Back when I compiled my Top Television Series of 2020, one of my choices was Stargirl, a series I’ve mentioned a couple times now here in this newsletter. In response to that recommendation, one of my readers replied: “Stargirl was good until her 14 year old brother killed the most powerful villain by running him over.”
You know what? That’s entirely fair. That didn’t kill the finale for me — otherwise I thought it brought all the season’s various threads to conclusion in satisfying ways, and the other final confrontations, especially Hourman vs. Grundy, were appropriately thrilling and climatic — but it was certainly a deflating moment, a dumb storytelling decision that not only reduced the season’s primary antagonist to a joke, but really only seemed to be there to give said 14 year old brother, Mike Dugan, something to actually do in the big finale.
Looking back with the gift of hindsight, Mike was actually a weak link throughout the entire season. I’m far from the only person to come to that conclusion — just take a gander at the comments section for literally any episode of Stargirl’s first season over on the AV Club — but the more I thought about it, the more surprised I was by just how superfluous Mike was to literally every aspect of the series. He wasn’t important to the story. He didn’t have any sort of subplots or arcs of his own. He didn’t add anything interesting to the family dynamic — in fact, his presence actively created questions and contradictions within it instead.
So, why is Mike a part of this series? The answer is simple: Mike exists because he’s in the comics Stargirl is based off of. He’s a vestigial character, one that the series has evolved past, but who persists because of his presence in the source material.
Let’s get pedantic, and break this argument down in detail. Stargirl is a superhero series, airing on the DC Universe streaming app and the CW Network, about a teenager named Courtney Whitmore (Brec Bassinger) who discovers that her new step-father, Pat Dugan (Luke Wilson), was once the sidekick of the fallen superhero Starman, Sylvester Pemberton, and who decides to take up Starman’s mantle to battle the evil that’s taken root in her new hometown. With its dual focus on both superhero action and Spielberg-ian feel-good family entertainment, Stargirl strikes a unique tone that makes it stand out in the crowded superhero TV landscape.
Mike, though, doesn’t really fit into either of those modes of storytelling. Instead, his purpose in the series is largely to bug his step-sister and complain to his father, to annoy and get in the way; he’s a younger brother from a Disney Channel sitcom for tweens transplanted into a superhero show. Hell, Mike even looks like Lizzie McGuire’s little brother.
The writers do make one attempt to give Mike a plot of his own. Somewhere around the mid-point of the season, Mike and his step-mother Barbara have a pleasant afternoon together, bonding after feeling neglected by Courtney and Pat. It’s cute, but their relationship is never touched on again. If anything, it ends up making Mike look even more superfluous. First of all, it draws unflattering comparisons between Mike and Barbara as characters. As the series begins Barbara appears to be in the same boat as Mike, kept out of the action and therefore shuffled to the sidelines. But Barbara’s personal life ends up tying into the season’s main storyline rather neatly, giving her a relevance Mike never finds. Unlike the source material, the decision to hide Courtney being Stargirl from Barbara is treated as the grave, possibly marriage-ending offense it is, creating stakes around Barbara that, again, don’t exist for Mike. Barbara also has the advantage of being played by Amy Smart, and no offense to Trae Romano, who’s doing what he can with the material given to him as Mike, but he’s no Amy Smart.
More grievously, though, this aspect of Mike’s character also commits the cardinal sin of making Pat look like a bad dad. In the comics this was purposeful — Pat realizing that he hadn’t always been a great dad to Courtney and Mike was the culmination of his character arc — but the TV incarnation of Pat Dugan is defined more than anything by being a great dad. Part of that is just Luke Wilson’s sheer decency breaking through the screen, but it’s also in the writing. While in the comics Pat objected to Courtney taking up his friend’s mantle at least partially because he didn’t seem to like her all that much, in the show it’s clear that his concerns are almost solely based around Courtney’s safety, his fear of her getting hurt. As the series goes on and Courtney starts recruiting her friends to become the new Justice Society, Pat essentially adopts them one-by-one, becoming the team’s father figure. Yet, at the same time, there’s Mike, Pat’s own flesh and blood, running around underfoot feeling ignored and left out and not at all wrong about it. The way Pat treats Mike feels out of character; there could be potential for development there, except the series mostly plays Mike’s plight for laughs or quickly brushes them off. They don’t work.
Mike also raises more unanswered questions than his existence justifies. Who is Mike’s mother? She’s never acknowledged in the slightest, and neither is an ex-wife for Pat; more than a few viewers have speculated that Mike might be a robot created by Pat because his existence is otherwise so perplexing. Also, Pat has spent the last decade since the death of Starman and the rest of the JSA tracking the Injustice Society across the country — where does that mission leave room for Mike or a family, especially given that Mike knows nothing about Pat’s double life? And given that Mike is clearly older than ten, does that mean Pat had him while still running around with Starman? How did that work? There’s potentially an interesting story behind all this, but without acknowledging it, Mike instead just raises more questions than he answers. He muddles the series’ timeline and Pat as a character without providing anything worthwhile as a trade-off.
