2 out of 5

Let’s be honest: Ryan North has only a handful of joke formats.  Thankfully, as the static Dinosaur Comics can prove, his ceaseless curiosity and loose-lobed thinking and imagination can make that format funny again and again.  But the dude has a surprising amount of output, and so sometimes it does feel like he’s just falling back on habit.  I don’t know how the Galaga comic came to fruition, but it’s one of those webcomic dreams come true, with North scripting and Dr. McNinja’s Christ Hastings on art.  And for however you’d imagine the premise, that’s not the case, and instead we get this wacky mash-up of the 8-bit world with our world, where bugs that no currently existing weapon can destroy suddenly start approaching the Earth in oddly geometric waves and two teen (?) chicks start making the Galaga ship out of different colored cubes that fall onto their lawn.  Cue funny ways of figuring out how to work a point system into the comic as well as continually inventive tie-ins of old school gaming and the real world.

From a high level it sounds awesome.

But on the ground the comic never really takes off.  All of the characters communicate in “North speak” (everything is totes radical and semi-aware of itself, including the president… who in Chris’ hands sort of feels like King Radical except not as radical) which would be fine but… there’s no straight man.  In Dinosaur Comics, he can play the characters off of each other, and in Adventure Time he gets a pass because that whole world is crazy.  But Galaga seems to seek to be an action strip, which just doesn’t blend well with the non-stop chuckle talk.  And I can’t claim to know how people do weekly comics, but the pacing is frustrating – each week has an exciting title and sometimes nothing will happen.  Like – stop titling the strips and I won’t expect so much, I suppose.  The art is competent but despite some fun explosions, we’re sort of stuck in a rut of bug/girls/president and no other real settings or characters.

Sounds really cool, and talking about it feels fun, but the experience itself just isn’t too involving or rewarding.