Who Is The Suicide Squad’s Starro, DC’s Killer Starfish? (From Space?!)

There’s a lot going on in the two trailers that have been released for James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. The spots are packed with obscure DC heroes and villains and more explosions and gore than you can shake a javelin at, so one might be forgiven for not thinking too much about the literal big bad that’s revealed in the red band trailer with a tech yelping “We got a kaiju up in here!”

Yes, it’s a giant killer starfish and you can be forgiven if you like me saw that and thought “well that makes sense for a movie with a talking shark” and moved on, but I’ve been informed by my old pal the internet that the giant killer starfish is actually character called Starro with a long DC history. You learn something new every day in this job. We even fantasized right here on The Mary Sue about Starro getting their own movie and the day is finally here!

According to the DC Fandom Wiki: “Starro is a mind-controlling intergalactic starfish and leader of the Star Conquerors, its race of alien starfish. An intimidating, hulking monster itself, Starro has been a threat to Earth, as it has tried to conqueror it on multiple occasions, often acting as a planetary threat to the Justice League of America.”

I just want to sit with that for a minute because … it’s amazing. And some of Starro’s main powers are—aside from being a giant starfish from space—mind control and asexual reproduction where it can make lots of little Starros, and also enlist the help of Earth starfish to latch onto people and make them do Starro’s bidding.

Starro the conqueror has been around since the 60s, and has faced off with (wait, can I say that? Does Starro have a face per se or just a big eye?) notable heroes including Aquaman (it’s a starfish after all), and Starro keeps coming back. I’m honestly shocked we haven’t seen Starro in live-action television or in movies before, because Starro sounds like exactly the kind of threat that Doom Patrol or the Legends of Tomorrow would face. After all those shows featured a giant roach making out with a giant eat and a psychic gorilla time traveling to try and kill young Barack Obama respectively. But I’m very glad we’re getting Starro in The Suicide Squad.

And the introduction of Starro means that maybe we’ll get to see another fan-favorite character who I’ve learned is pretty popular in the comics: Jarro.

DC comics

So apparently in the comics, Batman preserves a piece of Starro (Starro was helping the good guys at that point which maybe means we’ll see Starro join the Suicide Squad too) in a jar and it grew into, natch, a sentient super starfish named Jarro. Jarro looks up to Batman like a parent and even dreams of becoming Robin.

DC Comics

Jarro is for obvious reasons, a fan favorite.

This is a Jarro Appreciation Post.

If you don’t respect Batman’s Starro Son, you don’t respect me. pic.twitter.com/NofeGSQgSx

— NOLAnerdcast (@NOLAnerdcast) April 13, 2021

An look, I’m looking forward to seeing giant Starro in The Suicide Squad, but if you told me that we might see Batman flinging his tiny Star Conqueror son at criminals, then I might finally get behind the idea of a Batfleck movie. “Dad?” Gets me every time.

(via NOLA Nerdcast, featured image: Warner Brothers)

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