I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Starfire, the golden-skinned alien warrior of the Teen Titans. Maybe it’s her joyful nature, or her love of adventure, or maybe it’s partly her beauty, contrasting the fierce warrior within. Either way, she is always near the top of any list of Alien Heroes, right up there with Lar Gand of Daxam, Mar-Vell of Hala and even the gold standard, planet Bismoll’s favorite son, Tenzil Kem. Unusually for me, I even love her animated adaptation, whose stilted English is endearing as heck, leading us to today’s extraterrestrial query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) wants make it clear I’m not asking about MOST POWERFUL alien hero, so it’s not a quick yell ” SUPERMAN!” situation, asking: Which hero from another world is the BEST alien hero in your mind?
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Sorry, still Superman, but since it feels like cheating, I’ll pick more alien-like one. Ultraman! Chameleon Boy is close, but not quite there because of nostalgic reasons.
Ahim de Famille, but I might be biased by a huge crush on both the character and her actress. So my second choice is her teammate, Captain Marvelous.
Beta Ray Bill, Norrin Radd, Rom Spaceknight, and Dr Honeycut are all good choices. Alien. Noble. Body transformation.
Wait. Body transformation? Why? I guess partly so that they can never go home. What’s the point of that? Well they are less likely to stay on their home planet and instead continue their adventures. Their continued adventures won’t just be a tour of weirdness between an alien and with different aliens. No, no, no. Their continued adventures will also be somewhat focused on some internally-directed psychosis thing.
This means that instead of the Alien Nation schtick of “those Earthlings are so Earthling-esque and those aliens are so alien,” which can be very heavy-handed, the focus of the weirdness is not cultural or biological but instead body transformation and its implications.
Superman is the superfavorite alien hero and partly because of his looks. He looks human. He behaves like a human. He was raised by humans. There’s a line of thought that if an object looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck then, it is a duck. Superman is barely an alien to his own audience.
My favorite alien hero is Milestone’s Icon. Just another Superman knockoff. Except he has lived like no human due to his time on Earth with his looks. He has the body transformation gimmick too. So no going back to his home world. And he is noble, blah blah. Icon’s series was full of great stories about life on Earth.
Matthew! How could you forget the adventures of that plucky and indomitable soul stuck on a world he never made?
HOWARD THE DUCK!
As for the DC side, I vote for J’onn J’onzz a.k.a. The Martian Manhunter. I think he was one of the characters that really took a lot of time to learn about himself and his adopted home.