Жұлдыз шашыраған: Ғарыштық комикс сағасы

American sci fi comic book series

Starstruck is an American science fiction comic book series. It is based on the off Broadway stage play of the same name written by Elaine Lee, with contributions from Susan Norfleet Lee and Dale Place. An audio drama has also appeared.

Starstruck, in comics form, has been produced at various intervals since 1982 by writer Elaine Lee and artist Michael Wm. Kaluta; their primary collaborators are colorist Lee Moyer and letterer Todd Klein. The series, epic in scope, has been carried across multiple comic companies, amongst them Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and IDW Publishing. It was collected in a revised and recolored hardcover book form as Starstruck Deluxe Edition in 2011. Since its inception, Starstruck has built a cult audience and critical acclaim from peers, periodicals, and fans for the sophistication of its storytelling. Most noted is the predominantly female cast, portrayed by Lee with a range and nuance that confounds gender stereotypes. Kaluta, an esteemed veteran of comics and illustration, is often commended for the virtuosity and imaginative detail of his artwork. Also, the series is cited for the progressiveness of its rich and complex structure: Starstruck preceded Watchmen in using innovations like nonlinear storytelling, overlapping dialogue, multiple story threads, back up text, unreliable narrators, adjunct stories, underlying themes, recurring symbols, and an almost symphonic interconnectedness.

The story is set in an anarchic future in which humanity spans the universe. The Dread Dictator has fallen and a power vacuum sparks a chess game of eccentric players scheming for control. The serio comic stories follow Captain Galatia 9 and her running partner, Brucilla The Muscle, as they navigate madcap scenarios and surreal misadventures in between the galactic infighting.

Elaine Lee herself played the adventurous lead, Captain Galatia 9, while Lee's sister, Susan Norfleet Lee played her rowdy pilot, Brucilla the Muscle. Noted illustrator Michael Wm. Kaluta played a major role in visual aspects of the play, working on sets, costumes and promotional material. The story is set in the future, and features several strong female lead characters. A strange and gleefully corrupt future version of the Girl Guides, the Galactic Girl Guides, are introduced in a subplot that leads to the climax. The Starstruck play was produced in 1980, with another staging in 1983. The script of the play was published in 1985 and is still available. An audioplay adaption was recorded in 2010, and released on CD and download.

Elaine Lee was an actor in the late 1970s New York City theatre and television scene. She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her work on the long running NBC soap opera The Doctors; she portrayed the troubled Mildred Trumble, a character modeled after Sissy Spacek's character, Pinky Rose from Robert Altman's film 3 Women. Seeing a lack of range and depth in the roles being offered to female actors, she formed a Manhattan theatre company with her sister, Susan Norfleet Lee, and actor friends which they called Wild Hair Productions. The Lees wrote their own plays for the company to star in, starting with Brief Cases. During the writing of a second play, The Contamination of the Kokomo Lounge, Elaine began pulling together ideas for a science fiction play. The Lee sisters were at a Manhattan bar/cafe called The Library, discussing ideas over a pile of science fiction magazines when illustrator Michael Wm. Kaluta, a neighbor who often sketched there, approached them asking, "Are you science fiction fans?" Kaluta was impressed by the wit and range of their second play: he recalled thinking: "If they're going to do a science fiction play, they're going to do it very well". Kaluta told an interviewer backstage about the evolution of his role: "Should it be like a real 1930s movie poster? That's when I realized I wanted to do characterizations of the entire cast on the poster. But, I had to know what they looked like. So that's when I started designing the costumes. Because I designed them so intricately, I had to build them. And that's when my house started looking like the garment district". 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. Kaluta said: "You could build an entire city on the stuff the city throws away, just sitting out there".|source= Elaine Lee on the genesis of Starstruck comics.

Writer Clive Barker has stated: "I was, and am, a huge fan of Starstruck, which I think was one of the most brave and elegant experiments in comic book story telling". Writer Mike Carey, when asked to name his favorite comic of all time, responded "Starstruck, by Lee and Kaluta". He was later asked to write the introduction to the Starstruck Deluxe Edition with his wife Lin Carey, known by her pen name as the Fantasy author, A. J. Lake (The Darkest Age series): "The truth is, there just never was another book out there that did what Starstruck did". They praised the progressive innovations of the series by stating: "So how cool is it that at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it still reads as being ahead of its time?" Publishers Weekly opined in 2009 that "the cult classic comic Starstruck [was] well ahead of its time when initially released in 1985", pointing particularly to "a cast of strong female characters—a rarity in comics then and now". After the 1984 graphic novel was published, Kaluta remembers "a few letters, coming in saying: 'My, this is really too clever'. The writer and artist are being very, very clever, here, obviously clever, it's too convoluted to follow". The Epic Comics series won critical acclaim and a cult audience, but similar letters followed. Kaluta was proudest of one from an angry reader that took the creators to task for making him take longer than 15 minutes to read a comic. At the same time, the writer and artist realized they had a series that appealed to a growing segment in the mature market, but was being dismissed by the mainstream superhero audience. As a joke, Kaluta asked Epic to run an ad for Starstruck saying, "Readers of The World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Use But Your Brains! ", an idea they enjoyed but passed on. Addressing their concern for the future of the series, Lee said: "People have called this a cult book. I hope it's more than that. I hope people will bother to read it and go, 'This is different. Let me give it a try', rather than 'This is different. Let me throw it on the other side of the room from my X Men comics'". In 1985, Kaluta had predicted: "But they might, years later, pick up (books like Love And Rockets) and go, 'Damn it, why didn't I read these things back then?' Because they weren't ready for it, right? They weren't ready to be entertained in that sphere of their life". The recent 2009 IDW remastering of Starstruck has garnered critical acclaim that has bolstered its reputation as a timeless and essential work in the modern comics pantheon. Pop culture critic David Allan Jones wrote of the republished series that it would be a challenge to new readers who would "have to work a little to follow along, but believe me, it's worth it, especially if you enjoy experiencing the unique. A+". 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. World (universe!) building like you don't see so often " Alex Dueben of the Suicide Girls site found the series' progressive story and art to be timeless: "Now Starstruck is a pretty nonlinear project, which I love, and I have to say that the structure and the feeling, the complexity, how it moves around, it really feels contemporary". The British Science Fiction Association's journal Vector listed Starstruck among six groundbreaking comics, and praised it for " overall myth building on a par with that of Dune " Also, much of the praise given to works like Lost and Watchmen featuring " non linear graphic storytelling, use of supplement texts for story expansion, overlapping dialogue, unreliable storytelling " employed these techniques that were pioneered by Starstruck. Similar praise accompanied the release of the collected IDW remastered issues as the Starstruck Deluxe Edition hardback graphic novel in 2011. Comics media critic Paul Gravett called the collection "a wondrous, ebullient SF epic and it all comes together in this delectable package. Prepare to be transported!" John Hilgart of The Comics Journal considered it an essential classic, advocating that readers should "pick up this book, because not having read it is sort of like not having read Pogo, or listened to Trout Mask Replica, or seen a Hayao Miyazaki film". The show was notably created by and features Elaine Lee's son Brennan Lee Mulligan as its gamemaster.