[7] Starstruck was being created in the late 1970s period of New York City's decline, when poor musicians in Punk and free jazz were making a rising scene out of cheap rents, collective venues, and street throwaways.
[1] The resulting sets, designed in the style of classic science fiction serials, used Hot Wheels tracks, walkie talkies, medical splints, medicine jars full of marbles, Bingo chips, coffee lids, and plastic cups, which Kaluta glue-gunned together with help from his colleague, Fantasy illustrator Charles Vess.
[4] One year earlier, the original path for Starstruck had been paved when a fight scene between two women that Elaine had written reminded actor Dale Place of the style of Heavy Metal: "Oh, that would be fun, to do a kind of science fiction play" for her company, the writer recounted.
[11] The Starstruck prequel series they first produced were firmly in the template of these magazines; hallucinogenic narratives, elaborate fine art, epic backdrops, farcical humor, and adult themes, printed in serialized segments across many issues.
Another contemporary parallel is A Distant Soil,[13] a challenging sci-fi/fantasy series by writer/artist Colleen Doran which had print runs and revised expansions across multiple alternative comic companies, also starting in 1983.
Kaluta explained: "As the books progress, the reader gets a slow reveal of the greater energies and alliances by the way they impact the lives of the happy-go-lucky space girls and boys eking out their bits of the big ball of wax".
[16] Toutain also reprinted innovative strips by American artists like Will Eisner, Richard Corben, and Howard Chaykin, and it was in his variation of Warren's Comix International that Starstruck made its debut.
The graphic novel, dedicated to director Robert Altman and author Thomas Pynchon, included a four-page glossary in the back that expanded upon references in the story, much in the spirit of the concurrent work of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Fan artists were given a spotlight in a few issues: CG diagrams of the ship, The Harpy, were provided by Walt Carter;[35] and Kristina Carroll did a painting of art assassin Kettle Black in a scene alluded to in text but never previously shown before.
[41] The use of circle border frames in compositions, serpentine forms in architecture and fabric, and elegant pantomime in characters like Queen Glorianna continue the Art Nouveau poster work of Alphonse Mucha and paintings of Gustav Klimt.
On the classic side, the rockets and pistols of Dick Calkins' Buck Rogers comic strip art and from Flash Gordon serials; and the spaceship interiors of EC Comics artists like Wally Wood and Roy Krenkel: Kaluta wrote of his mentor: "Seeing what Roy Krenkel accomplished with line, shape and negative space stirred my imagination and set my nascent abilities onto a highway into my future as an artist".
[39] Kaluta has a professed admiration for Manga and Anime stalwarts like Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and Masamune Shirow (Ghost In the Shell); many of those style hallmarks show in his design for the Samarai-esque droid, Veep 7.
The original first 73 pages of serial stories covered a span of nearly three decades, on different planets, with a wide and seemingly unconnected cast, which ultimately led to everyone coming to one space station at the same time.
[46] In one sense, the series was non-linear by the sheer span of its subjects, the episodic glimpses of them in different times and places, their flashback sequences, the element of perceived randomness altering their paths, and the uncertainty of their connectedness: an uncommon narrative strategy that now draws comparisons to critically successful TV shows like Lost.
In another sense, the series is a very particularly linear story - going so far as to detail the births and maturing of pivotal characters - which is too large to be seen all at once: a novelistic narrative now seen similarly in critically praised TV shows like The Wire.
Starstruck can be considered one of comics' premiere hypertext fictions, in the sense of using supplementary texts, adjunct stories, and ancillary art to expand, deepen, and even alter the narrative experience.
Critic David Allan Jones wrote of the intricacies of the Starstruck discourse: "The (Robert) Altman-esque dialogue style is also a joy to parse out- as confusing and disorienting as it sometimes can be, it's always witty and clever".
Elaine Lee told a Suicide Girls interview: "We did include one scene in the graphic novel where Brucilla's dialogue balloons begin to crowd Galatia off the page, in order to show that the character was a loudmouth".
