Starstruck (comics) - Themes

Themes

"Brucilla filled the archetype of the rowdy, boozing, promiscuous hotshot pilot normally reserved for men, and preceded Battlestar Galactica’s Kara Thrace in doing so by about 20 years. And as an anarchist punk spaceship captain who was arrested in her youth for defacing public property with feminist revisions of nursery rhymes, Galatia-9 was a Riot Grrrl before the movement existed."

Critic W. Andrew Shepard of The New Inquiry, 2011.

• Feminism: Starstruck is consistently lauded for its mostly female cast, the depth and range of the individual characters, and the upending of gender and sexual stereotypes through the series.

The genesis of this was practical: Elaine Lee formed her theater company as a way for women to create and perform better roles than the 1979 New York scene was offering them, and Starstruck extended this idea into the universe; she recounts, "The idea was to do something really wild, so that we could all show off and do parts we would normally never be cast for. I was five feet tall and weighed about 90 pounds soaking wet, but I wanted to be an amazon starship captain, so Galatia 9 was the part I came up with for myself." 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. If a fictional world presents you with all the same problems that greet you each day in the office, what fun is that?" Conversely, the stories focusing on a blissful all-female utopia left her unmoved: "My main problem with Utopian sci-fi is that nothing ever explodes, and the love scenes are really boring." With Starstruck she attempted to lift the discourse out of a dogma of revenge or exclusion into a broader spectrum where personality, skill, and fun drove the characters. In 1997 she wrote, "Science Fiction is at its best when it offers us new ways to look at our problems. It is silliest when it offers too many (or too little) solutions. Then it is simply an allegory...or worse, propaganda." In 2011, a critical essay from The New Inquiry lauded this approach: "But Lee deliberately eschews the separatist narrative and isn't above mocking the knee-jerk misandry which often colored those stories. Instead, our heroine is forced out into the universe at large, where she is confronted with the task of helping to build a society more congruent with her ideals."

When Starstruck moved into the sights of mainstream comics buyers during the Epic Comics run in 1985, the series had to contend with the attitudes of a predominantly young male market. Lee remembers, "we got quite a reaction to the fact that there were so many female characters in the story. ("Is the writer a lesbian? Does she have a political agenda? Is the artist gay? Do they both hate men?") We had to wonder why everyone was so concerned about our sexuality when no one was wondering what Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez meant by putting all those women in Love and Rockets." Lee and Kaluta were vocal advocates of Love And Rockets, an indie comics success that also earned critical notice for the breadth of its female cast: Kaluta saw it as further evidence of the mature move to escape the gender role restrictions imposed on women in comics; "Love And Rockets is an incredibly adult comic strip. You can't fault it, because the characters are real." Kaluta dismissed gender categorizers by saying of the Starstruck characters, "They're people that don't pander to what you're expecting a female character in a science fiction play or comic book to be, they're just people. If you don't like them, they're not going to change for you."

Critic Robert Rodi, covering progressive Gay issues in comics for the Comics Journal in 1986, wrote, "Starstruck is an explosion of alternate sexuality and its phenomenal trappings. Characters are (overtly or not) homosexual, heterosexual, asexual, antisexual, omnisexual -you name it, it's there if you look for it." 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. The underlying themes in Starstruck regarding gender and sexuality are consistently sex-positive, anti-sexist, tolerant of sexual preference, anti-misogyny and anti-misandry, and emphasizing the individual person above any categories. In 2011, a Comics Journal reviewer wrote, "Lee and Kaluta deserve a special award for appropriating the entire comic book tradition of women as eye candy for heterosexual male readers and setting those bodies free, throwing the reader’s desires and expectations for a loop."

In 2011, Lee said, "People thought we had some political agenda, because we had a lot of female characters. Now it's not unusual."

• Destiny: Fate plays an underlying factor in the story: characters who feel that destiny intends greatness for them (Verloona, Bajar, Kalif); those who feel they have been cheated out of a better station (Lucrezia Bajar, Brucilla The Muscle); those that intend to manipulate fate into their own control (Queen Glorianna, Rah El Rex); those that feel fate is meaningless and anything goes (Randall Factor); and those that feel personal focus will get them through random chaos (Galatia 9, the Galactic Girl Guides).

The artist said, "You have to become your own law in a way. There are self-appointed protectors of humanity, some of whom are protecting it for themselves, and some of whom have the idea that there is a better way and will stop things that are against the peoples' interests."

• Satire: Starstruck takes aim at many aspects of society.

Religion: a sci-fi 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 the 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.
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."

Starstruck initially began its creative life as a stage play spoofing time-worn tropes of Science Fiction. Kaluta recalled his reaction to Lee's script: "Oh God, I was amazed at how many genres she was actually poking fun at, without being a dyed-in-the-wool science fiction fan. She was poking fun at Andre Norton, she was poking fun at everybody, all the Doc Smith stuff, without ever having read Doc Smith."

• Absurdism: Starstruck laces its drama and intrigue with bouts of surrealistic farce, ludicrous slapstick, absurd non-sequiters, random weirdness, cross-communication, cultural parody, and one-liners.

The writer clarified, "Of course, it includes some social commentary -people often comment on the feminism- but it's all comedy. I want people to enjoy it. People accept new ideas and commentary more readily if they're funny." Lee points to the feuding Bajar twins, Kalif and Lucrezia, whose sibling jealousy gets out of hand due to their wealth and power: "In real life they probably would have just annoyed people in a bar; in comic books they blow people up." The writer saw absurdism as a philosophical antidote or survival perspective in the Starstruck universe, as well as in its creative process: "We get real serious about showing the humanity of our characters, and at the same time, we feel that life is silly, and something that seems horribly embarrassing and horribly important is really silly at the same time." Critic Robert Rodi wrote, "Lee has reinvented Camp as a new sensibility; it isn't Camp in that it violates all known laws of drama and internal logic for the sake of flamboyance or effect. Rather, she's taken the space opera form and, while respecting the limitations of physics as we know them, pushed the genre's more baroque aspects to their absolute limits."

• Archetypes: The series takes gender-bending liberties with many iconic female and male roles of world history and popular culture.

The Cowgirl: the Medea women on their space ranch.
The Amazon: Galatia 9 and the Omegazon tribe who christened her.
The Bimbo/Sex Doll: Erotica Ann and the 333 Annie pleasure droids; and the male droid, Handi Andy.
The Valkyrie: Brucilla The Muscle, the flying warrior whose uniform makes her resemble Brunhilda.
The White Queen: Queen Glorianna, the tough revolutionary posing as a shining monarch.
The Black Queen: Verloona Ti, the devourer of little children.
The Hardboiled Detective: Harry Palmer, the tough pug with a wounded heart.