Review by Frank Plowright

As a guide to the insanity that awaits within Star Cat all you really have to know is that it features the most incompetent four man crew ever to explore space, and their space craft is a mechanical cat that often behaves like a real one. James Turner’s screwball mind is responsible for a strip that should be recognised as an all time great.

It’s been too long since there’ve been new Star Cat stories, and the reformatting of the original edition as redrawn by Yasmin Sheikh didn’t quite meet with expectation despite her great cartooning. A Turnip in Time, though, is the real deal, although the title strip is another redrawn from the original Star Cat collection.

Science Officer Plixx holds her post more through a desire to experiment instead of any basic qualification, and she’s key to much of what goes on here. Or, to be more accurate, much of what goes wrong here. Among her mishaps are catapaulting a cake through time, shrinking the crew, the casual use of de-evolution ray and being the most useless spy ever. Not a good time, then, for an official inspection.

Turner takes what have become stock SF adventure situations and gives them a ridiculous twist. An encounter with a civilisation whose intellectual capacities are far beyond human intelligence is hardly a new idea, but in no other version would the inhabitants of Brainulon be distracted by a toy car. A giant space beast is concerned about its profile, we see the Dark Rectangle’s robot hamster suit, and everything ends at the science fair. The longest story is ‘Space Race’, and it’s Turner’s homage to the Wacky Races animation, featuring several ridiculous aliens and having the Dark Rectangle playing every dirty trick in his effort to win.

Sheikh’s cartooning emphasises how silly everything is without ever exaggerating it, which would spoil the jokes, and her alien designs are pitched just right to be vaguely threatening, but not to the point where they’d even scare the youngest reader.

A Turnip in Time ticks the silly box, it ticks the side-splitting box and it ticks the conceptual brilliance box, so is a true all ages treat.