Starstruck (off-Broadway play and comic book)
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- This article is about the play and comic book called Starstruck. For other uses of this name see Starstruck.
Starstruck was originally an off-Broadway stage play written by Elaine Lee, Norfleet Lee and Dale Place. 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.
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 a graphic novel The Luckless, the Abandoned and the Forsaked [sic], followed by a six issue comic book series, also under the Epic Comics banner. Lee and Kaluta would later re-print this material into a series with added material, entitled Starstruck: The Expanding Universe (1990-1991) published by Dark Horse Comics in 4 issues marked as "Volume 1". At this time, this is only the first of several planned volumes to be published. 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.
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 and in Linda Medley's Castle Waiting.
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.
The script of the play (ISBN 0-88145-023-5) was published in 1997 and is still available.
