Look, here are we
On this starry night, staring into space
And I must say
I feel as small as dust lying down here

From the song "Pig," off the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets

The star by *Liester on deviantART

As noted, Stardust’s leading lady is Yvaine, a star in human form. who has fallen to Earth. The idea of a star in human form is not new. There is even a Marvel character, Cloud, a member of the Defenders in the 1980s, who was an entire nebula who took the form of a teenage girl (and sometimes a teenage boy) on Earth. I dealt with the concept in this column in my discussion of P.L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, in which one of the Pleiades appears as a young girl named Maia and even goes Christmas shopping in London (see “Comics in Context” #158).

What I found most intriguing about the Maia episode, and another one in which Mary Poppins hangs paper stars in the sky, is that they imply that in the world of Mary Poppins, science is wrong. Similarly, after meeting Yvaine, Tristran tells her “that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away” (p. 111). Mary Poppins and Stardust postulate that science is merely illusion, a notion that is appealing although not to be taken seriously. Science tells us that our planet is a miniscule part of a cosmos too vast for us to comprehend, to which we mean nothing. It is a bleak vision of reality. Wouldn’t the universe seem to be more benign if it had a more human scale, if the stars turned out to be people like ourselves, or to be tiny lights that we could reach out and touch just by climbing Mary Poppins’ ladder?

from Comics in Context at Kevin Smith's Quick Stop Entertainment, a website that reviews comics and related work
for the complete article, read Comics in Context #191: My Lucky Star