FIRST ISSUE: STARBORN

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

The third of the so-called “Stan Lee” titles from Boom! is Starborn. The first issue opens on some sort of intergalactic battle between races of superior beings; then we turn the third page and discover that the galaxy, the battle, and the beings are all inventions of a wannabe writer of fiction named Benjamin Warner. Warner, who poaches on his employer’s time and the office computer to write novels during working hours, is awaiting word from a publisher that his first novel has been accepted. He muses for a few pages about how to make the inevitable sequel a better book than the first, Khary Randolph’s pictures deploying different styles to display alternative realities — first Warner’s, then the world of his fiction, illustrating his musing. Warner’s happy daydream is destroyed when a letter from the publisher arrives, rejecting his novel.

In the midst of the ensuing doldrums, Warner sees the flame of his childhood and adolescence, Tara Takamoto, and engages in reverie about her. Back at his work station, he is attacked by an alien being that looks like a fugitive from one of his unborn novels, but Tara suddenly shows up and saves him by shoving him off an upper floor of the office building, which then explodes, leaving Warner and Tara in midair on the plummeting side of a cliffhanger.

Makes you wonder why every writer thinks writers make fascinating protagonists. In this case, at least, Stan Lee’s concept, born, doubtless, of his own experience as a comic book scribe, is at least grounded in a reality we all are likely to recognize. Even if we aren’t writers, we realize that writers live in two worlds, one of their own devising. In Starborn, Lee’s alter ego, Chris Roberson, has constructed a fantasy about being a writer of sf, an inception in which the writer’s reality alternates between those two worlds. Our introduction to Warner, his musings, and the outcome of his first novel’s submission to a publisher constitute the completed episode in this inaugural issue.

Warner is a nice enough fella, a little naive perhaps (but aren’t all writers a little naive?), and Tara is sufficiently toothsome that we wonder what she sees in Benjamin. The book, however, promises to be an extended allegory about the life and imagination of a writer on the fringe of a world we all live in and can probably identify with — at least, with his yearning for Tara if not with his imagined intergalactic warfare. Might be enjoyable. (And I’ve insinuated into this and the preceding paragraph two clues as to what the possible inspiration for this kind of fiction might be. You get to smoke ’em out.)

Randolph’s storytelling — pacing, focusing, staging — is entirely adequate, even highly skillful, without any particularly spectacular innovations. His style, what I gather is the “urban” version of manganese (square fingers, dental detail as far back as the palate), is crisply achieved in a mostly clean linear mode, and he varies his treatment in three ways to indicate visually that we are in Warner’s fantasy world, his real world, or his remembered adolescence. Nicely done.