Screwball sci-fi comedy can be tricky to get right. Focus too much on the slapstick and you lose any of the potential sci-fi elements. Lean too heavily on futuristic premises and the jokes become impossible to set-up. Finding the balance between gaudy fantasy themes and a good solid gag is hard, but when you get it right, it’s hilarious.
Voyage to the Stars is a graphic novel based on a popular podcast of the same name, and it really shows. The comic relies very heavily on dialogue with the artwork mostly their to add to the humour rather than tell the story. Connie Daidone’s art-style does a lot of the heavy lifting here; it’s silly and fun and really does help land the many quick-fire gags; it’s just a pity it’s buried under so many word balloons.
The story itself sees a bunch of intrepid misfits flee a doomed Earth; with no home to return to this band of idiots seek out a way of stopping the all-consuming Nothing from devouring the entire galaxy. The central gag is that these ‘heroes’ are vain, selfish and very bad at pretty much everything. They kill and destroy pretty much everything they see not out of malice but stupidity.
Of course, they come across the galaxies best hope against the Nothing and some how make things worse. The story is a nice blend of Guardians of the Galaxy and Spaceballs and if you can forgive how contrived some of the story beats are, quite fun. It doesn’t resemble the podcast at all; the charm of the voice actors fails to come across in this entirely different medium, but the artwork makes up for that quite well.
Over-all, a nice bit of light reading for those who love wacky hi-jinks.
