Who is Starro the Conqueror? 5 Things You Need to Know About the Suicide Squad Villain

As far as DC Comics’ supervillains go, we have had the pleasure of seeing the most wonderful and the most bizarre of villains throughout the publisher’s Multiverse. Among the latter group, the Suicide Squad’s Starro the Conqueror, who is also set to appear as the principal antagonist of James Gunn’s 2021 movie, is certainly among the most bizarre ones.

Starro is basically a giant alien starfish that is bent on conquering Earth and other planets. Due to his parasitic nature, Starro is a very dangerous foe and has fought the Justice League, as well as other heroes and groups, including the Suicide Squad.

Since Starro is such a unique and bizarre character, his story is extremely interesting. If you couple that with the fact that he is going to be a main character in James Gunn’s highly anticipated movie, you get a character worthy of an article. That is why we have decided to give you all the necessary information you need to know about Starro the Conqueror. Enjoy!

1. Starro’s origins

Starro is a super-intelligent being, an alien with a life form resembling a gigantic starfish with a central eye and prehensile limbs. This entity arrived on Earth, and with its special ability created three starfish, causing these creatures to cause dangerous havoc (such as detonating an atomic bomb explosion, in order to absorb their energy; it would kidnap scientists to absorb their brain ability to take them under control and thus spread spores in the form of the Starro star, and be able to control the residents of Happy Harbor and Rhode Island under his mind control) until he was stopped by heroes such as Aquaman, Flash (Barry Allen) , Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Martian Manhunter, and Wonder Woman.

Starro would be defeated and covered alive with lime, which nullified the entity’s mental powers.

It was later revealed that Starro comes from an alien planet of similar creatures known as Star Planet. The race Starro belongs to is called Star Conqueror and the creatures are bent on absorbing energy from other planets, as they have a lot of parasitic traits. This is what makes them so dangerous.

Is Starro an alien?

As the above paragraphs revealed, Starro is, indeed an alien. He is an alien lifeform resembling a giant starfish, which is why he looks familiar, despite being very, very different. Starro stems from the so-called Star Planet and is a member of the Star Conqueror race. Although he looks like a starfish, he is not related to the animal of the same name found on Earth.

Is Starro a kaijū?

From a purely technical standpoint, Starro could be classified as a kaijū, since he is a giant monster. To further strengthen his case, Starro is also an alien, which makes him even more similar to a kaijū: But, Starro is at the same time an American comic book villain, and kaijū is a term associated with, primarily, Japanese cinematography. The term kaijū, aside from the monsters themselves, signified a subgenre of (predominantly) Japanese cinema featuring giant monsters. It is important to know that the term is culturally almost endemic to Japan and that Western monster movies are rarely (if ever) classified as kaijū movies. This is why we wouldn’t really classify Starro as a kaijū.

Is Starro a Yellow Lantern?

Well, in Teen Titans #51–54 (2007–2008), as well as Green Lantern/Sinestro Corps: Secret Files (2008), Starro is portrayed as being a member of the Sinestro Corps, carrying a total of five Rings and controlling several other supervillains. This means that Starro was, for a brief period, truly a Yellow Lantern, but that was short-lived, really. He was destroyed by a future version of Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash.

2. Starro’s abilities

Starro is an alien conqueror, an entity as much as a living being that possesses the gift of controlling the human mind when he releases his famous spores, which resemble the shape of a terrestrial starfish, the same shape that his giant body possesses.

As creatures that reproduce asexually, Starro spores are capable of generating clones that act in accordance with the will of the main mastermind. The clones are parasites by nature, and can adhere to the face of any living terrestrial or alien being, so that later it takes control by welcoming the central nervous system, allowing it to control it remotely in this way to its respective host.

Without the control of the host, it can be lost once removed from the victim.

3. Starro’s powers

Both variants of the parasite are capable of absorbing energy, it can project it towards the main Starro telepathically; they have the ability to fly, change color, and even self-regenerate, while the larger ones have a high degree of invulnerability.

The giant versions also have tremendous power to achieve immense mental abilities, and with it, be able to indirectly influence the mind of the host they consider for their potential main characteristic, in addition, they are capable of lulling countless people to an induced sleep and accessing their thoughts through dreams.

