Galaxy Quest, the 1999 sci-fi romp about the cast of a Star Trek-like show that gets recruited to save a group of real aliens who believe the show is real, is one of my favorite genre spoofs. Galaxy Quest: The Journey Continues, the new trade paperback collection of the four-issue miniseries from IDW, may have always been doomed to fall short of my expectations. The story is readable and inoffensive, but it doesn’t provide many truly exciting or funny moments.
The series, written by Erik Burnham and drawn by Nacho Arranz, actually starts with a promising premise: without diving into movie spoilers (and the entire comic starts with spoiling the end of the movie, so see the movie first), the actions of the crew in the climactic moments of their earlier interstellar adventure doomed an alien rebellion on a nearby world. Now, these aliens have tracked the perpetrators to Earth and want them to help set right what went wrong. Unfortunately, this plot takes a while to get going, and once it picks up some momentum, it doesn’t go anywhere very interesting. The exposition is clumsily delivered, at times, and the climax is disappointing, thanks to an unnecessary deus ex machina which makes what build-up there is feel almost like a waste. The humor, too, falls short, with only a few moments being amusing, and often those make you realize how much the cast of the film brought to the comedy in it.
Nacho Arranz’s art, meanwhile, is generally attractive enough but suffers from what many movies-turned-comics do in that the characters on the page don’t look much like the characters from the film (possibly for legal reasons) – and several of them look similar enough that it can be tricky to identify who is talking.
Overall, Galaxy Quest: The Journey Continues can do a little to scratch that Galaxy Quest itch, if you have it, but an uninteresting plot and inconsistent humor keep it from being a must-read. The book hovers somewhere between bad and simply disposable. While it is nice to see IDW paying any attention at all to Galaxy Quest as a property, hopefully, any future related projects will step up their game.
