Review by Ian Keogh

Designed to be a reader friendly title, all you really need to know about Captain Marvel is that Spider-Woman is her best buddy, and although it looks like she has a pet cat, it’s actually an alien beast known as a flerkin. Its mouth is a portal to another dimension, through which it can pull large objects via massive tentacles. Thankfully flerkins are friendly creatures, and Captain Marvel’s pet is the only one on Earth. So why are cats on the march throughout New York?

The Captain Marvel film was on release when Sam Maggs and Sweeney Boo produced these stories, and with the semi-manga style of cartooning and the continuity-free plots they’re squarely aimed at a younger audience who might not previously have known Carol Danvers. For good measure other Marvel film favourites turn up later on. Maggs supplies narrative captions featuring Carol’s inner voice explaining everything as she goes along, other than why Carol manifests several different costumes. The technique’s not subtle, although Maggs stops short of introducing each member of the Guardians of the Galaxy, but the tone is distinctive and it helps move the action along.

Eye-catching and brightly coloured art is distinctive with the characters designed to charm, especially if you’re a flerkin lover. Those darned flerkins are so cute in their little uniforms.

The greatest problem with Cosmic Cat-tastrophe is that it’s so short, almost as slim as a regular stapled comic, as is the follow-up A.I.M. Small. Ghost in the Machine has a more traditional page count for a graphic novel, but anyone interested is better advised to head for all three combined in pocket format as Game On.