So again, it all raises the question: Why include Mike in the series at all? Maybe the writers have big plans for him in Season Two, but for now I’m sticking with my original thesis: he’s in the show solely because he was in the comics first, so the writers think they have to include him. This is a rather common thing with superhero adaptations in general (see: the Amazing Spider-Man movies or the Young Justice animated series), but I see some more specific arguments for it in this case as well.
Like most superhero adaptations, Stargirl takes inspiration from numerous comic books and storylines, but the bulk of its premise and overarching storyline are taken from Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., a DC comic written by Geoff Johns* and illustrated by Lee Moder and Scott Kolins, which ran for 14 issues starting in 1999.
While Johns would go on to become DC’s most influential writer by the end of the 2000s, and would advance into leadership positions in both their comic book and television/movie divisions in the 2010s, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. was the first comic series he had ever written. Johns also based the character of Courtney Whitmore after — and dedicated her to — his younger sister Courtney Johns, who died in a plane crash at age 18 in 1996. The comic and the character are nearer-and-dearer to his heart than any other. In preparation for this piece I went back and reread Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. for the first time in a decade, and was surprised by how many scenes were ripped straight off the page and onto the screen for Stargirl. The comic isn't just an inspiration for the series, it’s a blueprint.
*Since I’m talking about Geoff Johns here, it feels important to mention that he’s been accused of abusive behavior, along with Joss Whedon and Jon Berg, on the set of the Justice League movie by Cyborg actor Ray Fisher.
Despite his minimal role in Stargirl, Mike actually appears even less in Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. “Pat’s son” is mentioned in issue 2, but otherwise, he doesn’t enter the series until the end of issue 8, when he moves in with Pat and the Whitmores full time, and he isn’t present for the comic’s version of the final battle at all. This take on Mike is quite different from the show’s, and not just in his appearance; he just got kicked out of military school, so he talks like a soldier, but he also has a disrespect for authority and a massive chip on his shoulder.
He also knows about his father’s super heroics from the very start, and the story behind his mother and Pat’s ex-wife is explained almost immediately after he first appears. His goal is to take the belt that gives Courtney her powers for himself*, which achieves two things; in the short-term, it leads to Courtney and Mike fighting over the belt and breaking it, providing an extra complication for the final battle, and in the long term it allows Pat to regain his bond with Mike by passing along to him a different legacy by training him to pilot the S.T.R.I.P.E. mech at some point in the future.
*Mike had a reason for wanting Courtney’s power — something about “taking care of him once and for all” — but the series was cancelled before this could ever be explained, and although Mike continued to sporadically appear in the Justice Society titles alongside Courtney over the next decade, this particular plot thread was left dangling.
So Mike’s role in the comic is small, and the series wouldn’t have changed much if he hadn’t appeared at all, but it did have a purpose and an effect on the plot and characters. It’s easy to see how Johns and the Stargirl writers went “well, okay, Mike has to be there,” but then changes in the story as the show developed made him less and less relevant until his inclusion at all became perfunctory.
Interestingly, Mike was a vestigial character even in Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. I had always assumed Johns and Moder created Mike as well, but — and I only just learned this while doing research for this piece — Mike actually dates back to the 1980s. Pat Dugan dates back even farther, originally debuting in the 40s, the Golden Age of Comics. Most Golden Age characters fell into disuse and obscurity by the early 50s, but many also saw a resurgence in the late 70s and early 80s when a few DC writers started writing stories about these characters set on an “Earth-2.” Pat wasn’t a popular character at any point, but Sylvester Pemberton became a primary player in a comic called Infinity Inc. in the early 80s, and Pat would occasionally pop in to say hello to his former partner. It was in one of these stories where the fact that Pat had married and had a son was established. Again, I had assumed that Mike had been created by Johns and Moder in order to create more of a “blended family” element for the Dugan-Whitmores, but instead, he was a bit of baggage from previous writers that the new team felt obligated to address.
Except, Johns had an out. Between Infinity Inc. and Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. came Crisis on Infinite Earths. I won’t go into detail (though I have here in the past), but this storyline created a soft reboot of DC Comics’ timeline, allowing creators to rewrite the pasts of their characters however they saw fit. Johns could have ignored Mike completely and had all the in-universe justification in the world to do so, but he didn’t, and this is because Johns is a writer who cares deeply about comic book history. This is evident in pretty much everything he’s ever written; in Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. it takes the form of entire pages devoted to history lessons on the backstory of Pat or the Dragon King or the Shining Knight. These intricate connections and deep dives into history are something Johns adores, but they tend to work much better in the comics than they do a television series.
In fact, it’s this love of comic history that leads to Stargirl’s other vestigial character: Sir Justin, the Shining Knight.
