Cody Starbuck

Cody Starbuck

Elon Cody Starbuck is the space pirate created by Howard Chaykin, who first appeared in Star Reach magazine, issue #1, and also appeared in various issues of the graphics magazine, Heavy Metal.


 * 1) Starbuck, the first mate of the ship Pequod in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick
 * 2) Elon Cody Starbuck, a space pirate created by Howard Chaykin for the comics anthology magazine Star*Reach, first appearing in 1974.
 * 3) Lieutenant Starbuck, a character in the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica film and television series
 * 4) Kara Thrace, call sign "Starbuck", a character in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica television series
 * 5) Bill Starbuck, the main character in the 1954 play The Rainmaker by N. Richard Nash and its adaptations.

Putting Atlas behind him, Chaykin continued to toil in the trenches of the comics industry, doing fill-ins on such titles as DC's Weird War. At Marvel, he and Len Wein collaborated on Dominic Fortune, another pulp-style character. They also put their heads and talents together for Gideon Faust, a Victorian era sorceror published first in in the pages of Star Reach, an independent sci-fi anthology comic, and later in Heavy Metal.

codystarbuck.jpg He also continued to develope his own ideas while experimenting with a variety of artistic styles. When his Cody Starbuck debuted, his drawing style was very reminiscent of Alex Toth. A grand space opera, Cody Starbuck mirrored many of the themes later seen in the 1977 blockbuster film Star Wars.

Chaykin was chosen to illustrate the Marvel Comics adaptation of the film. After a meeting with George Lucas in Burbank the year before the movie was released, Chaykin walked away with a box of 4000 stills and a portfolio of conceptual paintings by Ralph McQuarry. "The stills were incredibly dead an inert," he explains. “They looked like a high school science project. What freaked me out when I saw the film was it ended up looking like the McQuarry paintings, and that was the most profound effect, that they managed to do all the work in post. It's a tribute to what was done to that film after it was shot."

Of course nobody had any idea the phenomenon that Star Wars would become. "Had I known, I probably would've worked harder on it. I still haven't gotten over the resentment of the fact that it existed in the pre-royalty times so I got chump change for those books.” [edit] External links

* Comic Book Bin * Trip Atlas

Star Reach (also spelled Star*Reach) was an influential, American science fiction and fantasy comics anthology published from 1974 to 1979 by Mike Friedrich. It is unrelated to the early MS-DOS computer game of the same name.

Overview

Significant as one of the first mainstream independent comic books, and the first with any significant distribution, Star*Reach bridged the gap between the countercultural underground comics and traditional Marvel/DC Comics fare, providing mature genre stories for an adult audience. 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 an important forerunner to the late-1970s rise of the modern graphic novel, and of the 1980s' independent comics.

Eighteen issues were released between 1974 and 1979. Most of the content was intended for an adult audience. 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 respected 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).

Friedrich's company grew into a small publishing house, 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. The company ceased publishing in 1979.

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

Contributors Star*Reach #7 (Jan. 1977): Cover by Barry Windsor-Smith.

Johnny Achziger  •   Neal Adams   •   Jeff Bonivert   •   Frank Brunner   •   Howard Chaykin   •   Mark Cohen   •   Gene Day   •   Steve Englehart   •   Fabio Gasbarri   •   Michael Gilbert   •   Dick Giordano   •   Sitoshi Hirota   •   Robert Gould   •   Eric Kimball   •   Paul Kirchner   •   Steve Leialoha   •   Lee Marrs   •   Al Milgrom   •   Jeffrey Morgan   •   Gray Morrow   •   Dean Motter   •   Masaichi Mukaide   •   Michael Netzer (Nasser)   •   P. Craig Russell   •   Dave Sim   •   Walt Simonson   •   Steve Skeates   •   Mary Skrenes   •   Bob Smith   •   Ken Steacy   •   Jim Starlin   •   Joe Staton   •   Mike Vosburg   •   Mal Warwick   •   Len Wein   •   Barry Windsor-Smith   •   Mark A. Worden   •   John Workman   •   Roger Zelazny

References

* "The Star-Reach Bibliography", by Richard J. Arndt

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