Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Hero Case File #91: Starfox

Sometimes, someone comes up with a character that, on the surface, seems like a cool idea.  But then, time passes, societal standards change, and people come to different conclusions about what is and isn’t acceptable

That’s probably why Starfox has become a lot less visible than he used to be.

The Eternals are a longtime concept at Marvel, and at some point, someone decided to set a few of them on Saturn’s moon Titan.  These Eternals have three noteworthy members:  Mentor, the wise old leader; his son Thanos, the lover of death; and his other son Eros, the eventual Avenger with the creepy powers.

While Thanos has gone on to become the face of evil in the Marvel Universe, Eros would be seen a lot less.  See, Eros had the standard Eternal powers of long life, strength, flight, and so forth,  But he had one other power, the one that gets all the attention, and that was emotional manipulation.

More accurately, he could make people calm, relaxed, and really, really happy.

And given his name, you can probably guess where this may have gone.

Not surprisingly, Eros was popular with the ladies.  Under the codename Starfox, Eros joined the Avengers and served with them using the world’s creepiest powers that don’t involve raising the dead.  All his powers can raise are hormones…and a lot of uncomfortable questions.

In fact, given the nature of his powers, before the actual father was revealed at San Diego Comic Con, I, along with who knows how many others, may have been inclined to think Star-Lord in the MCU version of the Guardians of the Galaxy, given his luck with the ladies, would be revealed to be Starfox’s son, thus making Thanos his uncle.  As it is, that won’t be happening unless Thanos also has an origin change, and I don’t think we’ll be seeing anything like that anytime soon, though I have been wrong before.

By the by, there must be something satisfying about having Starfox try to calm the Hulk down, as seen in the image at top, only to have the really angry Hulk punch the guy through a few walls.

The overall potential creepiness of Starfox’s powers actually came to a head in a recent She-Hulk series where the superhero lawyer was called to defend her former Avenger comrade on sexual assault charges.  The end result was actually that Starfox was found to be just really charming, and he’d never used his powers in a creepy manner to get himself laid…but it says something that this idea came around at all.  Given how successful the character had been with women, it wasn’t too far a jump, and the character was always portrayed as a benevolent sort, so it wasn’t too much of a leap to wonder about such things.

And we need to remember, the seventies had an Avengers storyline where Ms. Marvel was impregnated against her will and taken away by the father to live “happily ever after” and none of the Avengers saw anything wrong with that!  It took a later X-Men storyline by Chris Claremont to have a righteously pissed Carol Danvers tell off all the Avengers for their own stupidity.  So, maybe it isn’t such a shock that the Avengers would take a guy with rather…sketchy powers and think nothing of it.