Starstruck

Michael Willliam Kaluta was the third person from The Studio to make an appearance in Heavy Metal. His work, "Starstruck," originally started as a stage play by writer Elaine Lee and when she saw Kaluta’s work, she knew he would have to be involved. He did some costume and set design for the stage play, but they eventually settled on a comic instead. This issue contains the first chapter of "Starstruck."

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The first few episodes lean into farce, focusing on the inept son of an interplanetary industrialist who develops an unhealthy attachment to an erotica android. His father shoots the head off the android and the son starts dragging the headless body around with him as he provides a listless and inane monologue. Parts of it are more disturbing than slapstick and it's easy to see how these jokes would have worked in a live theater environment with an audience, so you know when to laugh. Subsequent chapters follow different characters, whose paths all eventually intersect. 

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What makes the whole thing work is Kaluta’s art. Kaluta is the kind of artist who enjoys adding as much detail as possible, anywhere he can. Backgrounds, foregrounds, outfits, introductory chapter headings - it’s all got exactly the right level of detail. Kaluta also provides a lot of the science fictional texture of the story. At one point, the industrialist father is holding a meeting in an office that has been rigged like a holodeck (years before holodeck was a word), and there’s an entire group of functionaries sitting around an oasis in the desert. The fact that Kaulta could draw anything makes the sequence work.

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For me, the story doesn’t really snap into place until Brucilla “the Muscle” shows up. We see her get cashiered out of the Space Brigade for egging the St. Arnold Zaporoffsky pep band during commencement exercises and ends up wandering the universe until she encounters another protagonist, Galatia 9. The trouble that the two of them get into drives the latter half of the story and makes the series worth looking for.

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One of the interesting things about "Starstruck" is that it’s been printed and revised over the course of its publication history. It started in a Spanish magazine Comix Internacional in 1982, and the same pages (in English) were printed in Heavy Metal shortly thereafter. In the May 1983 issue, there was even a special feature about "Starstuck," talking about its origins as a stage play.

The pages printed in Heavy Metal were collected and printed as a graphic novel by Marvel Comics in 1984. In 1985, Marvel’s Epic imprint released a series of Starstruck comics that expanded beyond the material printed in Heavy Metal. From there, Lee and Kaluta made material for Comico and Dark Horse Comics. They were working on a piece for Kevin Eastman’s Tundra Comics that got canceled when the company folded. Pages from that work ended up in Heavy Metal in the March 1993 issue.

In 2009, IDW published a revised and updated version of Starstruck that expanded on older material and made the whole thing into a much more coherent whole. Comparing the 2009 edition with the Heavy Metal episodes from 1983 is like night and day. The writing is much better and the team took advantage of modern digital coloring techniques to give the whole thing an overhaul. All things considered, I’d recommend the IDW version, but the point remains that you cannot discuss the publication history of this comic without mentioning Heavy Metal.