2 out of 5

A promising, pretty book that suffers from “did the story start yet?” syndrome.

From its quirky title to the fun character designs and its solid sense of humor, Oswald and the Star-Chaser has the makings of a book to watch – an indie up-and-comer with eagerness spilling over its pages. And it’s not that it isn’t that, but over two issues, I couldn’t really find an aspect that got to the critical mass of spilling over, rather leaving things at a simmer. There are some pacing problems affecting that overall, leading to a story structure in which the tone and direction isn’t really clear, also unfortunately impacted by some dialogue / art mistimings.

Oswald’s first issue kicks off with some great beats: noir sci-fi panels of a hooded figure, menacingly approaching “The Crabs Claw” bar, revealed as the red-headed, cherubic looking titular Oswald Bretters. His annoucnement of being a space knight is met by exactly zero fanfare, with a smash-cut to a two page story-book style narrative on an overthrow star king and the Space Knights left behind to defend his kingdom. Ace stuff, and I dig colorist Simon Robins’ synthwave color vibes running up against artist Tom Hoskisson’s Star Wars-style weighty tech designs, with Oswald wearing what legit looks like a suit of armor.

From here, though, the trajectory of the story is not very clear. “save the Star Lands” is a fun, generic goal for the storybook pages, but it seems to be all Oswald has to say as well as he goes about trying to recruit others as Knights – he wants to save the Star Lands. And I do think this is intended to be part of the conflict, highlighting Oswald’s naievty, but Kulik and Maron take a middleground at making Oswald seem either eager or stupid, and the world-building is similarly somewhere between just-for-jokes or trying to build out extra lore, resulting in a space adventure that wants to be a space comedy, or vice versa, with neither definition satisfying in either direction. This is compounded by the other part of the pair: Star-Chaser. Star is a big, bad robot looking person – again, great design, great color – who decides to side with Oswald… because. Because “evil king is bad for business,” and that’s pretty much that. For all other intents and purposes, Star-Chaser seems to hate Oswald, so presumably there’s more to it, but that’s not coded well enough into the pages to lure us in as readers.

The first two issues are then mostly comprised of Star and Oswald traveling about to gather additional knights, with the latter’s eagerness getting the duo into troubles which the former is more capable of resolving. You know the structure of a story like this by heart – odd couple; will come to work together; heavy histories revealed – which is why its tonal aimlessness is especially aimless. And though the book is funny, and the art is engaging, there’s something about the way those elements combine that makes most of the jokes land kinda flat.

The passion is definitely there with Oswald and the Star-Chaser. It feels a few editorial tightening passes away from bringing that closer to the fore, however; in its current state – at least in these two issues – you can definitely sense the potential, but there’re also a few too many roadblocks to appreciating it.

Note: Rebecca Good takes over color for most of issue #2, and opts for a slightly dingier palette that brings out a rougher edged vibe in Hoskisson’s artwork. While Robins’ work looked great, I do think the book “feels” better with a more underplayed visual style.