Star Reach

Star Reach (also spelled Star*Reach) was an American science fiction and fantasy comics anthology published from 1974 to 1979 by Mike Friedrich.[1]

For the MS-DOS game, see Star Reach (video game).

Star Reach
Star*Reach #1 (April 1974)
Cover by Howard Chaykin
Publication information
PublisherStar*Reach
ScheduleIrregular
FormatAnthology
Genresuperhero, science fiction, fantasy
Publication dateApril 1974 – October 1979
No. of issues18
Creative team
Written byVarious
Artist(s)Various
Editor(s)Mike Friedrich

Publication history

One of the first American mainstream independent comic books, Star*Reach bridged the gap between the countercultural underground comics and traditional Marvel/DC Comics fare, providing mature genre stories for an adult audience. The fan press of the time referred to this and the comics magazine Heavy Metal as "ground-level publications".[2] Along with such other examples as Flo Steinberg's Big Apple Comix, published in 1975, and Harvey Pekar's naturalistic Everyman series American Splendor, first published in 1976, Star*Reach was a forerunner of the late-1970s rise of the modern graphic novel, and of the 1980s' independent comics.

Star*Reach #7 (January 1977)
Cover by Barry Windsor-Smith

Eighteen issues were released between 1974 and 1979. Contributors included such Marvel and DC writers and artists as Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, and Barry Windsor-Smith. It also included prose short stories by such authors as Roger Zelazny, who wrote the 13-page "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth", with illustrations by Gray Morrow, in issue #12 (March 1978).[3]

Friedrich's company grew into a small publishing house in Hayward, California, also called Star*Reach, that published the comic book series Quack; Imagine; and Lee Marrs' Pudge, Girl Blimp, along with a number of one-shot comics.[4] The company ceased publishing in 1979.

Eclipse Comics repackaged some of the original Star*Reach and Imagine material as Star*Reach Classics in 1984.[5]

gollark: Nim is an interesting possibility which I may investigate, yes.
gollark: I feel like that would just be OCaml but the ecosystem is even more nonexistent.
gollark: It has nice features but also horrible things.
gollark: I tried using it for stuff and I disliked it.
gollark: Haskell is obviously no, Python is quite slow and has different ecosystem problems as well as a remarkable amount of weird inconsistency, JS dependencies break after about 5 months and it's an awful language, Rust is somewhat nice but annoying compared to higher level languages, Clojure is maybe good however Lisp and also Java (well, JVM), and... that's about it?

References
  1. Sacks, Jason; Dallas, Keith (2014). American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1970s. TwoMorrows Publishing. pp. 146–148. ISBN 978-1605490564.
  2. Burchett, Rick, and Ed. Mantels, "Whizzard Talks to Steranko", Whizzard vol. 2, #11 [issue #16] (Summer 1978; published by Marty Klug, 5730 Chatport Road, St. Louis, Missouri), p.13
  3. Star*Reach (series) at the Grand Comics Database
  4. Publisher Star*Reach at the Grand Comics Database
  5. Star*Reach Classics at the Grand Comics Database

Sources
  • Richard Arndt, Mike Friedrich, The Star Reach Companion, TwoMorrows Publishing, 2013.


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