Kris Straub

Starslip Crisis is one of three webcomics where I've bought the content in print despite being able to get it all on the Internet for free. (The other two are the epic Narbonic and the sadly short-lived [nemesis].) It's about an art museum in space, and so it combines two things I like: space opera and theory about how the presentation of a work of art affects its meaning. A lot of it is science fiction parody, but it just as often has character-based humor, not to mention a lot of jokes at show more the expense of academia. (In the future, Earth's greatest export is culture, and as a result, its government is a critocracy.)

Starslip Crisis starts out a little rough, I think, but it quickly settles down, alternating between daily gags and longer storylines. And when I say "quickly," I mean quickly; about a dozen pages in, and Straub is already starting to hit his groove, with a tale that explains how humans finally stopped robot uprisings by making machines that were smarter than people. Unlike machines just as smart as people, who wanted to kill humans and rule the cosmos, machines who were smarter were all philanthropists and serve humankind out of free will. There's also the Firefly parody (the space rogue Zillion speaks a strange dialect where you always drop the last word of every), and the Cirbozoids, the strange species who have a new biological ability every time the crew needs a new way out of a situation, but best of all is the ongoing conflict with Lord Katarakis of the Dreadnox Cluster.

Now, Lord Katarakis is an evil despot who wants to control the universe, and only Captain Vanderbeam and the crew of the Fuseli stand in his way... but he wants to do it through art. And this means jokes written by someone who has clearly read Walter Benjamin and John Berger. I don't know who this comic's target audience is, but I'm clearly part of it, and it's amazing. Kris Straub has good gags, great sci-fi ideas, fun characters, and an epic plot; Starslip Crisis is one of those works where everything just comes together, and I love it. show less

Having finally read (or reread, rather), the first Starslip Crisis collection, I had to go straight into the second-- which is even better than the first.  It's in the second volume where the series hits my favorite sequence, Lord Katarakis's attempted invasion of Earth.  Lord Katarakis has a sculpture called the Spine of the Cosmos, and anyone who sees the work of art will fall under his mental thrall... but only if they fully comprehend it, which requires knowing its context.  So, show more having acquired the Spine, Katarakis has labored to discover it context.  To do this, he's conquered the planet Cirbozoid, whose inhabitants can parse the meaning of art, but cannot actually understand it.  They're the only ones who can stop him or help him.

So naturally, the only ship that can stop Katarakis is the Fuseli, an luxury-battlecruiser-turned-art-museum, which is co-captained by Memnon Vanderbeam, the best curator in known space, and Cutter Edgewise, somewhat reformed pirate and alcoholic.  Who else can fight against art?  The climactic battle happens halfway through Volume 2, and it's everything I want out of Starslip Crisis: there are jokes, there are some epic twists and unforgettable scenes, and Straub brings them together into one. show less

Ask me what my favorite webcomic is, and the answer will probably be Smithson or maybe [nemesis], but of all the daily strips out there, Starslip Crisis is undoubtedly the best. Always funny, it manages to also have a fantastic over-arching storyline that always keeps you guessing, and a far-out array of characters. Plus. it's set on an art museum housed inside a luxury warship. In space. Even though you can read the whole strip on the web for free, I still shelled out for this collection. show more It's that good. (originally written November 2007) show less

Volume 3 of Starslip Crsis claims to be 115 pages, but in actual story, it is only 73 pages long, making it the shortest Starslip volume of them all. This is one of the strip's weaker periods, something Straub himself acknowledges in his afterword. The strip began to be overtaken by its own storylines; while the Fuseli crew being at war with their own future was epic and funny, the characters being split up into multiple locations dampened both the drama and the humor.

Straub's afterword is show more honest and thoughtful, and there are times where I feel like Steven Moffat would do well to read it as he constructs the next twist in his ongoing Doctor Who saga:

I had thought that added storyline complexity would be a challenge to write, which was what I wanted, but it turned out to be easier than I expected. Too easy. Not because I was a genius, but because at a certain depth complexity begins to look arbitrary. Something readers kicked around was the increasing likelihood that Vanderbeam would actually become so twisted in his time-travelling search for Jovia that he turns into Katarakis. And it's a wonderful idea.

But what bothered me wasn't that it was a wonderful idea -- what was troubling me was knowing that, if I needed to take the story there, I could. And if I needed to reverse that plot point somehow, I could.... All the plot loops and time travel had made things too straightforward.

When you can reveal that two of your protagonists' daughter was actually their childhood best friend with seeming no consequences, you've fallen into this trap I think.

My complaints about the River Song storyline aside, the slimness of this volume comes from the fact that it ends at the point the universe is reset, jettisoning all that continuity, but keeping the character histories in tact. (DC Comics, take note.) Some "extras" take up the slack, but at 40 pages, there's too many of them. There's some extra strips, which is good, and there's also a few pages of art for a potential monthly Starslip comic, which looks nice, but the formatted-to-take-up-a-lot-of-room script for it shows that it was nowhere near as funny as the original; the whole art museum/critic angle is dropped, and it's a pretty generic and toothless Star Trek parody. I can't say I'm sorry it didn't come to pass. show less