Jim Starlin's Dreadstar Returns Kickstarter Launches

For the first time in three decades, Jim Starlin is reviving his Dreadstar property for an all-new tale. Tuesday, Starlin and Ominous Press rolled out a Kickstarter for Dreadstar Returns, a 100-page original graphic novel featuring Starlin's first work on the series in thirty years. Featuring Vanth Dreadstar and his massive supporting cast of creator-owned cosmic characters, the Kickstarter campaign has already been funded as of this writing, with stretch goals well in sight.

Physical packages begin around $10 and include variant covers of classic Dreadstar books; there's even a level where you can get a new variant from the legendary George Perez. A digital copy of the new graphic novel is $20 while a physical copy is $30, and the packages just get bigger from there. Outside of that all, Starlin even teamed up with Creation.ink to craft the Dreadstar Guidebook, the Dreadstar Universe's equivalent of Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

An accident a few years back sidelined Starlin from the drawing board. Now that he's recovered for the most part, the comic icon decided is was time to revisit the character he created all those years ago.

"Three years back, I suffered some pretty serious damage to my right hand and left eye in a compressed air explosion," Starlin tells THR. "After I 'healed,' I found the eye worked well enough again but the hand would cramp up terribly after only about 15 minutes drawing with it. After three years of squeezing a rubber ball and other rehabilitating exercises, I'm now good for a couple of hours without taking a break. So I decided it was time to go back and visit with my ol' pal, Dreadstar."

In the same piece, Starlin says Dreadstar is one of his two favorite creations. As for the other favorite? You might know him awfully well these days. "I've come to think of Vanth and Thanos as my two favorite but highly different sons, one good in an odd way and one not so good," the writer adds. "Vanth is the ultimate anarchist, a bomb-thrower without a second act. He's good at breaking things — evil empires, tyrannical religion, despots, etc. — but godawful at putting the pieces back together afterwards. How could I resist seeing where he's at 20 years later and what he's been up to?"

You can back the campaign here.