Justice League of America # 29

Overall- Eh, this was an OK story. Nothing more, nothing less. This issue basically retells the origin story of the villainous Starbreaker. The bottom line is that Starbreaker seems to be somewhat similar to Galactus from the Marvel Universe, in that he destroys entire planets and then feeds on the energy that those dying planets release.

Starbreaker tells the story of his initial encounter and defeat at the hands of the JLA from several years ago. Starbreaker was a big time cosmic menace, but his Achilles heel was the fact that he needs negative psionic energy to become more powerful. When he destroys a planet, Starbreaker is actually feeding off of the fear of the dying people/things on the planet(or something like that), which is what grants him his powers. Starbreaker heads to Earth and begins to push the Earth into the sun to destroy the planet and feed upon the fears of the dying people.

The JLA naturally oppose him, and ultimately manage to defeat Starbreaker when the crowd watching the battle begins to cheer for the JLA, which deprives Starbreaker of the negative emotions he needs to power himself. After his defeat, we learn that Starbreaker was then cast into a shadow dimension by the Guardians of the Universe, and has been languishing there ever since. However, the Shadow Thief, who can access the shadow dimension with his powers, decides to work for Starbreaker and plots to free him from his imprisonment. And that ladies and gentlemen was basically what this story was about.

For me the highlight of this comic was the artwork of ChrisCross. I've always enjoyed his artwork, and it was as crisp as it ever was in this comic. As for the story, like I said earlier, it was OK, but since it was a glorified reprint of Starbreaker's origin, it missed the spot for me. For a score, I'll give this comic a 6 1/2 out of 10. Ah, seeing ChrisCross's pencils brought me back to his great work on Captain Marvel with Peter David a couple of years ago... Those were some incredibly good comic books that I would recommend to anybody.