Arne Starr is a long time comic book artist and illustrator who has segued into the world of Hollywood over the last few years.
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Trained as an illustrator at the NY-Phoenix Schools of Design, a division of Pratt Institute, he graduated second in class in magazine and book illustration. Eventually he got involved with his first love, comics, by training with and becoming assistant to Dick Giordano.
After a while he became part of the DC Comics team working on various Who's Who books, Power Girl, assisted Mike DeCarlo co-inking Legion of Super Heroes for about 25 issues and assisted Dick Giordano on many projects such as The Man Of Steel Starr provided the airbrush cover for the trade paperback compilation from Random House.[1] Starr additionally worked on parts of Crisis On Infinite Earths (notably the Death of Supergirl issue #7, where Dick requested a co-credit, but the mysterious "powers that be" refused it).
Starr was then booked to do the first ever Star Trek: The Next Generation comics as the inker of record, hired before many of the actors from the show itself, but again politics reduced it to co-inking credit.[2] There was a gap at the close of the mini-series with all Trek books due to more goings on in Hollywood, but when it resumed, Next Gen was started anew, and classic Trek, which Starr was moved over to, started over as Volume 2 of that title, which he stayed with for most of its run.[3] Worked on other titles here and there like Green Lantern, Unknown Soldier, Firestorm, Booster Gold and Vigilante to name a few, and got to work over at Marvel on some of the secondary Clone War titles of Spider-Man and Venom.
All the years of doing Trek in comics also led to Starr becoming a regular speaker at Trek conventions, segueing into the Hollywood gossip guy with the trailers and the giveaways courtesy of friends in Hollywood. Also he was involved at that time as one of the Sysops of the old GEnie Computer Network, creating the Comics Roundtable, and being part of the Science Fiction Roundtable (SFRT) eventually taking over the Media division (SFRT2) which was all things Trek, Sci-FI, and the new show that pretty much premiered there as "that which cannot be named", Babylon 5, with J. Michael Straczinski in attendance. Joe'(JMS)'also supplied Starr with test CGI footage and eventually a music video from the pilot of B5 to be shown at conventions all along the east coast while Joe did the same on the west coast, which between that and GEnie and Compuserve, is how the "word of mouth" of B5 occurred, and culminated in Joe coming to Springfield MA at a convention called Wishcon 2 with the raw pilot which was shown to a standing room only audience that came from across the world.
The conventions also introduced Starr to many of the SciFi actors of many of the shows, and ended up doing some radio plays with Bill Campbell and John de Lancie at many a con and that culminated on a Seatrek where actor Mark Lenard invited him into his Master's Acting class in NY across from the Papp Theatre. Following a couple of years training he worked in many plays in CT, including the lead in a few, understudy for another, and even working musicals as well.
When he moved to Florida, to be part of Hollywood SE (Disney/ Universal), the Trek books at DC were cancelled and with his mentor Dick Giordano retiring from DC proper, he kind of got retired along with him. Marvel went bankrupt at that time firing everyone he knew up there, and kept his final royalties on the Spidey books as they delayed sending out the paperwork at the time of the move.As far as Hollywood SE went, it had gone north to Canada at that point, so he got stranded in FL for many years doing odd jobs like caricatures at Disney, and Dell Technical support 2nd level tech, at least until it went off to India. Also worked as a postal carrier. And he did work on more plays while there, as well as some student films for the Full Sail School. But when his son Devin, who was living with him, graduated high school and joined the Marines, it was time to get out of Dodge, and he headed for Hollywood.
Starr is now working his way through Hollywood, working background on a long list of shows and films, and has become a regular doctor, attending physician, actually named Starr in an episode, for the show Grey's Anatomy for five season's now. Also was typecast in the show Mad Men, playing the "artist" for all 3 seasons of the show so far (totally typecast as he was REALLY a Mad Man, an art director in Manhattan, back in the 1970s in NY). In film he was featured in a "cut" scene in Iron Man by Jon Favreau, is very visible in Hotel For Dogs and Adam Sandlers' Bedtime Stories, and was briefly seen in the new Star Trek courtesy of a featured spot by J. J. Abrams who knew of his history, bringing things full circle. He has recently become a card carrying SAG and AFTRA actor, and has become a regular on the new NCIS: Los Angeles playing the "tailor". Starr has also contributed art to a few episodes of Medium, caricatures on Greek, sketches as the court sketch artist on David Tennent's pilot Rex Is Not Your Lawyer, and was the artist of record, being the real artist along with Alex Ross, for Michael Chiklas' character in the pilot of No Ordinary Family.