Stakar Ogord: The Untold Truth Of Marvel's Starhawk

Stakar Ogord, also known as Starhawk, is the most enigmatic Guardians of the Galaxy member from the alternate future timeline known as Earth-691. This was the multiverse where the War of the Worlds occurred, with Earth overrun by aliens who used Mars as a staging ground. This is the world where Killraven emerged as the hero of the resistance. Later, Earth expanded into its solar system and even reached Alpha Centauri, but the alien Badoon conquered them. This is where the original Guardians of the Galaxy emerged, a group consisting of Vance Astro, Martinex, Charlie-27, and Yondu. They later added Nikki, and Starhawk himself mysteriously emerged to become a member. 

Starhawk is one of the strangest of Marvel's cosmic heroes. For one thing, he shares his body and consciousness with his adoptive sister (and later wife) Aleta. While he has the usual standard cosmic powers of manipulating light, flight, enhanced strength, etc., his most significant (and annoying) power is his precognition. Along with his enhanced senses, he often smugly says, "Accept the word of one who knows" when situations come along, often telling people what to do as while citing those powers. 

Starhawk has gone through a lot of changes in the comics, as more and more of his past has been revealed. His retconned backstory was made even more bizarre than his first origin story, which is really saying something. Let's learn more about this cosmic enigma. 

In 1977's "Avengers Vol 1" #166, the Guardians of the Galaxy traveled back in time to the 20th century pursuing their enemy Korvac. They knew he had traveled back to this era as well, and he was intent on killing the younger version of Vance Astro in order to change history. Unbeknownst to them, he had acquired godlike power from the world ship of Galactus, and was plotting his next move on Earth. 

Starhawk was able to perceive him and tracked him to a modest house in New York in his Aleta form. Korvac fought Starhawk and Aleta, killed them, and then resurrected them. He didn't want to raise any suspicions, but he erased Starhawk's memory of the event and recreated the character unable to perceive him in any way. Smart plan, right?

The problem was that it worked too well. When the Avengers managed to track Korvac down through other means, everything seemed normal. They were about to leave when an enraged Starhawk yelled at the others about who they were talking to, because there was no one there. Starhawk couldn't perceive Korvac in any way, including as a normal human being. That led to a vicious battle where Korvac ultimately committed cosmic suicide, because he saw that his girlfriend no longer had total faith in him. 

On the planet Arcturus IV, their military was known as the Reavers of Arcturus. They were dedicated to wiping out the mutants, who apparently were feared on more than one planet. After wiping out a mutant group, a Reaver named Ogord discovered what seemed to be an Arcturan child. He took him as his own son and raised him alongside his own daughter, Aleta. Naming him Stakar, he was a disappointment to his father because he was more interested in archaeology than he was war. One fateful day, Aleta followed him to the temple of the Hawk God. 

Aleta accidentally activated a helmet that tapped into the Hawk God's power, and Stakar saved her from madness. It had a strange side effect: it merged them, so that only one of them could exist in physical space at the same time. They left Arcturus IV to explore the stars and become part of the Guardians of the Galaxy nearly a thousand years later. They tolerated each other's presence despite a number of resentments for a while, but they were eventually separated and rejoined on multiple occasions. During one separation, she was able to express her love for Vance Astro, and they became engaged. Feeling himself start to fade, Starhawk forcibly reabsorbed her, although they were now capable of hurting each other when one was in control. The Hawk God permanently separated them after getting tired of watching them fight, with each retaining different powers. 

Sylvester Stallone played Stakar Ogord in 2017's "Guardians Of The Galaxy: Vol 2," and is slated to return as the character in the third film. Rather than the cosmic-powered, enigmatic version from the comics, Stakar here was a hard-bitten Ravager whose clans nonetheless had some familiar characters in them. Like his comics counterpart, Stakar is from Arcturus. Indeed, the comics version might have been a lot more like the film version if he and Aleta hadn't disturbed the temple of the Hawk God. Perhaps he would have became a Reaver.

In the MCU, Stakar never merged with Aleta. Instead, he met her along the way and they became part of the same Ravager crew, falling in love before falling out. Stakar rescued a young Yondu Odata from a slave-fighting operation and made him a Ravager. He was a father figure for Yondu. Yondu broke his heart when Stakar learned that Yondu was bringing Ego his children, because he knew that they were heading to a fate worse than death. So he expelled him from the Ravagers.

