Review by Frank Plowright
Well, this is a peculiar product. As originally published in 2014, James Turner’s Star Cat was a genuine five star slab of hilarity, packed with absurd situations and funny lines as a crew of incompetents went about their business in outer space.
Several years later David Fickling Books began a programme of repackaging their comic series into smaller, almost digest size publications, achieved by reformatting the strips. This worked fine enough when applied to Jamie Smart’s manic energy for Bunny vs. Monkey, and Neill Cameron’s sprightly Mega Robo Bros, but Turner’s method of packing panels onto a page resists reformatting in the same way. The solution is to have Yasmin Sheikh redraw Turner’s scripts to accommodate the new format. Sheikh is a more refined cartoonist than Turner, but something diminishes for the loss of his wonky styling. The reworked strips also slow down the insane pace, which is a shame.
Six of the ten strips from the original volume are reworked, and Turner takes the opportunity to polish the dialogue a little and add a connecting theme to the stories. ‘With Friends Like These Who Needs a Nemesis?’ ends with the presentation of an award for Bravest Captain in the Universe, and Turner expands that by applying new endings to the earlier stories explaining how desperate Captain Spacington is to win the award. The problem with that is his being continually inept, first seen playing with his own action figure before the Space Mayor instructs him to apprehend a dangerous escaped criminal planning to rob a bank.
Spacington is just one of the nutty characters populating a vessel that’s half spacecraft and half cat, but prone to the same distractions as real cats, which leads to troublesome situations. Brilliantly, top travelling speed is achieved by dangling a large ball of wool in front of it. Spacington is seen on the cover with Science Officer Plixx, the dimmest alien around, and the egotistical Robot One, allegedly the smartest form of life, although you’ll question that reading the stories. The crew is rounded off by the cat pilot who speaks in a language no-one can understand, but sharper readers can work out. They like runny scrambled eggs.
Star Cat is in Leo Baxendale’s great tradition of all-ages absurdist and anarchic comedy, and Turner has a seemingly endless stream of funny situations in his head, played out beautifully by the daft crew in a strip that should be more highly regarded. The sheer volume of silly jokes both verbal and visual is amazing, and we should be thankful for a second dose in A Turnip in Time.
