Art and Composition
"(Kaluta) gives us beautifully rendered scenes of surpassing grandeur, while winking at their pomposity and silliness at the same time. ...(H)e shows us not only the glitter and the brilliance, but the places where the seams have split, and where the false walls are propped up behind. This works wonderfully with Lee's multi-layered tomfoolery."
Comics Journal #111, September 1986.Starstruck stories reference diverse elements of pop culture, science fiction, and international art. Michael Kaluta drew on his varied artistic influences to directly homage or indirectly parallel these inspirations, including Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Golden Age illustrators, Pulp magazine covers, EC Comics, Métal Hurlant, and Anime.
Kaluta references classic fine art and illustrative design often in his work: "My drawing 'style' came from my attempts to draw like all the artists I was impressed with. Although some of them were certainly Comic Book artists, many more were illustrators and designers from the turn of the 19th Century." A crucial event in the finale of Epic issue #6 features an island that tributes the painting, "Isle Of The Dead" (Basil version, 1880) by symbolist Arnold Bocklin. 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. His grand panoramas of mountains are in the tradition of Maxfield Parrish. The panoplies of intricate columned palaces recall Art Nouveau cartoonist Winsor McCay's Little Nemo. The fluid body language and theatrical framing of characters is in the spirit of comics innovator Will Eisner: Kaluta specified, "Anybody who doesn't think I've studied this Will Eisner fellow just hasn't looked at my work. He's the man."
The technology he draws pays visual nods to many retro styles of science fiction design, as well as contemporaneous styles. On the classic side, the rockets and pistols of Dick Calkins' Buck Rogers comic strip art and from Flash Gordan 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." On the modern end, the curved plastic modularity of 1960s Italian futuristic furniture design (such as by designer Joe Columbo); the rundown quality of it in films like Star Wars and Alien; and the linework of Moebius, such as the arid and surrealistic landscapes in his series Arzach and The Airtight Garage, as well as in spacesuit designs like Brucilla The Muscle's pilot suit. 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: "I like Otomo’s style, and that of Hayao Miyazaki...," Kaluta told an Italian interviewer. "I’m a big fan of the work by Shirow and am always looking at Adamo’s drawings and paintings."
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