Janus Stark

Janus Stark was about an escapologist in Victorian London who appeared to be simply an unusual act on the music hall stage, but who privately used his extraordinary abilities to battle against injustice.[2] Stark had an unusually flexible bone structure, enabling him to get out of an astonishing variety of tight situations at need.

The protagonist was born in 1840 as the orphan Jonas Clarke. His background story explains that he was sent to an orphanage where he was mistreated, but escaped and lived in the streets. There he befriended a beggar, Blind Largo, who taught him pickpocketing, but also trained Clarke's unique gift for body bending and escaping.[3] As an adult, Clarke took on another persona as Janus Stark and became an escapologist and private detective.

Drawn by Solano Lopez, there was more than a touch of Reed Richards (from the departed Fantastic Four strip) in Stark's uncanny abilities. The strip was one of the few to survive the merger of Smash into Valiant in 1971, and is still well remembered today.

Lopez was a foreign illustrator, born in the Argentine, who worked at a studio in Spain. For reasons of cost, IPC had taken a policy decision to source artwork from cheaper sources outside the UK. Along with the presence in the new Smash of reprint strips, production costs were cut to the bone in order to make the comic financially viable.

The British punk band Janus Stark based its name on this comic strip.[4]

Janus Stark is also referenced in Albion (2005) by Alan Moore.

On the Series K, episode 5 of QI, Alan Davies sparks a tangent discussion about a superhero he remembers from "Valiant Comics" called Janus, who he describes as an "escapologist who can get through tiny gaps". Davis noted that every week Janus seemed to be in a situation where the solution was for him to get through a tiny gap.[5]