They praised the progressive innovations of the series by stating: "So how cool is it that at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it still reads as being ahead of its time?"Publishers Weekly opined in 2009 that "the cult classic comic Starstruck [was] well ahead of its time when initially released in 1985", pointing particularly to "a cast of strong female characters—a rarity in comics then and now". After the 1984 graphic novel was published, Kaluta remembers "a few letters, coming in saying: 'My, this is really too clever'. The writer and artist are being very, very clever, here, obviously clever, it's too convoluted to follow". The Epic Comics series won critical acclaim and a cult audience, but similar letters followed. Kaluta was proudest of one from an angry reader that took the creators to task for making him take longer than 15 minutes to read a comic. At the same time, the writer and artist realized they had a series that appealed to a growing segment in the mature market, but was being dismissed by the mainstream superhero audience. As a joke, Kaluta asked Epic to run an ad for Starstruck saying, "Readers of The World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Use But Your Brains!", an idea they enjoyed but passed on. Addressing their concern for the future of the series, Lee said: "People have called this a cult book. I hope it's more than that. I hope people will bother to read it and go, 'This is different. Let me give it a try', rather than 'This is different. Let me throw it on the other side of the room from my X-Men comics'". The Epic series was cancelled in 1986 after six issues, and in its wake within the same year, innovative series like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus earned acclaim and success for the mature qualities and sophisticated innovations that Starstruck was initially resisted for. In the wake of the cancellation, Comics Journal critic Robert Rodi wrote: "That Starstruck should owe more to Gravity's Rainbow and M*A*S*H* than to the Galactus Trilogy means that many people who are exclusively comics-literate won't have the necessary aesthetic vocabulary to read it. But, whose fault is that, if not their own? And whose loss is that, if not their own?" In 1985, Kaluta had predicted: "But they might, years later, pick up (books