James Gunn's The Suicide Squad film brings several lesser-known DC characters into the spotlight. While King Shark, Peacemaker and Ratcatcher all play impressive rolls in the film, it could be argued that Starro the conqueror makes the biggest impression. Prior to its big-screen debut, the gigantic kaiju-esque starfish monster proved itself to be a formidable opponent, fighting numerous heroes over the years. But, in Starro's first appearance in Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky's The Brave and the Bold #28 the Justice League make hilariously short work of the starfish with a simple chemical compound.
Both the Justice League and Starro made their debuts in this classic issue. The story begins when a pufferfish warns Aquaman that it saw a gigantic starfish fall from the sky and recruit three normal starfish to help it conquer the world. Aquaman assembles the Justice League to investigate the mysterious creature and stop it from taking over the planet. When the league splits up to track down and dispatch Starro's deputies, they discover that Starro is planning to use nuclear energy and mind control to conquer humanity.
The flash runs into a young man named Snapper who appears to be immune to Starro's mind control powers. He has Green Lantern use his ring as a spectrometer so that they can determine what makes young Snapper so different. As it turns out, Snapper is covered in Calcium Oxide, aka lime. He had used it while doing lawn work earlier in the day and it ended up saving him from Starro's psychic advances. Armed with this new information, the heroes of the Justice League take turns pouring vast amounts of lime onto the would-be conqueror. As silly as this tactic is, it proves to be quite effective, rendering Starro powerless.
After this encounter, the Justice League became a mainstay in the comic book world, but Starro wouldn't return for another seventeen years. But in 1977's Adventure Comics #451 by David Michelinie and Jim Aparo, the evil starfish reared its villainous head once again to fight Aquaman. After that appearance, Starro made a habit of returning every once in a while to terrorize the DC universe, changing drastically over the years. Rather than being able to share his powers with other starfish, the alien conqueror gained the ability to asexually reproduce, with its progeny becoming an essential part of its mind control powers. In Starro's first appearance, it simply uses its mind to control others, but later iterations of the character used its offspring to latch onto people's faces and control them with a physical component.
Starro's most noteworthy upgrade is that lime is no longer its Achilles heel. In fact, these days Starro seems to be impervious to just about everything except for ice and extreme cold.
No matter how powerful Starro becomes, the goofy nature of its first defeat will always be emblematic of its fundamentally campy nature.