What If There's Others on the Ship We Missed? Or if He's Triplets?

Starslip: A Completely Accurate Portrayal of the Future

by Kris Straub

Comic trade paperback, 120 pages. Published 2011 (content: 2009-10).  Acquired August 2011.  Read October 2011.

This is the first (and so far only) volume of Starslip to cover what happens after the universe is rest after the battle with Deep Time.  For the most part, it's a return to glory for the strip, which is simplified back to its roots: stuffy curator Memnon Vanderbeam in charge, with ex-pirate Cutter Edgewise and the strange Mr. Jinx at his side.  There's even a couple of new characters, Doctor Dahk Tohrr and Protocol Officer Quine, both of whom are good additions to the cast.  (Engineer Holiday, alas, still has nothing to do besides be the only girl.)

There are some good storylines here: the war games exercises, the locked-room mystery, and especially the ship's hijacking by space pirates when only Quine can stop them. (Kinda like "Starship Mine" from The Next Generation but with a total dweeb instead of Patrick Stewart.) But unfortunately, the spark is not quite at the same level as it was back at the beginning-- with the crew now serving on the exploration cruiser Paradigm instead of the starship museum Fuseli, it is a little more accessible like Straub says... but it's a little bit more generic sci-fi parody.  It never quite goes all the way, though; the opening storyline here is a rewrite of the bonus story at the back of Volume 3, and with Vanderbeam instead of that generic Kirk-parody, it's ten times as funny, so clearly Straub is doing something right.

That's all the Starslip I've got for now, because it's all that's been collected.  I hope Straub releases another one soon, 'cause I'll buy it, even though I don't read it as a webcomic anymore. (I don't read any, actually, because I don't have the time.)

Too Late, Peacenik! You're Coming Downtown in Our Service Blimp

Starslip Crisis, Volume 3

by Kristofer Straub

Comic trade paperback, 115 pages. Published 2009 (content: 2008-09).  Acquired August 2011.  Read October 2011.

Volume 3 of Starslip Crsis claims to be 115 pages, but in actual story, it is only 73 pages long, making it the shortest Starslip volume of them all.  This is one of the strip's weaker periods, something Straub himself acknowledges in his afterword.  The strip began to be overtaken by its own storylines; while the Fuseli crew being at war with their own future was epic and funny, the characters being split up into multiple locations dampened both the drama and the humor.

Straub's afterword is honest and thoughtful, and there are times where I feel like Steven Moffat would do well to read it as he constructs the next twist in his ongoing Doctor Who saga:

I had thought that added storyline complexity would be a challenge to write, which was what I wanted, but it turned out to be easier than I expected. Too easy. Not because I was a genius, but because at a certain depth complexity begins to look arbitrary.  Something readers kicked around was the increasing likelihood that Vanderbeam would actually become so twisted in his time-travelling search for Jovia that he turns into Katarakis. And it's a wonderful idea.

But what bothered me wasn't that it was a wonderful idea -- what was troubling me was knowing that, if I needed to take the story there, I could.  And if I needed to reverse that plot point somehow, I could.... All the plot loops and time travel had made things too straightforward.

When you can reveal that two of your protagonists' daughter was actually their childhood best friend with seeming no consequences, you've fallen into this trap I think.

My complaints about the River Song storyline aside, the slimness of this volume comes from the fact that it ends at the point the universe is reset, jettisoning all that continuity, but keeping the character histories in tact.  (DC Comics, take note.)  Some "extras" take up the slack, but at 40 pages, there's too many of them.  There's some extra strips, which is good, and there's also a few pages of art for a potential monthly Starslip comic, which looks nice, but the formatted-to-take-up-a-lot-of-room script for it shows that it was nowhere near as funny as the original; the whole art museum/critic angle is dropped, and it's a pretty generic and toothless Star Trek parody.  I can't say I'm sorry it didn't come to pass.

And That Shifts the Context to a Metadiscussion on the Commodification of Power!

Starslip Crisis, Volume 2

by Kristofer Straub

Comic trade paperback, 127 pages. Published 2008 (content: 2007-08).  Acquired August 2011.  Read October 2011.

