao Miyazaki. Stellar company, indeed!

In the Light

Art by Nico

The Radiant Polity directly ruled only a few worlds or habitats, but it claimed ultimate guardianship over the future of the entire human-descended tribe. Membership in the polity was ostensibly voluntary, yet each of its lords wielded absolute power, checked only by other lords. Their mantra was: "We civilize; we do not govern. We end war; we do not wage it. We guard; we do not control. Our thoughts look always to the future."

The civil servants of the Polity were it's most common face. Many were volunteers; others were drafted. They administered the noospheric fora (where members could petition the lords) and the Polity controlled hyperspace network, collected tolls, and handed out encryption keys for it's use to members. Through these measures the Polity effectively controlled interstellar trade and exerted soft power to shape planetary governments.

Not all it's power was soft. Polity membership made a sophont or a world subject to the justice of the Radiant Lords--justice meaning anything the lord in question felt would further the needs of the Polity and by extension humanity. They had a strict code and seldom acted rashly, as actions determined to be in error by review of their fellow lords carried harsh penalties, but they wielded great power and acted decisively--even brutally--when necessary. The lords all appeared baseline human, but their nervous systems were linked to their swift sophont ships, their brains modified with psybernetics (1), and their bodies enhanced. Each acted as a combination law enforcer, spy, advisor, and diplomat. When real war was needed, lords' code required they withdraw, and Hannibal Early was summoned.

In an effort to keep the peace, the Polity prohibited the export of irrational memeplexes such as religion between cultures. It was this prohibition that brought it into the conflict with the emerging Instrumentality of Aom and ultimately led to it's dissolution.

(1) It's believed that the psi-research NGO the Phaidros Group was involved with the Polity inception. If so, they abandoned it before it's final fall to begin their colony on Smaragdoz.

Wednesday Comics: What's Next?

Last week was the concluding chapter of Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey. A natural choice for my next comic to get into would be the Dreadstar graphic novel, but I thought I'd ask you guys.

Should I go on to that or to a different series? Something more purely fantasy or a more recent series?

The Sisters of War

The Sisterhood of Morrgna is a humanoid clade living on the border of the Zuran Expanse and the territory of the Alliance. The dark ages after the fall of the Radiant Polity fashioned their society into a machine for war and made its members famous throughout known space.

Appearance & Biology: As the name would imply, the entire Sisterhood is female (though excessive male hormones have led to some being androgenized). They are genetically derived from baseline humanity; all Sisters are cloned from less than a hundred genotypes, but they are further modified for certain caste functions. Most appear as roughly baseline humans, but their are hypertrophic muscled shock-troops, vacuum-adapted space-sisters, and ambigenitaled comfort sisters.

The most heavily modified Sisters are perhaps the queens (or "mothers"): macrocephalic beings, whose vast brains allow them to monitor every aspect of hive function.

Society: Only one Morrgna hive exists currently, a moon-sized artificial habitat with a single queen, but in previous times the Sisterhood was more expansionistic and sent out war wombs to generate hives on numerous worlds. Most of these were destroyed in conflict with other cultures; some fell to inter-clade strife.

Stats: The Morrgna Sisters have the same stats as baseline humans, though based on caste, their actual stats may vary wildly.