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