Kaluta took care to give perspective panoramas of the Starstruck universe, but to fill them with functional details that ground its reality for the reader and stage its complexity: "[A]nyone can walk...around inside, go around the outside, around the back, and know that there's going to be something there".
[4] At the same time, Lee was reading a lot of feminist science fiction, which she initially found liberating, but had qualms with the two common themes: the rebel women versus the "'planet of chauvinist pigs' scenario...began to wear me down.
[55] In multiple examples the series turns gender cliches inside out: Lee parodied the 'whore' role by empowering the former pleasure droid Erotica Ann; commented on the uselessly pliant 'madonna' role with the passive nuns of the Cloister Of The Goddess Uncaring; dealt with themes of sexuality that erased boundaries between genders, species, and machines; included ritualistic amazons who also like a good bacchanal; and featured a starship captain upfront who owned her sensuality and enjoyed it.
These include religion (a science fiction author who invents a front religion with converts who passively fund a scheme of power and control, and the March Baptists who ally with corrupt corporate dictators for power); gambling (the idle rich who will gamble everything on the mere chance of someone perhaps coming into the room); vanity (a villainess who may have sacrificed many young girls just to stay youthful, and salons where hours of one's lifespan are sold by the poor to rich patrons who want a longer life); militarism (half of Earth was disintegrated in an act of militaristic paranoia, and then covered up by a hologram, and jingoistic Space Brigades who feel the universe is only there for them to thrust their agenda and control onto); and the arts (conceptual art assassins who eliminate creators of really bad plays, and a conjoined trio of actors turning self-absorbed frilliness into high drama).
Reviewer Richard Caldwell wrote: "The plot is fast-moving and puzzle-like, with strong elements of political intrigue and satire alike cavorting about the omniverse in a futuristic setting where multiple clans struggle for dominance over a mix of cultures as boggled by the theologies of the day as they are by the sensory overload of sensationalistic commercialism that passes for status quo".
[64] In 1990 through 1993, Kaluta worked on a project adapting the concept into movie form, but this came to naught; Kaluta noted in his career biography: "For Limelight and Largo Entertainment: (1990 - 91): Character, setting, mood and toy prototypes for 'The Adventures of Brucilla the Muscle, Galactic Girl Guide/Guard', sometimes called 'Maddie McPhee and the Galactic Girl Guides' -- a movie spin-off of (Starstruck)-- in development by Pet Fly Productions for Walt Disney Productions, October 1992".
[66] Lee has spoken of negotiations for a TV series circa 2003, where a network bought the option to turn Starstruck into a live action show in the spirit of Firefly or Farscape: "I wrote (and was paid for) pitch documents, several scripts and I outlined a season of episodes for them.
In the final issue of the IDW series, Elaine Lee alluded to other impending audioplays with "all-new episodes in which Galatia, Bru, and Annie fly missions for the U4F (United Federation of Female Freedom Fighters)".
[25] This reiterated a previous interview statement where she said: "We're thinking that the new audio pieces will happen, chronologically speaking, in that space of time between end of the comic series and the events of the play, when Galatia 9, Brucilla and the reprogrammed Erotica Ann are flying missions for the U4F".
Bach in the middle of an acid trip: fugues and choruses and multi-part harmonies of narrative, playing off each other in unexpected ways to produce delayed reveals, sting-in-the-tail pay-offs, devastating, poignant, and ironic juxtapositions.
In the wake of the cancellation, Comics Journal critic Robert Rodi wrote: "That Starstruck should owe more to Gravity's Rainbow and M*A*S*H* than to the Galactus Trilogy means that many people who are exclusively comics-literate won't have the necessary aesthetic vocabulary to read it.
[83] Joe McCullough of Comics Comics wrote: "In fact, I like literally everything about this cleverly revised, nipped & tucked edition, apportioning and expanding upon Lee's modular, time-skipping vignettes with text features crammed right between the 'main' story and Charles Vess-inked backup material..., creating a kind of call and response between different characters from different points in time, walking you carefully through Lee's collage of varied femininity in a hazardous future.