{"id":45178,"date":"2013-06-30T16:50:11","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T15:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=45178"},"modified":"2013-07-01T10:29:06","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T09:29:06","slug":"god-hates-astronauts-graphic-novel-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/reviews\/god-hates-astronauts-graphic-novel-review\/","title":{"rendered":"God Hates Astronauts graphic novel review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A wonderfully anarchic knockabout-turned-Kickstarter project from Ryan Browne (artist on Image Comics&#8217; \u00a0<em>The Manhattan Projects\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em>Bedlam<\/em>), <em>God Hates Astronauts: The Completely Complete Edition<\/em> is gleeful mixture of Saturday morning cartoon gone violently wrong <em>Venture Bros<\/em> and Grant Morrison&#8217;s Dadaist <em>Doom Patrol<\/em> run.<\/p>\n<p>Less wickedly subverting tropes and more inanely revelling in them like a naked jelly bath, <em>God Hates Astronauts<\/em> follows cosmic-powered super-dick Star Fighter, who gets his head beaten to a gristly swollen Toby Jug by a mustachioed Victorian boxer and his army of battling bears. As his relationship with his vacuous super-groupie wife Starrior degenerates, she hooks up with a ugly, but not as ugly as Giant Bulbous Head Man, cowboy haunted by the ghostly, floating head of a cow he failed to protect.<\/p>\n<p>Star Fighter catches them in the act and lashes out, transposing the spectral cow head onto his own bloody stump (it explodes like a balloon full of yuk, like swollen heads do when they get shot), he goes increasingly nuts \u2013 unleashes an atomic punch that gives his hirsuit Batman analogue the Anti-Mugger a green third arm, sees his job threatened by the pompous rhino-man Dr Professor and has a frustrated cat with a rocket-pack called Simon represent him in court.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, a bunch of crab-headed aliens ruled by King Tiger Eating A Cheeseburger, who is a tiger eating a cheeseburger, are doing\u2026 something, not quite sure what, but it&#8217;s got a sort-of fast-food mascot <em>Bucky O&#8217;Hare<\/em> vibe to it, so it&#8217;s bound to be a good thing.<\/p>\n<p>Deliriously odd, the real surprise about Browne&#8217;s folly is just how coherent it all is in narrative terms \u2013 the subject matter may be eyebrow-raisingly ludicrous and surreal, but there&#8217;s a real cause and effect and genuine sense of drama underpinning the whole thing. The art, too, is just as brash and bold as the concept, and produced over a period of years there&#8217;s a real, visible progression in skill and style that makes the later, cameo-laden spreads all the more impressive and energetic.<\/p>\n<p><em>God Hates Astronauts<\/em> began life as a 24-hour comic-creating challenge, and while the original black-and-white strip (included on this volume, along with origin stories drawn by the likes of <em>Hack\/Slash<\/em>&#8216;s Tim Seeley, <em>Angel<\/em>&#8216;s Jenny Frison\u00a0and frequent Jonathan Hickman collaborator Nick Pitarra) has that increasingly tiresome stream-of-consciousness narrative that&#8217;s never as funny as you think it is when writing it sloshed on Skittles at 3am, it underlines just how cohesive and complete the finished product is.<\/p>\n<p>Either that or we&#8217;ve gone mad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>God Hates Astronauts: The Completey Complete Edition is like Adventure Time meets Doom Patrol<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":45180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"MSN_Categories":"Uncategorized","MSN_Publish_Option":false,"MSN_Is_Local_News":false,"MSN_Is_AIAC_Included":"Empty","MSN_Location":"[]","MSN_Add_Feature_Img_On_Top_Of_Post":false,"MSN_Has_Custom_Author":false,"MSN_Custom_Author":"","MSN_Has_Custom_Canonical_Url":false,"MSN_Custom_Canonical_Url":""},"categories":[2616,8],"tags":[2931],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/God-Hates-Astronauts-The-Compeltely-Complete-Edition-review.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}