A hardass and unknowable space hero does battle with a corrupt government force led by his brother, runs afoul of a cosmic powerhouse named Vokonokov, and uses his glowing laser claws to slice up robots. Half a galaxy away, a scantily-clad pirate vixen and her robot-seeming bodyguard pull off an incredible heist of a mystery treasure with Raiders of the Lost Ark powers. These stories have little to do with one another except this: they are exceptionally rad.
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Rarely before have I seen a comic that delights so fully in itself as does Space Opera Xanadax: Across The Unknown Dimensions of the Galaxy. Crafted with a childlike sense of exuberance, moving at an incredible pace, and unworried about unnecessary narrative complexity, Xanadax embraces the most basic urge to present the coolest thing ever without constraint. The book revels in the sort of action you might have created as a child, mashing your action figures against one another in your room as you created whirling, nonsensical epics.
Cartoonist Tom Scioli has created a comic that is all bombast and fury, all comic-booky sci-fi concept with little to no explanation. There isn’t a grand story to Xanadax, no simmering political drama or complex human emotion. There are spider robots and laser claws, space pirates and explosions, and every page is exciting. The book moves at an almost impossible pace; page after page is dedicated to highly choreographed action sequences; it is unrelenting in its desire to thrill.
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Even Scioli’s artwork has a childlike energy – his draftsmanship is loose, improvisational. Laser blasts and explosions flare out in jagged, color-outlined starbursts, and the anatomy of characters is exaggerated; all of this is filtered through the precise cartooning cool of a creator who has spent decades refining style and form. After his Kirby-esque early work on Gødland and the toy-accurate boxiness of his Go-Bots and Transformers vs G.I. Joe, the looseness and freedom of Xanadax becomes a studied release of form; Xanadax shows an exceptional artist pushing himself into exciting graphic territory.
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While Xanadax sees bold colors dominating pages and restrained color highlights, the book’s backing story Princess: The Space Princess from Outer Space leans more directly into Scioli’s more nuanced gradients, its panels crammed with embellished detail. While both stories share a giddiness of science-fiction goofiness, they couldn’t be more visually distinct (and still come from the same craftsman).
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The book is a thrilling double feature, then, and one impossible to put down. The first story propels the reader forward with such breakneck speed that the second feels like a sort of cool crashpad, a denser cushion to slow the reader down.
Space Opera Xanadax: Across The Unknown Dimensions of the Galaxy is a delight from start to finish, a book that celebrates the most primal urges of the medium and excels in them. It’s a book for people who love the medium with an unabashed passion.
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