This is a Marvel graphic novel, but it came out in 1984, features no superheroes and feels far more like a European graphic novel than an American one. I believe the stories within it were originally published in 'Heavy Metal', originally a French publication called 'Métal Hurlant'. This collection is part of a series rather unimaginatively called 'Marvel Graphic Novels', in which it's number 13.

The adult approach is very much the point, I believe. European graphic novels were thriving in the seventies and eighties because they could tackle adult material that American comic books simply couldn't, due to the restrictions of the American Comics Code. Marvel, as a behemoth of American comic book publishing, wanted its own part of that market. Enter Marvel Graphic Novels. I assume that they could get away with more in a graphic novel than they could in a comic book. However, it isn't adult in the sense of the erotic comics so popular in Europe, just in maturity of theme.

Just to make this even more atypical for Marvel, 'The Luckless, the Abandoned and Forsaked' is a prequel of sorts, certainly a companion piece, to an earlier stage play, written by Elaine Lee with her sister Norfleet Lee and her husband Dale Place, called 'Starstruck'. In the introduction here, she calls it "a very silly science-fiction comedy". It may even have had songs. Michael Kaluta drew its poster and designed the sets and costumes and, while they worked together, they talked about the characters in 'Starstruck', which led to this collaborative work.

To quote Lee verbatim: "Our idea was to take several of the characters and, based on things that were revealed about their pasts in the play, recreate the incidents that changed them, made them the kind of creatures they were, set them on the road that would lead them to the confrontation around which the play was built. This is the book. These are the stories."

If that makes you wonder how accessible it's going to be, then you're on the right lines. Imagine if you had never seen the original 'Star Wars' trilogy and nobody had made any of those other films, but you picked up a graphic novel full of interlinked stories about an evil space lord in a huge black helmet, a giant carnivorous teddy bear and some backwoods hick who knows how to fly. Be honest with me here: how much sense would you think it would make? Well, that's this book.

There are a whole bundle of stories here, some of them substantial enough to get our teeth into but some as short as one gigantic panel on one page that seems to have no connection to anything else here. Some seem to have no meaning only to gain some later on when we finally realise what we were looking at thirty pages earlier. Some characters cross over from one story to another until we start to put a bigger picture together. I only read this book once but I have a feeling it would be beneficial to read it again, maybe a few times.

While the characters with power, like Baron Rodrigo Sejanus Vasco D'Gama Bajar, a businessman upset with some pissant with only three planets who's declined to sell him 300 million aluminium stein handles, are male, they're really just the background. The primary characters are all female and there are a bunch of them.

One is Galatia-9, who joins the Amazons by defeating a room full of thuggish dromes, only for the ritual to go bizarrely wrong and blast her into space in a capsule. That's in 'Mumbo-Jumbo!', but a story later, in 'The Void', she crashes into another spaceship containing three Troikani actors who are all the same person spread over three bodies. Because they're idiots, she jettisons them in an escape pod and takes over the ship. Presumably she becomes a member of the Americadian Space Brigade, because she's a captain in 'I Ate a Whole Funnel Cake...' when she meets Brucilla.

Brucilla "The Muscle" is another. She shows up in 'I've Got My Finger on It Now', which details some ridiculously dangerous prank conducted as part of the commencement exercises on Anarchera. An entire graduating class (I think) of Brigaders attempt to make it through Neutral Zone 8 alive to egg St. Arnold Zaporoffsky's Military Pep band while they play on Port-o-Boy Gazebo 16. Very few make it and, given that one who does is the son of the aluminium stein handle salesman, I had to wonder if this was some grand revenge scheme. Either way, Brucilla presumably becomes Miner One Niner who crashes through Landing Bay 17 on Recreation Station 97 and ends up meeting Galatia-9.

I'm sure these two, who are also the two characters on the cover, get up to all sorts of shenanigans in 'Starstruck' the play, but I have no idea how that unfolds and the proposed Disney adaptation (seriously) never got off the ground. The third character we see a lot of doesn't do much but feels to be important. She's an Erotica Ann, the last in a line of sexbots, presumably discontinued and destroyed after how traumatised the Baron's son Kalif gets in 'They Lie Dormant in Some People', the first substantial story. However, she seems to be alive, sentient, whatever you want to call it, and presumably goes on to things of importance, just not particularly here.

Finally, there's a character that we see very little of but whose fingerprints show up on a whole lot of these stories. She's the Baron's daughter, Indira Lucrezia Ronnie Lee Ellis Bajar, better known to many as a Hugo Award-winning science fiction author Ronnie Lee Ellis. That trauma I mentioned is presumably part of an experiment she's conducting on her brother and I'm not convinced that an array of other things that happen here aren't also due to her setting something up. She seems to be very involved with the religion that keeps cropping up, the Cloistered Order of the Cosmic Veil. Maybe she's a sort of L. Ron Hubbard.

Of course, for more details, see the play and the various comic book series, completed or not, that followed this graphic novel. And I have precisely none of those, so this has to stand alone.

Initially, it seems almost incoherent, like Elaine Lee had done way too much acid and braindumped a few trips into scripts for experienced comic book artist Michael Kaluta to bring to life. His art is a joy to behold, except for moments when Galatia-9 seems to be about eight-years-old. See the back cover. She certainly isn't, with panels of her talking to Galactic Girl Guides there to underline that. I don't know if he conjured up the shark spaceships the Brigaders fly or the Baby Sister recruiting droids for the Cosmic Veil, but they look amazing and, whether it was he or Lee, kudos is due.

However, the more I thought about the connections and how they tie together, the more sense it started to make. And then I read what little I could find on the 'Starstruck' series to see if I'd got it right. I think I did OK, but I still have many gaps. Presumably Galatia-9 is the Luckless, Brucilla the Muscle is the Abandoned and the last Erotica Ann is the Forsaked? If so, what is Indira Bajar? The trip was fun though. I liked this, even if I want a lot more of it to bring it coherence, but maybe it's always going to be niche to anyone who hasn't seen the play. Which, I presume is almost all of us. ~~ Hal C F Astell