Thoughts on the “Lightning Saga”
and Dawnstar’s Return
Dawnstar is back, after seventeen years, and with all of her limbs!
Not as a mutilated, spirit-possessed, ravaged woman. (Stay in esthetic perdition for that, Tom Bierbaum, Mary Bierbaum, Al Gordon, and Keith Giffen.)
Not as a morally challenged hallucination. Not as part of a tale dredged from a Crisis deemed long past. Not as a part of a momentary crossover in tangled multiple timelines. Not as the subject of tall tales told around groupies’ fires in a public park.
And not, as some of us had felt it necessary to create in order to remember her properly, in fan fiction.
In a substantive, fully-in-earnest, in-the-flesh-and-feathers, in-continuity, printed, official story. Whole, undamaged, and beautiful. Ed Benes showing her, inside — with passionate intensity and a gorgeous variation or two on her classic look. Michael Turner showing her, outside — stunning, fierce, dedicated in her focus.
Thus ends many years of frustration and longing, for those who’ve loved this character, as I have for over 25 years. It’s a subset of the broader pleasure in seeing the entire Levitz-Cockrum-Grell Legion portrayed on the page in the current JLA-JSA-Legion crossover, but it’s heightened by what this underrated creation of Grell and Levitz has been made to endure in the stories.
Dawnstar was often placed on the outer ring of action, too often in the thirty years since she was created, by Legion writers who didn’t know what to do with her. Tracking powers were instrumental, rather than influential, this in the sense of the Kryptonians, Mon-el, and Ultra Boy knocking things around. They made broader teamwork possible, as was true for the powers of nearly all of the Legion women.
They also were often difficult to incorporate into the demands of storytelling. Even with a huge galaxy for the Legion to cover, many stories still turned on some hero, villain, or object not being able to be found readily or easily. If her inner ineffable senses and her outer hyper-light speed — the fastest in DC space — were ever used fully, many stories would have been resolved far sooner. In a way, Dawnstar always was too capable!
She also both enjoyed the emotional richness and endured the impossibilities of her love for Wildfire. Even with never being able to touch him, nor he her, despite a temporary reversal in his lack-of-body fortunes. Only once being able to connect with another man, in his flesh, on a distant “exile” planet.
(If she found other love of any degree on Thanagar, in any gender, for me that’s another reason to cheer!)
And then, in the Five Years Later storytelling that ended thirty years (more or less, but persistent) of Legion continuity ... she was abused beyond words. I had a sinking heart when I saw what she had become, after the restart-short-of-a-reboot early in those tales. I knew immediately who she was. Worst of all, I saw what she had lost from her back.
Why, why, WHY was the cheap, brainless development used of mutilating and removing two of this woman’s limbs? As one of the worst of the misogynistic “Women in Refrigerators” elements of comics? Why build up such a character, over a dozen years, with detailed, convoluted, fascinating byplays of plot, emotion, and art, only to tear out her physical essence?
I made an esthetic cry of pain from the heart on that day, and gave up for many years on wanting to follow the Legion at all.
It’s only returned in fits and starts. The reworkings and reboots have never yet brought it back fully. Some of them have been a pleasure, more of them have been a nightmare, for this reader, since the last unmistakable Legion high point, when the team stood behind Sensor Girl on that floating piece of the Sorcerers’ World, at the end of the Magic Wars.
Yet even with Legion stories still being told, my beautiful, exotic, feather-rustling heart of them remained absent. Until, finally, this week, and in another title.
At least she is present, whole, and at the focus of a story, and I can finally have a reason for at least a part of my mind to exult, in more than one sense: The last seventeen years never happened!
Even if she is lost in this storyline, or vanishes into the mists again — a touch of bitter fear, anticipating the rest of this tale, as she holds the rod in her hand — she is there. She is helping to make the tales move with a gust of wind from her feathers. It’s sweet beyond anything my eyes have tasted in years. And I’m able to see it.
Decry this Dawnstar fan’s passion if you must. It doesn’t matter to me. A part of my esthetic joy is back. I adore this beautiful participant in the DC panoply, and I don’t care who knows it.
g r e y b i r d 0 0 7 {a t} g m a i l {d o t} c o m