Having finally read (or reread, rather), the first Starslip Crisis collection, I had to go straight into the second-- which is even better than the first.  It's in the second volume where the series hits my favorite sequence, Lord Katarakis's attempted invasion of Earth.  Lord Katarakis has a sculpture called the Spine of the Cosmos, and anyone who sees the work of art will fall under his mental thrall... but only if they fully comprehend it, which requires knowing its context.  So, having acquired the Spine, Katarakis has labored to discover it context.  To do this, he's conquered the planet Cirbozoid, whose inhabitants can parse the meaning of art, but cannot actually understand it.  They're the only ones who can stop him or help him.

So naturally, the only ship that can stop Katarakis is the Fuseli, an luxury-battlecruiser-turned-art-museum, which is co-captained by Memnon Vanderbeam, the best curator in known space, and Cutter Edgewise, somewhat reformed pirate and alcoholic.  Who else can fight against art?  The climactic battle happens halfway through Volume 2, and it's everything I want out of Starslip Crisis: there are jokes, there are some epic twists and unforgettable scenes, and Straub brings them together into one.

If Something Doesn't Take up at Least a Hundred Pages, and Require Defense in Front of a Board of Experts, It's Not Worth Saying

Starslip Crisis, Volume 1

by Kristofer Straub

Comic trade paperback, 175 pages. Published 2007 (content: 2005-07).  Acquired October 2007.  Read October 2011.

Starslip Crisis is one of three webcomics where I've bought the content in print despite being able to get it all on the Internet for free.  (The other two are the epic Narbonic and the sadly short-lived [nemesis].)  It's about an art museum in space, and so it combines two things I like: space opera and theory about how the presentation of a work of art affects its meaning.  A lot of it is science fiction parody, but it just as often has character-based humor, not to mention a lot of jokes at the expense of academia. (In the future, Earth's greatest export is culture, and as a result, its government is a critocracy.)

Starslip Crisis starts out a little rough, I think,  but it quickly settles down, alternating between daily gags and longer storylines.  And when I say "quickly," I mean quickly; about a dozen pages in, and Straub is already starting to hit his groove, with a tale that explains how humans finally stopped robot uprisings by making machines that were smarter than people.  Unlike machines just as smart as people, who wanted to kill humans and rule the cosmos, machines who were smarter were all philanthropists and serve humankind out of free will.  There's also the Firefly parody (the space rogue Zillion speaks a strange dialect where you always drop the last word of every), and the Cirbozoids, the strange species who have a new biological ability every time the crew needs a new way out of a situation, but best of all is the ongoing conflict with Lord Katarakis of the Dreadnox Cluster.

Now, Lord Katarakis is an evil despot who wants to control the universe, and only Captain Vanderbeam and the crew of the Fuseli stand in his way... but he wants to do it through art.  And this means jokes written by someone who has clearly read Walter Benjamin and John Berger.  I don't know who this comic's target audience is, but I'm clearly part of it, and it's amazing.  Kris Straub has good gags, great sci-fi ideas, fun characters, and an epic plot; Starslip Crisis is one of those works where everything just comes together, and I love it.

Archival Review: Sparkling Diplomacy: A Starslip Crisis Collection by Kristofer Straub

Sparkling Diplomacy: A Starslip Crisis Collection

by Kristofer Straub

Comic trade paperback, 180 pages. Published 2006 (content: 2005-06).  Read October 2007.

In this volume, the story really starts to ramp up, with the first inklings of titular crisis coming into play.  This is also the last part of this series of reprints-- before doing a planned third volume, Straub canceled it and replaced it with a new format that included over three times as many strips in a single book, starting from the beginning once again.  And I bought the first volume of this new series, despite the fact that I'd already paid for almost two-thirds of its content-- and I could have gotten all of it for free!  I guess I'm just a sucker like that.

Archival Review: A Terrfying Breach of Protocol: A Starslip Crisis Collection by Kristofer Straub

A Terrifying Breach of Protocol: A Starslip Crisis Collection

by Kristofer Straub

Comic trade paperback, 142 pages. Published 2005.  Read October 2007.

Ask me what my favorite webcomic is, and the answer will probably be Smithson or maybe [nemesis], but of all the daily strips out there, Starslip Crisis is undoubtedly the best.  Always funny, it manages to also have a fantastic over-arching storyline that always keeps you guessing, and a far-out array of characters.  Plus. it's set on an art museum housed inside a luxury warship.  In space.  Even though you can read the whole strip on the web for free, I still shelled out for this collection.  It's that good.