Jim Starlin's New 52 Comic Appears to Feature Lobo, The Weird

What could Jim Starlin be doing? It's getting less and less clear with each subsequent tease, and our initial assessment that it was a safe bet he was working with an A.R.G.U.S. helmet might have been somewhat off. After all, some fans had speculated that helmet might belong to a reinvented Adam Strange, which doesn't seem so farfetched today. After all, he's got two new pages posted on his Facebook page today from a mystery artist who's working with him on the series. Guesses from the fans have ranged from Rick Leonardi to Jesus Saiz, with both Pasqual Ferry and Patrick Broderick guessed and then discounted. Featured on the pages? Well, they're layout pages, so it's hard to say definitively, but the first page (shown at right) certainly appears to feature Lobo, slumped against the wall with a cigar in his mouth and a bottle of hooch in his hand. While that would be in character for any version of Lobo, the bare chest combined with what appears to be dreadlocks would be a change in his design since the last time we saw Lobo during Rob Liefeld's troubled run on Deathstroke. According to Liefeld, he was strong-armed by editorial into the look that they ultimately went with so that seems unlikely at least at first blush.

A second page, meanwhile, is a bit less clear in who it features, but a couple of Starlin's commenters have made a pretty good guess. A young girl is standing in a room that could be mistake for any room on any planet, except for the fact that she appears to have something to her right that seems to be floating off the ground and casting a shadow. That, to us, says "sci fi," as it suggests that this simple bedroom has some kind of self-propelling device or another in front of the massive mirror and/or communications device the little girl stands before. Enter a character with one regular eye and one big, round one, along with what looks to be some kind of deformity on his face. He's thin, wraith-like and comes up and in through the floor. Could this, a number of fans speculated, be a New 52 reinvention of the '80s Starlin creation The Weird? We kind of hope so, since the last time we saw the character--in 2006's Mystery in Space, also featuring Captain Comet--is was a great, underrated little story. In any event, it appears as though Starlin is taking us back to space, which is more or less what most fans would expect from him...but doing it in such a way that it appears to be drawing together a number of disparate elements of the DC Universe.