Starstruck (comics)

Starstruck was originally an off-Broadway stage play written by Elaine Lee, Norfleet Lee and Dale Place. It was later the basis for a comic book series published by Epic Comics.

Play

Elaine Lee herself played one of the benevolent characters, Galatia 9. Noted illustrator Mike Kaluta played a major role in visual aspects of the play, working on sets, costumes and promotional material. An exotic, erotic, obtuse and humorous space opera, the story is set in the future, and features several strong female characters. A strange and gleefully corrupt future version of the Girl Guides, the Galactic Girl Guides, gets a backstory mention. The play was produced in 1980, with another staging in 1983.

Comics

The characters and stories of Starstruck have continued in comics form. Elaine Lee and Kaluta first produced a comic strip series in Heavy Metal in 1982.

This series is, in fact, a prequel to the events in the play, revealing the history and relationships between the various characters and introducing many others. Marvel Comics's Epic Comics imprint re-published this material 1984 as the graphic novel titled Starstruck: The Luckless, the Abandoned and Forsaked, the thirteenth title in the Marvel Graphic Novel series. This was followed by a six issue comic book series, also under the Epic Comics banner.

Lee and Kaluta would later re-print this material in a series with significant added material, entitled Starstruck: The Expanding Universe (1990-1991) published by Dark Horse Comics in 4 issues marked as "Volume 1". At the time Dark Horse had planned to add 8 more issues in 2 releases consisting of 320 pages of new material with older material, but this never happened. A few stand-alone "Galactic Girl Guides" strips have appeared as back-up strips in Dave Stevens's The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine from Comico Comics. Linda Medley did work with Michael Kaluta writng for the expanded version, but this never came about. (Source; Michael Kaluta, Nov. 07) A collection had been planned by book publisher Marlowe & Co in 1996, but that company went out of business and it has not appeared elsewhere.

Sequels

In 1990 through 1993, Kaluta worked on a project adapting the concept into movie form, but this came to naught. In 1991, Linda Medley, Phil Trumbo and Kaluta worked on a 5-issue comic book Galactic Girl Guide project for Tundra Press, but this too, never came to fruition. Michael Kaluta still has all the expanded Starstruck material and would like to publish it someday; however the major sticking point is a full color version versus b&w. (G. Gartiser, 12-7-07) The script of the play (ISBN 0-88145-023-5) was published in 1997 and is still available.

References

External links

• Kaluta's Starstruck information page