Review by Frank Plowright

The crew of Star Cat are back for another selection of hilarious adventures. Captain Spaceington is basically good-hearted, but an ineffective idiot, so the devious Robot One has occasional thoughts of replacing him. Thankfully, he’s also hampered by limitations, some superbly conceived by James Turner. Despite being the Science Officer, the alien Plixx has very little knowledge of actual science, and the crew is completed by the cat pilot who speaks in code. Just move every letter in their dialogue balloons back one alphabetical space to discover what’s being said.

As an example of the silliness on offer, one mission begins with the Space Mayor ordering the Star Cat to deliver an urgent consignment of rubber chickens to Clowntopia-8. It means travelling through the spooky section of space, where Spaceferatu awaits, the rumoured hiding place of the Omni-Crown, and Robot One is very keen to acquire it. Instead each of the crew faces their own personal terrors, including Robot One being forced back to school.

Yasmin Sheikh takes Turner’s inspiringly daft scrips and ensures the humour is maximised via great wonky cartooning, here also having to adapt to the crew becoming two-dimensional on a rescue mission. Considering the characters were almost designed to be incompatible, making them work in the same strip is an achievement in itself.

Among the ten delightfully silly adventures are a visit to the future, a planet where it’s necessary to speak in rhyme and a journey inside the Space Mayor. These are followed by Turner and Sheikh encouraging readers to create their own funny comics. The necessities are explained, some examples are given and a few pages supply an opening panel to set up a four panel joke. Everything is so precisely explained newer creators working in other genres could do far worse than following the examples.

Comics that make both kids and adults laugh out loud are rarer than you’d think, and Star Cat continues to dazzle on that score.