Review: Doctor Star and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows TPB

Take the Doctor Star challenge. See if you can read the first four issues of Dark Horse comics“ “Doctor Star and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows”“ (DSKLT) without shedding a tear. Collected in TPB for release this week, the first story arc of DSKLT is a poignant tale about work-life imbalance, love, abandonment, and unrecoverable loss. Jeff Lemire and Max Fiumara paint the spectrum of human emotions across the canvas of this intergalactic cross-dimensional universe. And a universe is what it is. The tag line for DSKLT says “from the world of Black Hammer”“ but what they really mean is “from the universe”“ or “from the galaxy”“ or “from the para-zone of Black Hammer.”“ These words matter in order to appreciate the size, depth and scope of Doctor Star“s “world.”“ And appreciating the enormity of worlds within Doctor Star“s world is the only way to finally grasp its most important, most mundane message: the most important thing you can ever do in any world ”“ in any timeline or universe ”“ is to be a present loving member of a family.

Doctor Star is an expert in para-radiation. His cutting edge research (in 1941) earns the attention of the US military industrial complex. The rest, you might say, is history. While Doctor Star sees his work as a groundbreaking foray into alternate realms and realities, our government only sees the militant and hegemonic potential of wielding the ultimate weapon of destruction and dominance. This is the story of world history ”“ peopled by idealistic scientists, over-determined government bureaucrats and disconnected leaders. *Spoiler Alert* The bureaucrats and the “leaders”“ win the day. They chart the course of our history and, for DSKLT, the history of Jimmy Robinson ”“ aka Doctor Star“s life and that of his family.

In the opening pages of DSKLT, Doctor Star is approached by a couple of G-men who are somehow aware of his work, even of his unpublished research. In the early exchange, Robinson corrects these government agents when they greet him as Mr. Robinson and then Jim Robinson. He gently reminds them that he is Doctor Robinson. Readers should appreciate (and love) that “doctor”“ is always spelled out in DSKLT. No abbreviated version of the word can capture the expertise and the intense commitment required to pursue and attain a Ph.D. Anyone who has ever achieved this consummate educational and intellectual goal (in any field) truly understands what it means in real-time and in real hours of focus and the intellectual pursuit of subject matter expertise. The pursuit of a Ph.D. (again, in any field) is an absolutely solitary enterprise. It is ultimately and literally just you and the work, eventually your work which in turn becomes your life, your offspring, your partner — your everything.

Never before has this been so perfectly dramatized in comic book form and that is just one of the gifts that Jeff Lemire and Max Fiurama bestow upon their readers in this simultaneously cosmic and commonplace story. Our real world corporate culture likes to go on endlessly about work-life balance. But in reality there is no such thing. Work, in our world, is often all-consuming and life often plays the background minor character in our existence. When the work is as awe-inspiring and universally sublime as the work of Doctor Star, then the consequences of work-life imbalance are meted out in epic proportions.
DSKLT is a candid look behind the veil of the golden age American superhero prototype. The series (and the Black Hammer universe) is a literary descendent of the classic original Watchmen series. But where Watchmen was critically committed to the deconstruction of the modern superhero ”“ the systematic dismantling and re-ordering of our safe good vs. evil tropes of heroism ”“ the worlds of the Black Hammer universe are less concerned with the play of deconstructing binaries and more obsessed with the studious re-imagining of the human relationships that live, suffer and die behind the mask. For all we know at this point in DSKLT, the “kingdom of lost tomorrows”“ is a realm nestled inside the deep corrugated spaces of Doctor Star“s exceptionally brilliant mind. And it is his unrecoverable personal loss that forms the aesthetic machinery of this interstellar, intergalactic, multidimensional story. As you take the Doctor Star challenge keep these two contested realities in mind. *Spoiler Alert* In our world Doctor Star is the worst possible parent and partner ”“ obsessed with his work; never present, even when he is; and maybe responsible for the deaths of his own family unit. And yet, in another world ”“ another universe, he is the paragon of fatherhood the parent and stellar partner that literally everyone aspires to be. That this irony can so seamlessly exist in the DSKLT universe is just one key insight into this comic“s universal appeal. 5/5.

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

(W) Jeff Lemire (A/CA) Max Fiumara