When Yondu sacrificed himself to save Peter Quill from Ego, Stakar and the other Ravagers were so moved that they held a special Ravager funeral for him, offering him forgiveness. Stakar also reassembled his original team, a nod to the original comics version of the Guardians. It included Charlie-27, Martinex, Krugarr, Mainframe, and Aleta. Their goal was simple: stealing. This was definitely not One-Who-Knows.

The Guardians of the Galaxy were born when the last survivors of Earth's colonies banded together against the conquering alien Badoon. That included Charlie-27 from Jupiter and Martinex from Pluto. It also included a man out of time: Vance Astro, a 20th century astronaut who survived a thousand years in cryogenic freeze, only to discover that faster-than-light drives had been invented on his way to Alpha Centauri. He had traveled back to Earth with a Centauri native named Yondu, only to find the Badoon. They banded together as the first iteration of the Guardians of the Galaxy in the multiverse known as Earth-691.

At least, that's how they thought it went down; what actually happened was a bit different. Starhawk secretly manipulated the events that brought them together. He set the teleporter that brought Charlie to Pluto. He secretly helped hide Martinex while he was surreptitiously sabotaging the Badoon. He helped Vance and Yondu escape from the Badoon throne room on Earth with his light powers. When they met Charlie and Martinex and officially formed their resistance team, he provided a beacon that allowed them to escape through underground tunnels. 

In Starhawk's first chronological appearance in Marvel comics, he was similarly mysterious. He helped Vance Astro and the time-traveling Valkyrie discover the female Badoon, which eventually led to the male Badoon's downfall. Then he told Dr. Strange and the other Defenders to go back to their era, and that their part in the fight was now finished. 

How did Starhawk become the One-Who-Knows? Dr. Strange didn't detect any magical energies in him, and also saw limited psychic energy. When Martinex was dying and Starhawk was healing him, he revealed his secret: Starhawk lived in a time loop. Due to some future actions, he was sent back in time to when he was a baby, right before he was discovered and adopted by Ogord. While there were memory gaps here and there, Starhawk was forced to relive his life over and over. He was the One-Who-Knows because he had lived it all before, and he knew precisely what was coming. 

The event that inspired this turned out to be betraying and getting kicked out of the team, only to rejoin them on a trip to the 20th century. There, he was forced to cede control of his body to Aleta. After a struggle, she triggered the time loop and sent him back. It wasn't until the Hawk God later intervened and permanently split them that they were able to live their own lives. 

Starhawk learned there was another being manipulating his life: Era, the evil son of the cosmic being Eon. Era ensured that the Martians won the War of the Worlds via his manipulations. He lured Starhawk's father Quasar to his death. Moreover, he was trying to cause a war amongst cosmic beings. A newly free Starhawk vowed to stop him, no matter what.

Starhawk went most of his life thinking he was the son of an Arcturan mutant. However, the Hawk God that gave him his powers tantalized him by claiming that the parents he grew up with weren't his biological parents. He also gave him a hint that the Silver Surfer knew something about the truth. The Surfer, now wearing the Quantum Bands and renamed the Keeper, was on a mission to defend the universe against Galactus. However, Starhawk borrowed the Quantum Bands for a short term and learned two things: his real biological father was Quasar, and Quasar had died a thousand years earlier. 

Quasar was a Protector of the Universe in wearing the Quantum Bands, and after they die protectors go to a mysterious sub-dimension called the White Room. Starhawk briefly perished at the hands of a cosmic entity called the Abrogate and visited the White Room himself. He met Quasar and learned that his mother was Kismet. When the Martians were deep into their attack on Earth, Quasar learned she was pregnant. He took Kismet to a play with an order of nuns who tended specifically to pregnant women. Quasar died trying to return to Earth, but the immortal Kismet remained on the planet out of grief. When Starhawk learned who his actual mother was, he immediately found her and they teamed up against an ancient enemy that was trying to destroy them. 

When Stakar and Aleta first merged and Stakar became Starhawk, he channeled the power of the ancient Hawk God. Their father, Ogord, was initially delighted by this turn of events. With his cosmic-powered children at his side, he dreamed of conquering the universe. However, Starhawk and Aleta had other plans. They left Arcturus IV to explore the stars, leaving Ogord vowing vengeance upon his children. 

