Gideon Stargrave

Gideon Stargrave was created by Grant Morrison as a comics protagonist first serialized in Near Myths #3 (December 1978) and continued in Near Myths #4 (1979). The character later appeared in a 1985 benefit comic (Food for Thought), was incorporated into Morrison's The Invisibles (Vol. 1, #17–19, 1995) as sequences and as an alter‑ego for the character King Mob, and resurfaced in Vertigo's Winter's Edge #1 (January 1998) and related prose. Morrison has described the character as originally based on the lead in J. G. Ballard's 'The Day of Forever' and placed Stargrave within a larger metafictional scheme linking author, character, and in‑story personae.

Descriptions across sources emphasize Stargrave as a stylized 1970s spy figure. Early Near Myths material presents him as a pulp protagonist without extensive distinguishing physical detail in the surviving summaries; his archetypal styling is tied to 1970s aesthetics (Bond/Jason King). In Winter's Edge #1 (1998) he is depicted wearing the 'trademark purple coat' of his original 'Entropy in the U.K.' incarnation and shown with a shaven head and piercings echoing the appearance of King Mob, giving a concrete visual of a purple coat combined with contemporary modifications.

No supernatural powers are attributed to Gideon Stargrave in the provided sources. His 'abilities' are literary and performative: he functions as a seducer and pulp spy archetype in stories, is used narratively for deception and role performance (for example, King Mob adopts the Stargrave persona to confuse enemies during interrogation), and serves as a metafictional device in Grant Morrison's work to explore authorship and the creative force of language. References in commentary frame Stargrave as part of Morrison's philosophy that fictional characters and language can operate as creative forces within a narrative context, but these are conceptual/metatextual functions rather than literal supernatural abilities.