Review by Ian Keogh

Well, here’s an against the odds continuation. Long after readers of the first volume left school and then left college, eight years since Fear Not, Tiny Alien, we return to Keith Kanga on the planet of Kaptara. There’s no recap, so any newcomers are going to have to pick things up as they go along beyond the back cover blurb helpfully noting that trying to find a way back home to Earth, but before doing that he’s trying to locate the remainder of his crew. And before doing that there’s the mystery of missing cat tanks to be solved.

What the blurb doesn’t tell you is that Chip Zdarksy and Kagan McLeod are supplying a Masters of the Universe parody and it’s one long shaggy dog story as Keith and allies head from one danger to the next. The joke is that perhaps like Keith himself, his allies are well-meaning, but all incompetent outsiders that no-one in their right mind would have on the team. Well handled, there’s some mileage in the idea as has been proved in Hitman with Section Eight, and it’s not as if Zdarksy is short of variations on how things can be screwed up, but over the previous volume and opening chapters here he just drags things on too long without any relief from the silliness. It makes having any sympathy for Keith and his predicament difficult, until the complete shock masterfully dropped in the third chapter. Suddenly, the game has changed and Kaptara becomes a whole lot more interesting. That’s when attention moves away from Keith.

As drawn by McLeod it’s always interesting. An eight year gap hasn’t slowed his supply of impressive designs for ever more bizarre creations, and as before there’s not a straight line to be seen in his kinetic art. These are also packed pages, but never too crowded to figure out what’s going on, while the pin-up pages are an even greater treat.

After the third chapter revelation Zdarksy continues to surprise. We find out how Skullthor’s doing on Earth and there’s a great turning of the tables despite intervening pages with Keith back on Earth strangely placed at a point when there’s no certainty he’ll be returning. It’s all a massive surprise as Fear Not, Tiny Alien had a few moments, but was disappointingly rudderless, yet Universal Truth is one hell of a rescue job.

McKagan also writes the majority of the short bonus strips, looking at characters featured in the main story. They’re all funny, but the best of them is by Andrew Wheeler and Tim Fish taking the look of posing pouches to a new level.