I did not expect my favourite Red Lantern to be a house cat. But here we are.
Dex-Starr is exactly what he sounds like: a small blue cat from Brooklyn carrying a power ring that runs on pure rage. He flies. He fires energy blasts. Then he vomits glowing, corrosive blood at people.
And underneath all of that, he ranks among the saddest characters DC has published in twenty years.
Here is the part that gets me.
Every other Red Lantern rages at something enormous and abstract: the Guardians, the universe, the injustice of existence.
Dexter wants one specific person: whoever broke into his owner’s apartment.
He has hunted that man since 2010, and DC has never let him find him.
The angriest creature in the Corps carries the smallest request in it.
He is also the only one who never gets closure.
Who Is Dex-Starr?
Dex-Starr belongs to the Red Lantern Corps, the furious red-ringed counterpart to the Green Lanterns.
Green rings look for willpower.
Red rings look for rage, and they do not care what shape the body happens to be.
Usually the winner is a hulking alien warrior with a grievance.
Once, it was a cat.
He comes from Space Sector 2814, which is Earth’s sector and therefore Hal Jordan’s.
That makes for a quietly funny piece of trivia.
The sector that gave the Corps its greatest Green Lantern also gave it a furious housecat who spits acid.
The gap between cuddly pet and intergalactic rage machine drives the whole appeal. It also explains why he keeps turning up in DC animation and games long after the joke should have worn out.
Dex-Starr’s Origin Story
Fair warning: this one hurts.
Dexter started life in a Brooklyn animal shelter, one kitten among many. A woman who lived alone adopted him, and she had felt lonely for a long time. They suited each other. For a while, he had exactly the life a cat should have.
Then a man broke into the apartment. Dexter went at the intruder with his claws, which is everything a housecat can do and nowhere near enough. The intruder killed his owner in front of him.
From Crime Scene to Bridge
What follows turns grief into rage. When the police arrived, they decided the cat would contaminate the scene and threw him out onto the street.
Alone and looking for somewhere warm, he ran into two thugs. They stuffed him into a sack and threw him off the Brooklyn Bridge for entertainment.
He never hit the water.
A red ring crossed the universe, judged the rage in this particular animal more than sufficient, and fastened itself to his tail.
Dexter became Dex-Starr.
His full origin did not appear until 2010, in a back-up story in Green Lantern #55 called Tales of the Red Lantern Corps: Dex-Starr.
Johns wrote it.
Shawn Davis, brother of Shane, drew it.
A joke one brother sketched in the background became a tragedy the other brother illustrated two years later.
Does Dex-Starr Get Revenge?
Partly, and that is the cruel bit.
With the ring, he hunted down the two men who threw him off the bridge and killed them. Then he flew back to his owner’s apartment, curled up beside her body, and promised to find whoever hurt her.
That hunt is still open. It has survived a company-wide reboot, a death, a resurrection, and more than a decade of publishing. DC has never resolved it.
He got the small revenge. He never got the one that mattered.
Why Is Dex-Starr Blue?
This trips people up constantly, so here is the short answer.
He is blue because his fur is blue.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Blue Lantern Corps, who run on hope and represent the emotional opposite of everything he stands for.
One neat detail: “blue” is the correct word here in the technical sense too. In cat breeding, blue is the standard term for a grey coat. That is why breeders call them the Russian Blue and the British
Blue despite the obvious grey.
So Dex-Starr is a blue cat in exactly the way a cat breeder means it, and artists usually draw him as a blue tabby.
It also happens to look fantastic. Soft grey-blue fur against burning red energy makes one of the better colour designs in the whole Lantern mythology.
Dex-Starr’s Powers and Abilities
The Red Lantern ring swaps the wearer’s blood for rage energy, which is horrifying and also extremely effective. For a house cat, Dexter carries an alarming toolkit:
- Rage plasma: he spews corrosive, napalm-like blood that burns through almost anything. He fired the first one at the Sinestro Corps.
- Flight: anywhere, including open space.
- Energy blasts: straightforward bolts of red rage energy.
- Constructs and force fields: hard-light shields and shapes. Red Lanterns lean on constructs far less than Green Lanterns do, preferring fists and plasma.
- Healing and life support: the ring repairs his injuries and keeps him alive in vacuum.
- Translation: he understands every language, and everyone understands him. The comics usually show this as thought bubbles.
- Being a cat: DC lists this in earnest. He hunts with a cat’s reflexes, senses, and stealth, which matters more often than you would think.
The catch is the fuel. The ring runs on fury, so the angrier he gets the stronger he becomes. A cat who watched his owner die, then went off a bridge in a sack, has effectively unlimited reserves.
Is Dex-Starr a Villain or a Hero?
On paper, a villain. The Red Lanterns began as straightforward antagonists, writers call him the most sadistic and malicious member of the Corps, and his body count is not small.
Almost nobody reads him that way. He plays as a tragic anti-hero: a grieving pet lashing out at a universe that took the one good thing he had. Strip off the plasma and the ring and he is a cat with a broken heart, still looking for the person who hurt his human. That combination of menace and heartbreak is the whole trick.
Dex-Starr and Atrocitus
Every rage cat needs a person, and Dexter found his in Atrocitus, founder and leader of the Red Lanterns. Dex-Starr rides on his shoulder and back, works as his enforcer, and stays loyal even when the rest of the Corps turns on him.
It runs both ways: Dex-Starr has saved Atrocitus’s life.
For an organisation running entirely on anger, the Red Lanterns function surprisingly like a violent little family. The cat sits at the centre of it.
He is also, functionally, the only member anybody would call a pet, which he would presumably object to at volume.
What Happened to Dex-Starr? Death and Return
He has died, briefly, and the circumstances suit him perfectly.
In Lobo #11 in 2015, Lobo ambushed the Red Lanterns on Ysmault. Dex-Starr sniffed the air, locked onto the intruder’s scent, and flew straight at him. Lobo cut him in half with a sword.
The blade came away melting, because even bisected, the cat’s blood still burned like acid.
There is a lovely irony there. Years earlier, Dex-Starr had beaten Lobo’s dog in a fight. Lobo settled that account.
The death did not last.
In the same issue, blood pooling from the fallen Red Lanterns bubbled up and reconstituted Atrocitus, Bleez, the Rage Mother, and Dexter. That is what happens when a superhero team runs on sentient blood.
DC then revived him properly alongside a reformed Red Lantern team in the Rebirth era.
He also headlined an ongoing. When DC relaunched as the New 52 in 2011, the Red Lanterns got their own series and Dex-Starr became a fixture. Not bad for a one-panel gag.
Dex-Starr in Games and Cartoons
If you know Dexter from a screen rather than a page, it was probably one of these:
- Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, as a playable character who flies, fires lasers, and digs.
- Lego DC Super-Villains, playable again.
- Injustice 2, where he hovers at Atrocitus’s side during his entrance and turns up in his moves rather than fighting solo.
- Justice League Action, in the episode “Rage of the Red Lanterns.”
- Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Aquaman – Rage of Atlantis, with Dee Bradley Baker voicing him.
- DC Super Hero Girls, in a softer version. He plays a shelter cat with an aggression problem whom Jessica Cruz adopts, before he gets his ring back and causes trouble anyway.
- Scribblenauts Unmasked, as a summonable character.
How to Unlock Dex-Starr in Lego Batman 3
A lot of people arrive here wanting exactly this. It is not a cheat code. He hides on Ysmault, the Red Lantern homeworld, behind a chain of side quests. Work through those and he joins your roster, ring and all.