of the constrictive grid, much of the series simulates the feel of being wide open and watched from a wide view lens. This complements the story's long view perspective while separating itself from other comics with a unique visual narrative style. Kaluta took care to give perspective panoramas of the Starstruck universe, but to fill them with functional details that ground its reality for the reader and stage its complexity: "[A]nyone can walk...around inside, go around the outside, around the back, and know that there's going to be something there". Themes FeminismStarstruck 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