Its size can vary, it can be as large as to encompass the size of a huge city and even encompass the size of a planetary oceanic body, in which case, the Starro probe can radically alter the climate of a planet, its topography, and the geography within its radius, similar to the terraforming process, can even span the size of a planet.

A future iteration of Starro would finally manage to obtain much more power, as when he managed to obtain 5 Qwardian power rings (one on each of his pointed tentacles), when he was part of the Sinestro Corps; each ring allowed him to create completely functional Lantern constructs of his thoughts as a carrier, but only those that allowed him to feed off people’s fear rather than the power of willpower.

Given the difficulty in their usage, the Starro’s capacity to use five at once indicates a mastery of the fear element and its usage in battle, as shown when he personally went up against multiple iterations of titans all at once. The latest version of the Star Conqueror shows how to use its parthenogenesic capabilities to breed microscopic clones of itself, which can be inhaled by potential victims, serving as a catalyst to affect the giant iteration’s telepathic abilities.

When Starro the Conqueror controls a living being in particle, he uses it to spread his telepathic power, being strong enough to control the entire Starro alien race, possessing immeasurable levels of physical resistance, being further reinforced by the energies taken from the victims of their Starro probes.

Starro is physically strong enough to directly engage the supervillain Despero in single combat. In fact, Starro the Conqueror is nearly impervious to physical damage as are the larger Starro clones of him.

It is also akin to the spores implanted in living humanoid species that Starro controls in order to reproduce his own Starro clones from the physical presence of a Starro mother in his chest, a unique power for his own creation, is the ability to convert to a normal terrestrial starfish (from planet Earth) in a Starro spore.

4. Starro’s main enemies

Starro is a villain so talking about his foes means we’re talking about the good guys. And we are. Starro has fought a plethora of different heroes and here, we are going to list the most common ones. Some are individual heroes, some are groups. Here a list of these common foes as they have appeared in comics:

• Justice League, the Earth’s mightiest protectors, composed of the most famous DC’s heroes and heroines. They protect the Earh from local and galactic threats.
• Green Lantern Corps, the protectors of the Universe, whose headquarters is on Oa. The Lanterns draw their power from willpower and patrol the different sectors of the universe as a form of galactic police. One of the most famouse members is Hal Jordan of Earth.
• Aquaman, also known as Arthur Curry, originates from the mythical kingdom of Atlantis. According to the best known version, he is Arthur Curry, the son of a lighthouse man and an Atlantean queen, who accepts his heritage only later on and then becomes the protector of the seas.
• Flash, the Barry Allen version of the character, is the second iteration of the Flash. As someone capable of using the Speed Force, Barry is one of the fastes people alive and one of the best known Speedsters.
• Dream of the Endless, one of the Eternals and the personification of dreams, stories and, as the Eternals also represent the opposite of what they personify, of reality.
• Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, an animalistic version of the Justice League from Earth-C; the group initially had considerable difficulty fighting together. For example, they threw themselves against an enemy only in pairs, and found themselves interfering with each other and, as a result, found themselves out of action. However, as the series progressed, the Squad preserved the development of their tactics to become a coherent fighting force.
• Superman, also known as Kal-El or Clark Kent, an alien who developed various superhuman abilities, such as incredible strength and waterproof skin. His adoptive parents advised him to use his abilities for the benefit of humanity and he decided to fight crime as a vigilante. To protect his privacy, he dons a colorful suit and uses the alias “Superman” when he fights crime.

5. Who can defeat Starro?

Starro is, as we have established, a very tough nut to crack. He is very powerful and is immune to almost all sorts of damage. He has been defeated by the likes of the Justice League and its members, the Green Lantern Corps, and other similar groups. This means that with enough firepower, Starro is certainly someone that can be defeated. Among the characters that defeated him is also Neil Gaiman’s Dream of the Endless, a character from the Sandman series.

There are two interesting ways to defeat Starro, if you dig a bit under the surface of his comic book history. Namely, in his first appearance, he was defeated when it was discovered that Snapper Carr (an attempt at creating a Jimmy Olsen-type of character for the Justice League) was immune to Starro’s powers because he had lime on him from using lawn care products. The heroes then deduced that Starro was weak to lime and they actually managed to subdue him using it. On one later occasion, he was also defeated using fresh water, although that one has never been completely explained and has appeared only once, never to be mentioned again.

And that’s it for today. We hope you had fun reading this and that we have given you all the information you were looking for. See you next time and don’t forget to follow us!