After giving R.E.B.E.L.S. #1-3 a sort of lukewarm, middle-of-the-road review, I found myself enjoying issue #4 more than I did the first three. Then I found myself really enjoying the first 19 pages of issue #5. Unfortunately, it’s a 22-page issue.

The first 19 pages of R.E.B.E.L.S. #5 aren’t going to be recalled years from now as “classic” pages of a six-issue comic book arc masterpiece, but they are solidly entertaining pages that reminded me of Paul Levitz’s 1977-79 run on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and the early part of his second run on the title in the 1980s (before the classic “Great Darkness Saga” that elevated those stories to the “classic” level).

Like Levitz had 30 years ago with the Legion’s membership, Tony Bedard has a good handle on the personalities of the various characters that populate his current series, and he takes them through what was shaping up to be an intriguing plot concocted by a shadowy figure behind the scenes who had taken control of Vril Dox’s L.E.G.I.O.N. (for those who don’t know, Vril Dox is otherwise known as “Brainiac 2”--the “son” of Superman’s #2 nemesis and the great grandfather to Brainiac 5 of the Legion of Super-Heroes).

I was getting swept along in the intrigue--wondering who had been able to take over Brainiac 2’s operation (and apparently using the giant alien starfish-like creature known as Starro as part of his plan). I hadn’t really considered who it might be, but it seemed like it was going to be revealed to be a longtime villain in the DC mythos--someone like Brainiac 2’s own father or the Time Trapper, but I knew both of those villains had appeared or were appearing in other DC series.

Then I thought it might be someone like the Legion’s magical nemesis, Mordru, at a time when he was known as Wrynn in the 20th/21st century--or perhaps Kanjar Ro, a longtime science fiction villain of the Justice League and Adam Strange. Alas, that’s not who was behind the plot against Dox’s L.E.G.I.O.N. Rather than any of those longtime “cosmic” villains in the DC universe, it was revealed on page 20 that the manipulator behind the scenes has been none other than . . . Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer.

Except that this Death Dealer has one of Starro’s starfish spores on his chest, but the Psions (a lizard-like extraterrestrial race in the DC universe) on the last page of the issue referred to the Death Dealer with the mini-starro on his chest as “The Star Conqueror”--which has always been Starro’s sobriquet. My immediate thought was, “Why mimic Geoff Johns’s recent Brainiac arc in Action Comics by revealing that the real “Star Conqueror” was somewhere else in the galaxy while his giant starfish-like “probes” have been conquering the galaxy for him.

Then I recalled a recent interview with Tony Bedard on another Web site, which I didn’t read at the time it was posted online but which I recall had a title that was something like, “This Isn’t Your Father’s Starro”--which just goes to show you how old I am because the headline really was saying to me, “This Isn’t Your Starro, Old Man.”

And it’s not.

If the Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer is The All-New Star Conqueror, then I’m disappointed--and that truly seems to be what Bedard might be doing. It looks like just as Johns revealed Superman had never battled the “real Brainiac” all these years, the Justice League never battled the “real Star Conqueror.” Instead, Superman and the League had only been battling the “probes” of the “real villains operating behind the scenes.”

These is still well-written and well-illustrated initial arc for R.E.B.E.L.S. (though I wonder what happened to Andy Clark, the illustrator for the first three issues), and the story is entertaining in that “early version of Paul Levitz’s Legion” sort of way. However, I wish that writers would create their own characters rather than “reinvent” old characters.

It’s one thing for writers like Alan Moore or Grant Morrison to add to the mythos of Marvelman or Swamp Thing or Animal Man while not discarding what had come before (I support that type of “reinvention” of characters”). However, it’s quite another thing for writers like Peter Milligan or Steve Niles to essentially create new characters but slap names like Shade, the Changing Man or The Creeper on them--and I’m worried that Bedard has taken this latter approach with the Star Conqueror.

Why not just create a brand new villain that looks like Frazetta’s Death Dealer? (And I hope Frazetta is getting some sort of royalty for the use of his character design.)

Granted, the possibilities of what could be done with the giant alien starfish-like creature named Starro had pretty much been played out--especially after Gerry Conway’s Starro story in Justice League of America #189-90 nearly 30 years ago. Morrison also did a great story in his run on JLA in which he had another giant starfish-like alien named “It” as the villain. “It” was a member of Starro’s race and was also called the Star Conqueror.

After Conway’s story and Morrison’s story (not to mention Gardner Fox’s original back in The Brave and the Bold #28 nearly 50 years ago), there really isn’t much more that can be done with a giant starfish-like alien who controls people’s minds by attaching miniature versions of itself to them. If that’s the case, then Bedard should have just left Starro alone and let Frazetta keep his Death Dealer.

Yes, it’s a good issue, and it’s entertaining, but I’d rather have seen Kanjar Ro come out of retirement and be revealed as the villain who is building a power base by taking over Vril Dox’s L.E.G.I.O.N.

Oh well, that’s not what I’m getting. I’ll finish out this arc (next issue) to see if Bedard has anything truly original planned for his new Star Conqueror. If he doesn’t, the next issue may be my last until my finances improve.

I will say, though, that the fifth issue really made me wish that this creative team (Bedard and St. Aubin) had been doing the most recent Legion of Super-Heroes series. Instead, they’re using the Legion analogs of L.E.G.I.O.N. to do similar stories set 1,000 years earlier--and they really are entertaining tales, despite my qualms.

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