3 out of 5

Crowd-sourced indie comic projects have a slight edge over comic shop stuff in terms of retaining their audience: you are investing; you’re invested in seeing where the story goes. So you don’t necessarily have to frontload your tale with a hook – which is good, since hooks often lead to letdowns once an arc or the series concludes. Rereading Starside – a crowd-funded bit of kids adventure sci-fi – to be prepped for this first volume concluding issue, I was satisfied that my issue-by-issue reads hadn’t been lying: that creators Dylan Klein and Lane Brettschneider had taken that kids adventure sci-fi template (you know the one: A. aliens exist and B. we need YOU to save the universe) and successfully twisty-turneyed it at nearly every step, with artist Jordan Chao doing stiff but effective work that captured character and mood to match the ever-escalating and complexifying story of world-orphaned Jack, bouncing around planets with sometimes-buddy Riggs.

Rereads are generally what I do when getting to a conclusion, but I’ll admit I was also delaying a bit, as, though I do think Klein / Brettschneider sufficiently dashed story hook options as they came up – in a good way; in a way that wasn’t reliant on “easy” ways to build the world – there were still some ideas piling up that needed resolution, and I worried that issue #7 was either going to delay those resolves, and / or continue to expand the story instead of taking a beat to streamline it. Because that’s been the template so far: keep growing; keep adding new characters. It’s worked, but issue #6 felt like what should be the limit. And yeah, unfortunately, both of my worries came true in this outing: we delay; we expand.

Additionally, as we build to a big ol’ laser blasting showdown, Chao’s limitations with action make the choreography a bit clunky. That’s been part of the book’s charm, with Jordan putting time into design and layout and color choice that’s made it work, but the issue is all about that showdown, and it just felt like it needed some more visual zing. But I appreciate that the team went for it, and that Chao was game, even if I’m still criticizing the overall story direction, and the way the art impacted its effectiveness – that is, I can feel the passion of our Starside creators.

As such, I’m not dimmed in my passion as a reader. I suspect there’s a pause before the next arc, and so I kinda get why we sort of went for a bottle issue – in the sense that nothing much is resolved here in favor of spotlighting the showdown, and we dangle some Wait-And-Sees, allowing for a clearer jumping on point whenever the series returns. Still, though, without that next volume to jump in to, and armed with my recent reread, this is a bit underwhelming of an ending. It’s not illogical, and there are some key character beats that absolutely pay off, making the preceding six issues worth the buildup, just, again, ultimately underwhelming.