In 1960, issue #28 of The Brave and The Bold (Feb-Mar) introduced the Justice League of America, and their first villain.  Named Starro the Conqueror, he has appeared multiple times in print and several TV series.  To assist him in conquering planets, he is often depicted as releasing small starfish-shaped spores that usually latch onto the faces of sentient beings so they can mind-control them.

I started designing Starro in early February, 2020.  The first design I never even built because the legs were too skinny.  After adding a taper to the legs, I placed orders to buy the parts, around which time I realized that it was the 60th anniversary of both the first appearance of the Justice League, and Starro the Conqueror.  Once the parts arrived, I built Starro V2, which I displayed in Saline, MI on Feb 15-16.  Shortly after that show, I decided that the legs needed to be longer, so I changed the design to Starro V3, and got the parts to display him at Brick Bash on Feb 22-23.  Finally, I made a few tweaks to the design of the widest leg sections, filling in some of the larger gaps and merging the legs into each other.  Starro V4 was displayed two weeks later in Perrysburg, OH, on March 8.

The final version uses a total of 697pcs, including the five support braces, but not any of the minifigs.  The arms are built around Mixel joints, which allow an incredible amount of posability, while the semi-interlocking nature of the arm segments restricts much of that movement.  While the arms were originally designed to be radially symmetrical, I had to tweak the upper left/right arms so I could flex them both in a counter-clockwise direction, the three upper arms have minor changes to allow the minifigs to be attached, and four of the five support braces had to be incorporated into the four lower arms to help support the weight (giant space-starfish are a bit tricky to pose).  In an odd bit of fortunate timing, I was able to use the new action-jumper pieces from the DC CMF wave to attach Green Lantern and Aquaman in more dynamic poses than would have otherwise been possible.  At this point, the only major change I'd like to make is to swap out the 10x light-bley 1x1-1x1 down-brackets for dark-bley ones if they ever get around to releasing them.

Off to the side of Starro, I have Superman, the original Captain Marvel, and Plastic Man under the control of Starro spores facing off against Batman.  Someday I'd love to be able to field a huge range of DC superheroes wearing Starro spores.  And just because I have a weird sense of humor, I dug out the superhero versions of Spongebob and Patrick, and slapped a Starro spore on Patrick the Starfish.