Throughout most of Stargirl’s first season, the school janitor lurks in the background of scenes, eventually gaining more prominence until it’s revealed that he’s actually a hero, Sir Justin the Shining Knight, suffering from mental damage at the hands of the Injustice Society. Justin is also an old friend of Pat’s, but he adds little to the series, not providing any exposition other characters couldn’t have easily enough, having little emotional resonance with the other characters or the audience, and disappearing as the final fight begins, not contributing to the action. Perhaps even moreso than Mike, he’s a character who’s only in the show because he was in the comic first.
Justin’s storyline worked better in the comic, that’s for sure. Part of that is the execution. In Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. Justin plays a decisive role in the final battle, and Justin’s also the reason Pat came to Blue Valley in the first place — in the show, Hourman and the Justice Society fill that role instead, making Justin redundant. But Sir Justin also has an established history in the comics. Readers had, in the past, read stories of Justin’s romance with Firebrand or his clashes with the Dragon King, allowing Johns to revisit and resolve those old stories here. Most people watching Stargirl don’t have that history with the character, but the show seems to think that they do. This kind of storytelling is par for the course in comics, but feels overly complicated on a television show. In fact, that’s what Justin does to Stargirl: he complicates it without providing any benefits in return.
I know this is getting long, but if you’ll indulge me just two more paragraphs, I want to explain how good Stargirl otherwise is at avoiding complications, and how Justin starts to mess that up. See, in the comic books Courtney Whitmore has a complex legacy. Pat’s partner, Sylvester Pemberton, was a powerless hero known as the Star-Spangled Kid, and both were members of an obscure superhero team known as the Seven Soldiers of Victory. Eventually Pemberton gained super powers through a Cosmic Converter Belt given to him by the superhero and Justice Society member, Starman. After Pemberton’s death Pat marries Barbara Whitmore, and her daughter Courtney discovers Pemberton’s Cosmic Belt and becomes the new Star-Spangled Kid. Courtney quickly becomes a member of the newly revived Justice Society, and when Starman retires, he gives Courtney his Cosmic Staff, and she takes on a new name, becoming Stargirl. Stargirl, with her Cosmic Staff, became the iconic version of the character who went on to be a core member of the Justice Society and to appear in TV series such as Smallville, Justice League Unlimited, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
The Stargirl series smartly cut out all that early stuff. Pemberton was still Pat’s partner, but in the show he himself was Starman, a member of the Justice Society; he fought with the Cosmic Staff, not the belt, and Courtney inherited the staff, the Starman name, and the connection to the Justice Society right from the start. It’s the best possible move the show could have made, jettisoning unnecessary details to create a simple, streamlined backstory and role for Courtney, but Sir Justin complicates this by revealing that Pat and Pemberton had also been members of the Seven Soldiers of Victory, and bringing that obscure and complicated legacy into the television show. The show doesn’t make a big deal out of it — in fact, it mostly laughs off the Soldiers — but it could easily become too much for the show to handle. Characters in comic books switch teams or are on multiple teams all the time, but the show revolves around the concept of the Justice Society. It didn’t need another team muddling that concept and complicating these characters’ backstories.
And here’s the thing: I don’t hate Mike, or Sir Justin, or either of their actors. Mike made me laugh more than a few times throughout the course of the series, actually. It’s just that they’re extraneous, unnecessary elements that detract attention from stronger concepts and characters, and it’s clear that they’re just there because “well, they were in the comics.” That’s a shame, because, as I’ve just demonstrated, in almost every other aspect of the series the writers did a tremendous job of taking what worked about the comics and making them even better — seriously, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. is cute and fun, but Stargirl is a stronger series across the board. But with Johns working on both incarnations of the story, I think it was occasionally just a little bit too close to his heart for him to see that some elements didn’t need to make the jump from the page to the screen.
I’ll be fine if Sir Justin doesn’t return for Stargirl Season 2, but it would just be awkward if Mike disappeared. So, I hope the writers can find ways to make Mike more relevant to the story and the other characters moving forward, and I hope they can do so without repeating awkward bits like his defeating Icicle by running him over with a truck. Mike may not be a natural fit for Stargirl, but with a deft touch, he certainly isn’t doomed to be a vestigial character forever.
OH, AND ONE MORE THING ABOUT LAST WEEK’S NEWSLETTER
Last week I talked a bit about my experiences playing in garage bands when I was younger, and with a week to have thought about that piece, now I’m a little worried that I made the experience seem almost solely negative. I enjoyed being in bands enough to stick with it for a very long time, and I still look back at that time fondly, but the downsides are definitely the more interesting part of the experience, and the parts that I actually learned from. I would love to play music again someday, but I think my ultimate musical fantasy would be being in a cover band, just quickly learning songs then playing them in front of people. Boy, that would sure cut out everything I didn’t like about being in a band, huh?
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!