DC Subtly Reintroduced One of Their Best Villains (And Nobody Noticed)

DC is home to a whole litany of incredible and iconic villains. From household names like the Joker and Lex Luthor to underrated gems like Despero and David Cain, DC is filled to the brim with countless supervillains who deserve the spotlight just as much as the legendary heroes. Many of them are finally getting a chance to indoctrinate a whole new audience into their cults of personality with the release of the Absolue Universe. This reality is built on the idea of changing everything about heroes except for their cores, and putting villainy on top as the hands controlling everything.

There are already plenty of incredible new takes on some of DC’s biggest names, and that number only shot up in the pages of Absolute Wonder Woman. Issue #16 introduced the Absolute Suicide Squad, sent by Veronica Cale to take down Wonder Woman. Led by Zatanna, this team featured classic Wonder Woman villains like Cheetah, Doctor Poison, and Giganta, but the biggest revelation was the one character nobody noticed. Starro the Conqueror is in the Absolute Universe, and he has been for some time. 

The Parasite Within

Veronica Cale is not a woman who trusts people—especially people she deems dangerous. Cale is a control freak through and through, and seems to have made it her personal mission to tick off every superpowered threat in the world. Case in point, the countless people Cale has imprisoned would turn on her in an instant, but as she needs powerful weapons to bring in Diana, she needs a way to control her team. That’s where these little, starfish-like parasites with central eyes come in. They were surgically implanted in every member of the Suicide Squad. Instead of bombs in their necks, they all have Starro drones down their throats.

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Unlike normal Starro drones, these let the villains hold onto their individuality. Instead of being under the alien starfish’s control, the Suicide Squad members more or less treated them like bombs that could go off at any moment. They prevented Zatanna from using her magic to remove them, but the Mistress of Magic found a way around that by taking control of Wonder Woman’s magic and using her as a conduit. Zatanna vomited up her drone and teleported to safety. While that left Diana to fight the rest of the Suicide Squad, the important revelations about Starro need to be discussed.

The Conqueror Conquered

The fact that Starro’s drones have appeared but not the intergalactic starfish himself implies a few possibilities. Starro must have visited Earth at some point in the past, and either he was pushed back or captured. If he were pushed back, the answer could be that the US government collected some of his leftover drones and experimented on them, eventually learning to weaponize them like living bombs. Cale sepcified in issue #16 that the drones would decay quickly without her assistance, meaning that they can activate the drones remotely, perhaps by connecting them to Starro. If he’s too far away to control them, the drones could easily just tear their host apart due to a lack of orders from their master.

Of course, the other possibility is the one that I’m leaning towards. It’s likely that Starro arrived on Earth, perhaps in a weakened state, and was taken captive by Cale’s organization. From there, they experimented on his drones to create mind control devices by torturing or controlling Starro himself. Of course, their progress seems slow and uninformed, as they have yet to function at anywhere near the level of Starro’s regular drones. Either way, Starro the Conqueror was on Earth at some point, and his drones have been co-opted by Veronica Cale to control the empowered heroes and villains that she wants to use.

It goes without saying that Starro is one of the most dangerous villains in DC. His arrival was the inciting incident for the first-ever Justice League story. In fact, it’s possible that Starro’s cameo here could be setting up his eventual invasion of Earth, which the true Absolute Justice League could form to combat. Starro has conquered entire galaxies before, and any kind of dark reinvention that the Absolute Universe could give him is bound to be diabolically terrifying. Personally, I can’t wait to see more of him.

Absolute Wonder Woman #17 is on sale now!

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