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I know this isn’t the comic I said I’d do but I’ve had this article in my toolbar waiting for me to finally review a Starriors minicomic so I gave in. What are the Starriors?

Created by Tomy, the Starriors takes place in one of may post-apocalyptic Earths, back when they still had utopias to balance things out. By now dystopia is all sci-fi wants to do to our planet and I’m long since tired of it. I used to be able to enjoy a story set in Earth gone to heck on occasion but now I’m long past over it. I wasn’t into the toys because by that point if it wasn’t tied to Star Wars I wasn’t into robots that didn’t transform into something.

The gimmick of the toys were that parts were interchangeable. The story of the line is that a cosmic event forced the remnants of man underground, leaving the Starriors to protect and restore the planet. For reasons explained in the Marvel miniseries (which will get reviewed in the daily comic reviews once I get there, though I’m missing an issue or two) to groups form. The Destructors are out to wipe out the Protectors for basically going against the cultural norm…most of them unaware that the Protectors are actually trying to find and reawaken man after finding proof he did exist. The Destructors’ leader, Slaughter Steelgrave, is convinced man’s return will mean the end of the Starriors and in his paranoia is manipulating everyone until the Protectors’ leader, Hotshot, learns man is alive and leads a group of other believers to find them. It helps that Hotshot’s group are mostly collectors and builders while Slaughter keeps all the nasty psychos in his party. And thus a toyline was born.

Marvel also produced six minicomics, released with the Starriors figures. In Marvel’s take, unlike what you saw in the commercial, the Starriors are the giant robots, like the Transformers and Robotix so someone was in a rut. For years I was hoping to find scans of the miniseries and got lucky recently when I found a site hosting all six issues. So let’s see if the minicomics were any good.

“Man, what did you have for breakfast?”

Starriors minicomic #1

Marvel/Tomy (1984)

“Deadeye”

scanned by Virtuanaut.net, link earlier in this article

Sadly this is another minicomic where nobody is credited for working on it outside of Marvel producing it. It’s always a shame to see that happen.

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