God Hates Astronauts vol. 2: A Star is Born!
The first volume was one of the most gloriously stupid things I’ve ever read, so I had to put it on my “best of” list for 2013. Now we have the first volume of the ongoing series, and it’s just as dumb as before while also managing to raise the craziness to near unsustainable levels. This is because it starts off with Star Grass — the superhuman with the head of a ghost cow that has a mechanism to control his cow-impulses built into his ghost-brain — leading the Power Persons Five and their Star Bear battalion to stop a group of astronaut farmers trying to leave the tyranny of Earth so that their leader can enjoy un-persecuted love with his chicken-with-a-woman’s-body Hennifer. Mind you, this is only a prelude to the actual plot of this volume, which involves King Tiger Eating A Cheeseburger of the Planet Crabulon staging an attack on Earth for the perceived death of his son by a previous group of astronaut farmers. The insanity doesn’t stop there as the many sub-plots here range from the mundane — exploring Dr. Professor’s past as he tries to warn of the impending invasion — to the sublimely bizarre — seeing Gnarled Winslow find a way to exorcise the ghost of Crazy Train with the help of fat slob Cowboy Tom with funky butt-loving results.
What’s the point of all this? To entertain you and make you laugh. Yet what impresses me most about this volume is how it comes off as an all-out war against the idea of seriousness on the part of writer/artist Ryan Browne. There is not an ounce of dramatic pathos to be found at all in this series. Even when it looks like the drama is about to increase, there will be some sort of crude sexual innuendo or random profanity to dispel any notion that what you’re reading is meant to be take seriously in any way at all. It’s telling that the least interesting part of this volume is when Star Grass gets his cow-impulse modulator replaced and turns into a nice, boring, and wimpy husband before a well-placed smack from his wife brings back the asshole we all know and love. There’s a conventional dramatic arc here and the narrative suffers just a little for it. I’ve seen comics, TV shows and movies that are so serious that you can’t take them seriously, and this is as far away from that as you can get while still being entertaining. Assuming that the adventures of an asshole superhero with a cyborg ghost-cow head are something you want to read about.
(If I have one hope for the next volume, it would be for more “Goofin’ With Gnarled” strips. Please!)