Starro the Conqueror

The Brave and the Bold #28

February 1960

In a Nutshell

Starro the Conqueror has come to Earth with a plan to detonate all of Earth’s nuclear weapons. The League splits up to thwart mutated duplicates Starro has created, then reassembles to battle the giant alien starfish together. With the help of a teenager named Snapper Carr, the League manage to deduce the conqueror’s weakness, and end his threat with a simple household chemical.

From the outset, we should note that Justice League creator Gardner Fox is relying on formulas previously established for the Justice Society, a book he worked on nearly twenty years earlier. One of those formulas is the framing narrative. Many of the League’s missions follow the pattern of a menace being established, the team splitting up into smaller groups to confront specific threats around the globe, then coming back together again for a final confrontation. 

Roll Call

  • I am reluctantly giving Aquaman participation credit for this issue, though his actual contribution was minimal. It is Aquaman who first learns of Starro’s arrival during a conversation with a puffer fish. Yet he makes no effort to deal with the problem on his own, or even to find Starro. Instead, acting only on the testimony of a fish, Aquaman immediately summons the League. From that point on, he does almost nothing. His only further contribution is to note that fishermen use lime to keep starfish away from their catches.
  • We learn that the Flash is Chairman of the League in this issue, and he definitely acts like  the team leader. He hands out the assignments for combating Starro’s clones, and is chiefly responsible for determining the creature’s weakness when he notices that Snapper Carr is unaffected by Starro’s powers. He also single-handedly defeats the clone at Happy Harbor.
  • Green Lantern mostly follows orders in this story, but he defeats the Starro clone at Rocky Mountain National Park, and uses his power ring as a spectrograph to determine what was protecting Snapper from the alien’s powers.
  • Wonder Woman and J’onn J’onzz team up to rescue hijacked scientists during Starro’s attack on Science City. In the final battle, they help encase the conqueror in lime, ending the threat.
  • Snapper Carr is protected from Starro by a fine coating of lime he acquired while doing yardwork. This is the clue the League ultimately uses to defeat Starro. For his contribution, the Flash makes Snapper an honorary Leaguer, so I’m counting him here.

The biggest names in the League and notably absent from the team’s debut mission. Here again Gardner Fox is echoing a pattern established for the Justice Society back in All-Star Comics. To avoid diluting their properties through overexposure, the JSA established a rule that heroes who anchored their own books could not serve as full members. This precluded Superman and Batman for much of the team’s history.

In the early days of the JLA, Superman and Batman were likewise kept on the sidelines. Each hero was already headlining three or four other books, and Fox was concerned that having them at the forefront of the League would pull focus from the lesser known heroes he wanted to spotlight. We’re going to see them bowing out of a lot of these early adventures, and it will be several years before they’re allowed to show up on the covers.

  • Though Superman appears in this issue, he is too busy pulverizing an approaching meteor storm to participate. While it seems like he could have asked the League for help on this planetary-level threat, Superman prefers to handle the problem on his own.
  • Batman is also unable to help the League, as he is in hot pursuit of two unspecified enemies who have teemed up to loot Gotham City. This seems like a problem that could have been put on hold while dealing with the alien invasion, but Batman has his own priorities.

The Scorecard

We’re going to be seeing a similar pattern for a few years here. There are seven members of the League at this point, but only five are going to be given much screen time. Expect to see a five way tie for a while.


Team Member


Tenure

Cover Appearances

Story Appearances

Contribution Rating

Aquaman

1

1

100%

1

100%

1

100%

Flash

1

1

100%

1

100%

1

100%

Green Lantern

1

1

100%

1

100%

1

100%

Martian Manhunter

1

1

100%

1

100%

1

100%

Snapper Carr

1

0

0%

1

100%

1

100%

Wonder Woman

1

1

100%

1

100%

1

100%

Batman

1

0

0%

1

100%

0

0%

Superman

1

0

0%

1

100%

0

0%

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