Review: Stargirl: The Lost Children trade paperback (DC Comics)

I’m on a good streak right now, having enjoyed Joshua Williamson’s first Green Arrow volume and now, Geoff Johns' Stargirl: The Lost Children. It is not always the case that you can go home again, but I thought Johns did well making this feel of a piece with his classic Stars and STRIPE series — but also, being the first(?) mainstream Stargirl Courtney Whitmore appearance following the CW TV show, I detected a little influence from that, too. Late artist and Courtney’s co-creator Lee Moder is missed, but Todd Nauck brings an additional level of nostalgia, evoking Young Justice in general and certain adventures in specific.

Indeed, really this is a model for how a new DC Universe-wide “Young Justice Unlimited” could be done, though it’s unlikely that’s in the cards for Johns, at least. All the tonally different books Johns has written of late that culminate in Lost Children is equally impressive, showing the range and prowess that’s made Johns consistently so popular.

[Review contains spoilers]

All the missing sidekicks revealed in Lost Children are plausible enough that it takes some research to tell who’s legacy, who’s new, and who’s a bit of both. It’s these last ones I found most interesting — Johns brings in the Newsboy Legion, for instance, who if I’m not missing my guess are the Jack Kirby-created sons of the original Golden Age Newsboy Legion, as evidenced by the presence of Walter “Flip” Johnson.

These Newsboys were replaced in post-Crisis by clones of the original Newsboy Legion, whom Stargirl mentions here. So the realm where Johns is working is fascinating; not that he’s pulling the original Newsboy Legion out of continuity nor overwriting the Newsboy clones, but grabbing the already-overwritten interstitial Newsboys from limbo and simply dropping them whole cloth on the present. But more than that, though, because anachronistically he includes “Famous” Bobby, a Newsboy who only joined the clones as of Karl Kesel’s 1994 Guardians of Metropolis miniseries.

Why do we even need the new-old Newsboys, especially when the clones themselves could equally use rescuing from comics limbo? I’m not sure, but I hope Johns has a plan and that we see that plan come to fruition before his current tenure at DC expires, collections-wise. Equally that among all these Golden Age sidekicks, Johns includes Young Justice's Secret, a comparatively modern character — she’s been in limbo, yes; she’s portrayed as sidekick-ish to the Spectre, yes; but it would be nice if she had a role to play coming up rather than, essentially, going right back into limbo upon Johns' departure.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

If my etiology of the Newsboy Legion didn’t already give you a headache, Lost Children’s fourth chapter will, in which Johns goes at breakneck speed through Flashpoint, Doomsday Clock, and Flashpoint Beyond to end up at the current situation. Johns' tying of these four series is mostly sensible, especially considering that Flashpoint and Doomsday Clock likely weren’t originally meant to coincide like this. Surprisingly the least best fit is between the more contemporaneous books; Lost Children rewrites Flashpoint Beyond such that we’re supposed to understand that in the span of Beyond’s last few pages, Batman causes the sidekicks to be pulled out of time, the Time Masters rescue them and put them in stasis, and then they’re released from stasis and kidnapped by the Childminder. Again, that’s a recasting and not, I think, what’s actually on the page, of essentially three pages within Beyond’s final nine.

But I was impressed — given that Doomsday Clock is big and political and Flashpoint Beyond, with its Eduardo Risso lead-off, reads like superhero crime noir — that Johns is able to root it all in a friendly teen book, the closest approximation of Young Justice I can remember since Peter David’s Young Justice. This ought not be a surprise — I know the writer of Stars and STRIPE was also the writer of Batman: Earth One — but still I admire the range. And it speaks to good cohesion of the whole Stargirl franchise that I felt I could hear Brec Bassinger in Stargirl trying to warn Wing about his future, if not also Luke Wilson with Pat’s “She’s right, Court” in the first main issue.

In the Stargirl Spring Break Special collected at the book’s beginning (and published back around Infinite Frontier), Johns reveals “our” Green Arrow is the Golden Age Green Arrow, having been tossed in time and serving with the original Seven Soldiers of Victory. This recasts a continuity never before connected, as even classic DC had the Golden Age Seven Soldiers Green Arrow and the Silver Age Justice League Green Arrow pegged as coming from Earth-Two and Earth-One respectively.

I found this notable among other reasons for Red Arrow Emiko Queen’s casual use of the phrase “the Golden Age”; with “The New Golden Age” as the umbrella for all this, that’s on brand, but also introduces a meta-awareness of DC’s “ages” that I don’t think I’d seen before. Happily, at the point we’re talking about the original Seven Soldiers and the Justice Society and the cloned Newsboys and the events of Young Justice: Sins of Youth(!), it is rather amazing how DC has managed to successfully resurrect their old pre-Flashpoint continuity almost entirely.

I could choose to fuss about how Stargirl: The Lost Children has maybe one too many “big bads,” how Childminder working for Hourman working for Corky Baxter makes the cliffhangers repetitive, or I could choose to opine for a while how cool the scene with Boom Judy Garrick and Red Arrow is given that Flashes and Green Arrows don’t usually pal around (except on TV). I’ll do neither, but that is to say, it’s hard to find much wrong here and easy to find a lot right. Strong argument for Geoff Johns at least to write Stargirl again for DC, and I can only hope his two new volumes of Justice Society are as good.

[Includes original and variant covers, character sketches]

Rating 4.0