Despite being adoptive siblings, Aleta and Stakar fell in love with each other as they shared the same body. Truly, it was the ultimate form of intimacy. They asked the Hawk God to temporarily separate so they could marry and have children, and he granted them their wish. They had three children in short order and named them Tara, Sita, and John. Starhawk housed them on a domed asteroid, complete with a ranch-style home and horses. However, the Reavers discovered the asteroid and Ogord kidnapped the children, implanting mind-control devices. He studied them, learning that they had immense power, including the potential to be energy vampires. As they absorbed the power of Starhawk and then Aleta, they began to age. 

Just as they were about to kill Aleta, the Guardians busted in. They attacked Ogord, and Yondu realized that the headbands the children were wearing were controlling them. Vance Astro used his telekinesis to remove them, not realizing that they would age into dust. But that's exactly what happened, and Aleta blamed Stakar for not being strong enough to save them. 

The Guardians of the Galaxy that were formed by Peter Quill in the present-day, main Marvel universe (Earth-616) found a frozen Vance Astro trapped in some kind of time construct. Upon rescuing him, they were attacked by a mysteriously-appearing Starhawk, intent on killing Vance and everyone else. They managed to fight him off, but a female version of Starhawk appeared. She told the team that the Guardians shouldn't yet exist in this era, and that Vance's presence was a horrible mistake. The Guardians managed to subdue her, but she told cosmic cop Cosmo the dog that a temporal error in this era was impacting the future, and she had to destroy it. 

She kept trying to convince Vance to free her, but he refused. This female Starhwak eventually manipulated a newly-resurrected Moondragon into freeing her, and she attacked the Guardians again. This time, she used her time machine to bring them all to the 31st century, where she revealed that after some study, she realized it wasn't Vance Astro or the Guardians that caused the disastrous time error. It was Black Bolt, and his war against the Kree and Shi'ar Empire. 

This Starhawk told them that they had to get a message back to the past in order to convince Black Bolt to not set off the Terrigen Bomb, which would destabilize all of reality. She sacrificed herself to save Quill's team, who wound up pinging back and forth in time, meeting different versions of the future Guardians.

The Hawk God, the patron of Starhawk, is the bad boy of cosmic entities. Most such beings tend to have a central purpose. Death, Chaos, Order, and the Living Tribunal all have obvious motivations and reasons for existence. The Hawk God's purpose was to hunt; he was the ultimate predator. However, when he hunted and killed the entire race of Watchers in his dimension, this drew the anger of the Council of Cosmic Beings. Galactus argued on his behalf of "the need to feed," but the prosecutor was the last remaining Watcher. He tried to link the Hawk God to the hated plague-bringer Bubonicus. 

The Hawk God was ultimately deemed dangerous enough to be punished. He was sent back in time to the planet Arcturus IV, unable to move or speak for millennia. Stakar found himself inexplicably drawn to the Hawk God's temple, and it wasn't long before the Hawk God's power was unleashed, wiping out half of the Reaver fleet. Working through his new avatar, he had found a loophole in his sentence. 

He was later accused of precipitating the potential War of the Cosmic Entities, and he had a confrontation with Eternity. When Starhawk and Aleta emerged from Eternity, the Hawk God was furious for embarrassing him. However, they helped battle the powerful cosmic entity known as the Protege, and the Hawk God rewarded them by separating the pairing once and for all but granting Aleta her own powers. 

Immediately following the threat of Korvac, but before the Guardians of the Galaxy returned to the future, Starhawk detected a huge power surge on Earth. Worried that it might be a resurrected Korvac, he discovered his ability to perceive the source was impeded by machinery being operated by Ben Grimm, the Thing. Ben was looking for his girlfriend Alicia, who had been kidnapped by a powerful being known only as Her.

Her was created by the same set of scientists who created the perfect being they dubbed "Him." Him went on to become Adam Warlock, who at that point was dead. Her approached Alicia because she had met Him years earlier. Her concluded that she was created to be the perfect mate of Him, destined to spawn a race of ideal beings, and she was going to resurrect him. Thanks to a series of misunderstandings, the Thing and Starhawk got into a fight with Her but wound up helping. However, Warlock's spirit was not in his body, and the resurrection failed. 

When Adam Warlock actually returned, he rejected Her, and she decided to seek out a new mate. One of the possibilities was Quasar, who also rejected Her. They became friends, and she renamed herself Kismet. However, on Earth-691, during the War of the Worlds, Quasar and Kismet did get together and had a son: Starhawk. It wasn't the same Kismet as Starhawk's mother, but it was no less a strange encounter in retrospect.