Stargirl--The Lost Children #4 // Review
It’s a lot to swallow. The kid sidekick of the Time Masters should know what he’s talking about, though. He has a very complex understanding of the dizzying complexity of the DC multiverse. All the knowledge in the world isn’t going to help save the children if they can’t collectively defeat the Childminder in Stargirl--The Lost Children #4. Writer Geoff Johns moves his story towards its climax in another issue brought vividly into the visual by artist Todd Nauck and colorist Matt Herms. With big action rendered in a large group of largely new characters, Johns’s story runs the risk of feeling kind of unengaging, but Nauck and Herms’s art powerfully sells the intensity of the action.
There is a small village of former superhero sidekicks who have been kidnapped and taken to an island. To make matters worse, it’s an island entirely outside of time. And now Stargirl will try to rescue them all with the aid of a Golden Age kid who seems to know a lot about time. To save everyone, Stargirl and company will have to defeat the Childminder--a strange old woman who might have been the original face of Mother Goose. It’s all very strange, but it’s all very dangerous for everyone involved. The lost children are in a great deal of peril.
On its most basic level, Johns’s tale is a simple rescue story. The heroes will try to escape the grasp of a sinister villain at all costs. There’s little question that almost everyone’s going to make it out alive. Success is more or less assured. Johns has done an impressive job of collecting a whole cast of sidekicks that really DOES feel like it could have come out of a parallel DC Golden Age. As a result, there’s a feeling that every one of the characters in a very, very cluttered book is getting WAY too little time in the center of the panel. Ultimately, the series appears as though it’s heading toward an unsatisfying conclusion.
There aren’t many artists who can take a huge group shot of superheroes and make it look like anything other than a mess. Nauck’s work with this series feels like it accomplishes the same kind of depth with massive crowds that George Pérez was capable of back in the 1980s. Everyone seems to exist in their own space on the page while contributing to the larger atmosphere of the action and drama. This is a huge accomplishment given how much standing around Johns has them doing for the bulk of the issue. Herms’s coloring finds a way to make sense of the huge crowd while also managing to highlight Stargirl in the center of it all.
There’s a real sense that Johns is delivering on some of the complexity of the modern DC multiverse in a way that almost seems vaguely intelligible. It’s an admirable task that he’s attempting. It may not totally work, but at least he’s introducing a whole bunch of retro characters that could all theoretically work really well on their own...most notably Jay Garrick’s daughter--The Boom to his Flash.
