About 5 or 6 years ago, I bought a few full longboxes (and maybe a short box) from a local comic shop owner who was going through a hard time and looking to liquidate some of his inventory.  One of the boxes that I picked up contained a decent chunk of the guy's "S" titles, so I ended up with huge batches of comics like Superman, Steel, and Star Trek.  Included in the "S" box were quite a few issues of DC's Starman — the Jack Knight incarnation — from the mid to late 1990's.  I ended up with over 30 issues from this series and although I had never read any Starman stories in the past, I had heard a lot of good things about the title.  Back when I bought these, I was working nights and I was feeling a little burned out back then.  It was a nice escape to read 2 or 3 issues of Starman during my dinner break.  I really liked the Starman stories, but my interest in comics was waning back then, so once I read all of what I had on hand (or what I thought was all of them), I more or less forgot about them for a while.  Wile I was going my collection this past weekend, I found a few later issues from the series along with an annual and a special Secret Files and Origins issue that I had never read.  Reading these "lost issues" was an absolute blast.
Jack Knight as Starman
My favorite Starman picture,
taken from
Secret Files and Origins #1

On Monday, I stopped in a local comic shop and picked up issues 0 and 1 of Starman, as these two were among the missing issues in my collection.  With all the Starman books I had read, I was still a bit foggy on his origin and it was good to go back to the beginning and fill in some of the blanks.  Incidentally, these two issues were among some of the best I have read of this title.  As a side note, the copy of #1 that I recently snagged looks like it's been autographed by Starman co-creator James Robinson...and given the price I paid for it, I am guessing it was a bit underpriced. But who am I to complain?

Having read thousands of comics, I can honestly say that I think that the Jack Knight version Starman is really one of the better comics series ever produced.  Jack is the ultimate reluctant hero, sporting a bunch of tattoos and a Hawaiian shirt as his own unique superheo "uniform."  The series ultimately unified the multifaceted, multigenerational history of the "Starman" name and legacy.  Along the way, old heroes and villains were resurrected and reinvented in stories that stretched through time and space in grand and thrilling stories. The supporting cast featured complex and intriguing characters such as the Golden-Age Starman (along with quite a few other Starmen), Solomon Grundy and The Shade in a wonderfully complex series of fantastic tales.

I have read some rumors that DC is flirting with the idea of bringing the Jack Knight version of Starman out of retirement as part of their ongoing weekly series, 52. I'm not reading 52 these days, but DC has piqued my curiosity once again.