Today, Patrick and Michael are discussing Kaptara 2, originally released May 20th, 2015.

Patrick: Fun personal fact about me: I get sorta stressed out writing about some of the more prestige comics that Retcon Punch covers. While something like Saga or Nameless or Velvet might be both excellent and full of meaning, those creators are savvy enough to obscure any absolute reading of their work. The masters know enough to resist reducing their work to an easy slug line. I find the exact same quality to be true of Chip Zdarsky and Kagan McLeod’s Kaptara. Is it a subversion of high fantasy tropes? Or does the naturalistic, jokey approach to storytelling invalidate any comparisons one could draw to the standards of the genre? Issue two hints at commentary on celebrity, politics, gender dynamic, but doesn’t stay with anything long enough to make a point. But it may just be Kaptara’s refusal to make any point that makes it so damn fun. Oh, and the Cat Tanks. Obviously.

Keith has decided to buy in to Kaptarian culture 100%. The looming threat of Skullthor causes him no discomfort — there’s a whole city and way of life for Keith to discover, after all. He’s got a sexy new fighting teacher to flirt with, an apartment furnished with craft furniture and animal skin rugs, and no responsibilities — just so long as he’s willing to let Earth die. I’m still not 100% clear on why the Kaptarians are so interested in saving Earth, or why exactly they need Keith by their side, but they enact a little plan to shake Keith from his apathy. Keith eventually gets his belongings back from the crash site, and among them, finds a photograph of one of his former crewmates’ families.

Keith’s history is something of a mystery. The only thing that we can really infer about his past is that his old life wasn’t the most welcoming. The Queen asks him if his home was “some planet of monsters,” to which Keith is forced to admit that that’s not true. Keith may have a habit of being motivated to extreme ends by small things — one of the big things that drives him out of the new comfort of his new home is the aggressively mediocre service provided by his Mr. Help robot. It’s never a huge thing that sends him away from his problems, just as it’s never a huge thing that snaps him back.

Maybe that’s why he’s so able to comfortable within the confines of this Crazy As Fuck world. McLeod’s designs throughout are equal parts Masters of the Universe and Heavy Metal. I don’t know if I can describe the specificity of McLeod’s design aesthetic, but it looks like he’s got an affinity for awkward, but not grotesque, animal shapes. This is frequently combined with expressive human shapes and faces. Two of Keith’s new friends fit this description almost exactly. First, there’s the Kondra.

There’s a ballsweat joke there, (and I promise, we’ll get to ballsweat jokes) but the design of this character is much more interesting to me. McLeod doesn’t draw a half-bird-half-woman, instead, he draws a creature that is all of the bird, plus a human torso. The bird head on the front of the creature might be fake — there appear to be straps that could be holding it in place — but either way, the design fully honors the bird and the female form. The same is true of Keith’s escort to catch up with Manton and Dartor. She’s… well, I’m not even sure. She looks a little like Squirrel Girl, but she rides some sort of middle-aged man-dog.

Keith lets out a little bit of a surprised to reaction to that one, but ultimately, he’s good at rolling with these increasingly weird punches. In fact, he can even find the familiar in each of them and let that overrule whatever strangeness. He pops a sleep-boner riding with She-La because Keith “had a childhood blanket that felt like [her].”

I guess if there’s one thing that unifies this piece its Zdarsky and McLeod’s shared goal of being weird without being off-putting. Keith may have unruly ballsweat, or poorly timed sleep-erections, but these are never as socially devastating as they maybe should be. Just as Keith’s cool with their half-animal-half-human people, they are just as cool with his weird little body.

Of course, trying to tie it all into a thematically coherent package might have been a fool’s errand. Michael, do you have a more cohesive take on this issue? Or did you just want to talk about those Cat Tanks? I wouldn’t blame you if that was all you wanted to talk about. FOLLOW-UP: did you read McLeod’s explanation for how they work in the letter section? Totally gross, but — as McLeod insists — totally humane.

Michael: As wacky as Kapatra is, I think that Patrick made the boldest of attempts to derive a comprehensible theme from it. In our last write-up, I equated Keith to the sci-fi everyman. In a lot of similar sci-fi stories , we would typically find that the everyman character embraces this foreign world because back home he/she is shunned or doesn’t fit in. (For you fans of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show, it’s like when Michelangelo is the hero on the Krang homeworld.) We don’t exactly know Keith’s backstory; but some flashbacks from the first issue imply that he might’ve had some falling out with his parents, among other things. Patrick observed that Keith is the type of guy who has extreme reactions to very minute situations. With that in mind I’d like to amend Keith’s everyman status to a millennial sci-fi everyman status.

Sometime in the past decade a human being labeled basic interpersonal conflict as “drama.” On reality shows it typically occurs when a socialite schedules a birthday bash on the same night as their acquaintance’s dinner party; in real life it might occur when you start dating someone who went on one date with your friend’s roommate. In its colloquial usage, “drama” typically isn’t all that dramatic. To reduce an entire generation of people into one finite stereotype would be stupid and presumptuous. But I think that Keith is the type of everyman who could write off Earth completely because he ended up working a desk job at NASA (or whatever Kapatra space institution substitute) instead of piloting the launch shuttle. Then again, we could find out in Kapatra 3 that Keith witnessed the horrific death of the man he loved and I’m proven completely wrong.

Whatever Keith’s backstory is, I like that Zdarsky has him break out of his apathetic mold and become interested in saving his home planet. The primary motivation for Keith’s call to action is uncertain, but it’s a combination of human connection (the photo), public shame (the newspaper), “guilt dreams” and general discomfort/annoyance with Mr. Help. Story needs conflict; watching Keith live a Kaptarian life and all the space hoo-doo that entails would be interesting, but would get old pretty quick. We need to see Keith strive for something — the fact that it’s saving the planet we live on is just a plus.

I love the intrinsic joy that Zdarsky takes in writing any aspect of this comic. He takes things that would be considered mercenary or standard by any other writer and turns them into fully-realized pieces of fiction that he plays with. The recap page of a comic book typically a straightforward standard/mercenary job, but Zdarsky makes it one that does the bare minimum job of catching up readers while also engaging them on a completely different meta level.

Before you hit the first page of Kaptara 2, the writer pokes fun at himself for the fact that the hero lands on the eponymous planet and the villain of the story might’ve already killed you by now.

As Patrick mentioned, Zdarsky and McLeod use the comments section to explain the “science” behind concepts like the Cat Tanks; which I assume will be canon in the story.

I think that Zdarsky and McLeod are extremely economical in their use of the silly/gross in Kaptara. While we have unruly ballsweat and poorly timed sleep-erections, the pace of the narrative doesn’t slow down to dwell on them. We know that boners and ball sweat are unfortunate/funny truths of our existence, but we don’t need to beat that space horse to death. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Keith and the Kaptarians beating said space horse to death in the near future. And hey, how about that Motivational Orb? Still loving that guy.

For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page. Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore. If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to Comixology and download issues there. There’s no need to pirate, right?