Visit a weird and wonderful alien world that's not unlike our own, in Nathan W Pyle's Strange Planet. Pyle launched Strange Planet on Instagram in February 2019 and it instantly became a viral sensation. The comic is now one of the most popular on the web, accumulating 4.4 million Instagram followers in just 8 months. This new book includes dozens of never-before seen illustrations in addition to old favourites and covers a full life cycle of the alien planet's inhabitants, from ‘Young Beings’ to ‘Recreation’...

Strange Planet is a comic strip collection that follows alien beings on a planet very similar to earth (or it could very well be earth, and they are aliens living among us). The strip takes a wry look at how creatures from another planet observe and interact with their surroundings.

Like a lot of daily cartoon strips (I grew up exposed to Garfield; Peanuts; The Far Side; Calvin and Hobbes; Thelwell; Giles) the humour in Strange Planets is pretty hit and miss. In fact the only exception to this, to my mind, is Gary Larson's wonderful The Far Side. As with all comic strips of this nature, Strange Planet probably works best reading one a day, as the twisted observational humour soon starts to get a little predictable.

It's a hard medium to work in; having to get your observation/joke across to an audience in one or two panels, and to be fair Strange Planet will be embraced by those who are on the same comedy wavelength as Pyle.

While I found the occasional joke moderately amusing there was very little here that made me smile. For fans of the Instagram page this will make for an amusing keepsake.

5

Darren Rea