which is commonly praised for them. Like its parallel descendants Watchmen and From Hell, the series is a large mosaic of seemingly random but steadily interlocking people and events. The series started in 1982 by eschewing the then standard superhero formula of one male character in self-contained stories, instead using an ensemble of mainly female characters in multiple intwined story threads. The original first 73 pages of serial stories covered a span of nearly three decades, on different planets, with a wide and seemingly unconnected cast, which ultimately led to everyone coming to one space station at the same time. Lee wrote in 1997: "There is no reason why a story written for a comic shouldn't be every bit as involving as the plot of a novel. It's a wonderful form, and it can be stretched as far as creators and publishers are willing to go with it". In one sense, the series was non-linear by the sheer span of its subjects, the episodic glimpses of them in different times and places, their flashback sequences, the element of perceived randomness altering their paths, and the uncertainty of their connectedness: an uncommon narrative strategy that now draws comparisons to critically successful TV shows like Lost. In another sense, the series is a very particularly linear story - going so far as to detail the births and maturing of pivotal characters - which is too large to be seen all at once: a novelistic narrative now seen similarly in critically praised TV shows like The Wire. The writer said in 2009: "When we were first published, people were used to comics with linear stories about a main character. But now, with an audience used to shows like Heroes and Lost, with large casts and non-linear storylines, we're hoping that Starstruck will find an even larger readership". Starstruck used supplement texts as a dramatic expansion of the story. The Glossary, written by one fictional historian, went past defining references in the dialogue to sketching out the past, present, and future of the characters and their universe. Writer Alan Moore would do something similar afterward, more simply in Watchmen (1985) and much more extensively in his League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999). Starstruck can be considered one of comics' premiere hypertext fictions, in the sense of using supplementary texts, adjunct stories, and ancillary art to expand, deepen, and even alter the narrative experience. Comics Journal