captain starlight

A Page of Two Halves If I were being cruel to myself, I’d say this page is basically a pure distillation of my entire creative output in Fairburn: the top half, a gaudy attempt at humour using someone else’s jokes; the bottom, an earnest attempt to engage you with exciting serious drama, which fails because it tells us absolutely nothing. But there are things to say about it - they’re just not necessarily written on the page. The top half’s probably more eye-catching at first, a splash of colour in a faded world of grey pencil. It’s a shame I have no eye for which colours go together with which. What remains is a colour-blind person’s nightmare, but that’s OK because what I’ve written isn’t worth reading anyway. These ‘mad book titles’ are all copied from joke books - possibly The Crack- a-Joke Book, which I had a very well-thumbed copy of. I loved stuff like this - wordplay. Puns. So all I’m doing here is saying ‘I like jokes,’ which is fair enough. But the bottom half is the only bit I care about. We’ve met Captain Starlight before, briefly - he turns up at the end of The Origin of Electro - but this is the first time I’ve engaged with him directly. We don’t learn that much about him here unfortunately, but let me fill in a few gaps. I considered Captain Starlight my flagship superhero. Yes, I made up my own superheroes. Many of them were thinly veiled facsimiles of characters we already know and love - I fantasised about superheroes called The Spider, The Behemoth and Brick Boy, to name just three - but Captain Starlight was different. He wasn’t just a Marvel character with the name scribbled out. He was a Waen Shepherd original, and therefore I felt very proud of him. To be fair, in retrospect, he was probably inspired by a lesser-known Marvel superhero called Nova, who appeared in a comic I used to read called Rampage. But ‘inspired by’ and ‘shamelessly copied’ are two distinct things. And I wasn’t aware of the inspiration even if he was. As far as I was concerned, this was an evolutionary leap in my creative abilities - a character I’d made up completely by myself. I don’t remember the whole backstory but I’m pretty sure the picture here is of the second Captain Starlight, Steven Stevenson, son of Peter Stevenson, the original Captain Starlight. Not sure how, but thanks to some space accident or other - maybe brought on by flying too close to the sun - he found himself imbued with the power of starlight, meaning he could shoot light out of his hands and his head. Light which could illuminate or burn. I know he was already a thing by the time I was seven, because - and I can’t quite believe this myself when I think about it - in my third year at infants school (these days you’d call it Year Two), the teacher encouraged me to paint an enormous picture of him in powder paint, on a huge piece of paper we had to roll out onto several easels in the school assembly hall. Not just of him but a whole apocalyptic battleground scene involving him and hundreds of aliens. I say hundreds - it might have been twelve or twenty, I don’t remember - but it wasn’t just me painting it. It was the whole class. It was my idea, but the teacher convinced us we should all paint it. So maybe there were actually hundreds of aliens. As I recall, Captain Starlight was standing on a hill, shooting beams of light out of his head and hands at the approaching hordes of green Martian men. He may have had people with him on his side called the Disciples of Light, but I might also be making that up. But I do remember the main baddies - both of whom could be seen in the picture - were Eos, a muscly green alien with three heads, and his brother Eon, who was just as muscly but only had two heads. They let me take it home with me and I kept it for many years, but I made the difficult decision to dump it when I moved house age 16. It just wouldn’t fit anywhere on the day and it was basically a musty old rolled up bit of paper with bits of powder paint continually falling out of the end of it. I’m sure it looked completely incomprehensible. But I remember what it was supposed to be, and that’s probably much better. At some point - probably at that battle to be honest - the original Captain Starlight died, and his mantle was taken on by his son Steven. Which is where we’re at here. He’s got blonde hair, just like me, and his costume is blue. And that’s basically all I can tell you about him. At least for now. A few stray observations: • I really tried to push the boat out with the illustration here - look at his lips! And the chin! • The word ‘Star-Light’ is hyphenated here, but in future I would drop the hyphen • The initials on his cap are also hyphenated • You can just about work out the same initials are supposed to be on his chest/stomach as well • One of his pupils is bigger than the other, like David Bowie (but not intentionally) • The word ‘ZAP’ is so exciting, there’s an exclamation mark before it as well as three after • Star-Light isn’t just his name - it’s clearly the umbrella term for my entire range of superheroes. My own Marvel. My own DC. I wonder how long that will last? CAPTAIN STARLIGHT WILL RETURN…