Starro the Conqueror
2,000,000 BCE - Starro is spawned. A spore from a carnivorous alien organism that consumes planetary populations, it is mutated when its progenitor consumes the Hatorei, a psionic species. the Starro spore drifts through open space.
16 years ago - Starro attacks Earth, taking control of the population of Happy Harbor, a coastal town in New England. It takes the combined efforts of Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, Arthur Curry, Dinah Lance & J'onn J'onzz to defeat him. They decide to form a permanent partnership, forming the first Justice League.
2 years ago - Starro returns, its body now slightly smaller than the moon, overwhelming everyone in North America. The Watchtower is only able to battle it from within the Dream Realm
Building this project involves walking a lot of tightropes, balancing between trying to keep the logic of the world at least coherent (if not realistic) and trying to include the bizarreness that makes comics so much fun. Sometimes it's easier than others, but in some cases there is strangeness built into the very bedrock of DC's continuity, and it falls to us to just understand that this strangeness is the POINT.
Starro is one of the very first ideas introduced into the Silver Age of comics... long before we got New Gods or the Teen Titans or the Doom Patrol... we had a Giant Psychic Cosmic Starfish.
Starro is one of the very first ideas introduced into the Silver Age of comics... long before we got New Gods or the Teen Titans or the Doom Patrol... we had a Giant Psychic Cosmic Starfish.
Starro's Comic HistoryStarro is the very first threat the Justice League ever faced in their first ever appearance in Brave and the Bold #23 in 1960. Starro arrives on Earth and set to business conquering it. The comic is quick to give us all sorts of cool science facts about starfish, and does a great job of imagining just how dangerous a giant space starfish could be. Rather than spawning small copies of itself, it actually empowers three Earth-starfish to do his bidding, which tips off Aquaman and brings out the Justice League to fight it.
One of them does mind control a whole city (except for future League mascot Snapper Carr), but the visual of hundreds of mind-controlled victims with starfishes on their faces wasn't there yet, that came in later appearances. Starro showed up a few more times over the years in the pages of the Justice League of America, and even in the 60's era Superman/Aquaman animated series, but it wasn't until after Grant Morrison brought it back in their JLA run that you started to see Starro all the time. It's shown up in most of the modern DC animated series in one form or another, but it is DEFINITELY most famous for its appearance in 2021's The Suicide Squad, which, let's be honest, you've certainly already seen if you're reading this. |
Our Starro StorySo how big is Starro? How does it work? Like most villains, it gets re-imagined every time it shows up in continuity, but in this case there's a much broader variance because it does such a good job of fulfilling so many different narrative archetypes. It's been the size of a bus, the size of a skyscraper, and the size of a continent. Different versions of its story have made it so many different things, and that variety makes it almost TOO abstract to be narratively useful.
So we're going to narrow it down, because Starro is such an absolutely insane character to use we want to focus on just a few major appearances. Obviously we want to just use its first appearance, where it's a ball of squirming tentacles.. and perhaps by the end of that story, a big walking starfish kaiju, which is definitely part of the appeal here. The second appearance is another Morrison idea; where actually fighting Starro is impossible because he's so big he's basically a land mass. This story is more about going inside the collective minds of his victims, which allows us to actually use Morpheus in a Watchtower story. |