Starman: Such a great meal, even with the dodgy service

These days it's easy to completely pass by on genuinely great comics, movies, novels and TV shows, even though everything is now available everywhere all of the time. Especially when everybody is telling you to watch the new latest hot thing and you're still wondering how you'd tell your 8-year-old self that you couldn't even finish watching a bloody big budget Boba Fett TV show.

But I've had this problem since the 90s. After getting off the X-wagon, I was always more of a Vertigo kid, and only followed a select few superhero comics at the time. I saw a preview for the new Starman series by James Robinson and Tony Harris in an issue of the indispensable Comic Shop News, and it looked great, but I missed the first issue and figured I'd catch up later.

I never did. I read a couple of the trades and had a few issues, including a fantastic annual, but that was about it. And after a hefty write-up about the series in a recent issue of the equally indispensable Back Issue Magazine, I borrowed the collected series off my pal Nik and read the whole thing in a month.

And it was even better than I expected - so rich, so depth, so full of meat and flavour, and so well-made that it can make you get emotional about Solomon bloody Grundy. It gave personality to a city (the lack of suburbs in Opal City was one of a thousand beautiful little touches), and the way Jack's mind would wander in the middle of a fight was more true to life than a dozen contemporary autobiographical comics, you'd really feel worried for the dude. (And to be fair, he does actually die a couple of times.)

It had the best supporting cast, including the indomitable O'Hare family, the immortal Shade and a small army of previous Starmen. It was a very serious comic book, but also real deeply invested in the goofiness of the DC universe - the moment towards the end where Star Boy of the grokkin' Legion of Super-Heroes finds out he's an reincarnation of Scalphunter is a classic.

With incredible design work by Harris, an array of mighty talents to do the fill-ins and a rock-solid artist in Peter Snejbjerg to close out the series, the series looked even sexier than the plots. Just a goddamn delight to look at.

Despite warnings that the quality gets wobbly towards the end, I didn't find that at all, and thought it came to the only conclusion it could. I understand that it must have been hell to read in monthly issues - Robinson had an irritating habit of setting up a stunning cliffhanger, and then taking months to resolve it. Jack's loved ones are facing certain death, and it might be half a year before it gets resolved. 

But reading the whole series was like polishing off a genuinely great steak, and some of the latest Marvel and DC collections that I then read from the library were just so anemic in comparison. 

And many of them are still trying to mine the depths that this comic effortlessly reached. Those are meals I don't need anymore, and they can pass on by, like stars in the night.