STARFIRE HAS CLOTHES ON: Deets From the Team Behind Starfire & Harley Quinn
Starfire has a new look and a new home! Harley's... still Harley.
It looks like Starfire might finally be getting the comic she deserves!
Starfire #1, created by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, is coming out in June, and in it, we’ll find Starfire in a new costume, and in a new home: Key West, FL. Before we get to the obvious question of ‘Why Florida?’ (*waves at Floridians*), here’s the synopsis from the solicit:
“From the writers of the outrageous smash hit HARLEY QUINN comes former Outlaw Starfire in her all-new ongoing series! She’s an alien warrior princess trying to find peace on Earth, and she’ll fight anyone and anything to get it!”
Sounds awesome to me! And thankfully, this version of Starfire manages to be wearing a full shirt, which is nice. In a recent interview, Conner reveals that, more than reader response to Starfire’s most recent costume, she decided to change the look for herself:
“I’m actually a horrible social media person so I don’t know a lot of times what people are saying about anything, which is not good but great at the same time, but I actually spent an entire day pounding my head against a wall, trying to figure out what her costume was going to be.
I didn’t want it to look too aggressive and too military, too angry, like “Lets fight!” and then I didn’t want it to be too boring. Jimmy actually kept coming into my room and saying “Not right! Not right” and I was like “Agh!”, so I decided to shelf it and sleep on it. I ended up sleeping on it for the night, and sometimes you just have to push a project away and get away from it in order to have a fresh take on it, and so the next day I talked to Eddy Berganza our editor and I was just like tossing some ideas back and forth with him and we decided on “sexy without being porn-y.” So I was like, “That I can do.” And he goes “Maybe a little bit of the old costume and a little bit of the new costume,” and I was like “I can do that too.” And so I sort of combined the two of them, and I think it worked out pretty well.”
As for that move to Key West, Conner and Palmiotti wanted to take Starfire out of her comfort zone. Superpowered humans and aliens? No problem. But now Starfire is going to be interacting with more average humans. And as Conner says:
“We’ll be taking her to Key West, Florida, where she’ll stand out a little less than she would in New York, being tall, beautiful and orange – we can say she and her outfit will stand out less and we can just say she took too many tanning pills!”
Palmiotti has this to say about the move:
“We didn’t want to do a big city because than it becomes another superhero book in a way. Everyone’s in the big city, like if its Gotham than you have all of the Batman characters, and so and so forth, and if we put her in Brooklyn than it would be Harley’s territory, so we thought, well, her costume is pretty revealing still, and the idea that living in Key West might be a perfect place for her to be. She wants to be away from other superheroes. She’s an alien so she wants to get to know regular earthlings, and so we thought, Okay… don’t take her to an island.”
But don’t worry, Harley Quinn fans! The creator couple is still hard at work to bring you the continuation of her bizarre antics as she employs 11 assistants and creates an army of Harleys. I’m looking forward to the relationships that will be explored between Harley and a diverse group of women!
Palmiotti explains:
“In Harley Quinn #14, her life just breaks apart, but with Poison Ivy’s help, they put an ad out for help, for an assistant, and she gets like a million people trying out to be her assistant and in the end she picks 11.
They’re all going to dress like Harley and they have different ethnic backgrounds, and are different, so it’s going to be her running around with a gang of Harleys, but it’s not going to go as well as she plans. In theory it gave Amanda and Chad a chance to draw 11 different Harleys, and different costumes…”
And Conner reveals that they’ll be from different parts of New York City, and that it’ll be reflected in their names: Harley Queens, Harlem Harley, and Bolly Quinn, whose family owns an Indian restaurant on the Lower East Side.
The women of DC are getting more and more interesting every day. Hallelujah!
(via Newsarama)
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
