"Also, I have these free copies of "The Watchtower" which I'd like to give to you..." The cube-headed irritant pictured above is "Starshine," a really poorly designed cyborg who served as the kind-of love interest for Rom: Spaceknight in the comic book of the same title. Y'see, when the Utopian alien planet Galador was threatened by the Dire Wraiths, they responded by drafting all the able-bodied young people into a cyborg army. For the longest time and for no good reason, Starshine was the only female among them. She's like an armor-plated Smurfette. And her head pisses me off to no end. Especially her face.
The rest of her is okay, I suppose, in a retro 1950's kind of way. Okay, except for the hands. Those look stupid. And then there's the skirt thing, which has a slit in the middle which runs way too high, affording hapless onlookers a great view of her vagina-free crotch region. I think I saw Bai Ling in one of those. But mainly it's her head and face that I hate. Let's start with the head in general. Rom's head was vaguely masculine in that it was a boxy deal resembling nothing so much as a toaster with eyes. Like David Boreanz! As the first female Spaceknight, they tried to come up with a ladylike version. So there's the completely pointless ponytail on top and a head shape that suggests a dainty, feminine chin and high cheekbones. But really, it's just a diamond shaped box. It looks like you could pry her face off, and there'd be a delicious cured ham inside. And then there's her face: a barely convex membrane with no nose, the barest hint of eyes, and a tiny, snippy little triangle-shaped mouth which is usually turned downwards to indicate dismay, or (more often) disapproval. Like so:
Later, she managed through sheer force of will to rearrange her cyborg body into something butcher and more gladiator-themed. (Physics in the world of Rom: Spaceknight were something of a joke.) Guess which part she forgot to fix.
Yep!
4 comments:
As an ardent Rom:Spaceknight fan, I can tell you this:
The scary part is that Starshine's costume ended up being one of the more imaginative designs.
::shudders::
Seriously, by the last months on the title they kept throwing new Spaceknights at us, but it was clear that Mantlo/Ditko/Buscema/whoever weren't putting two seconds worth of thought into coming up with different armors.
I'm hear ya, Chris. I own every issue of Rom, except for #1 (and at this point I couldn't care less about getting it). So I remember the evolution and devolution of the artwork, from Sal Buscema inking himself (ick) to his being inked by Sinnot (HUGE improvement) to the gorgeous, atmospheric inks of Akin and Garvey to the ugly, overwrought Filipino-style embellishment of Mel Candido, to the Ditko days with the rotating cast of all-star inkers. Fun fact: P. Craig Russell once interviewed that Ditko's pencils were so vague in places that he had to copy heads from much older Ditko stories and draw them in place of the shapeless blobs that Ditko had left for him. And anytime you saw Spider-Man in a crowd scene, that was all the work of the inker. Ditko refused to draw him, for personal reasons.
I think the goofiest male Spaceknight armor was Firefall's, after the Wraiths put that Earth guy in it and you could see his bleary-eyed human face through the visor instead of the traditional two dots o' light. But yeah, Ditko's Spaceknights were awfully half-assed. I think at that point in his career, he just wanted the paycheck.
I think the big no-no isn't so much that she doesn't have a nose, but that she does have a visible mouth.
And the ponytail. What the hecK?
I'm guessing the only reason for the ponytail -- which is something the later female Spaceknights never had, by the way, is to emphasize her womanliness. As though the wide, childbearing hips aren't enough. And it never seemed fair to me that Starshine got to have hair as a cyborg but all of the other Spaceknights didn't. Rom had quite the mane of lustrous black hair when he was fully human, like a guy on the cover of a romance novel. Why couldn't the Galadoran scientists have used some of that for his boxy cyborg cranium? They could at least have turned it into a wig for him. I can just see our sensitive warrior Rom resting after a bloody battle, composing a love poem in his head and brushing his beautiful hair, over and over and over...
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