CatStronauts: Robot Rescue (Family Comic Friday)

Welcome to another fun-filled edition of Family Comic Friday. This weekly column reviews comic books and graphic novels that are aimed at young readers but can be enjoyed by the whole family. Today we'll travel to Europa, the moon of Jupiter as we review the latest entry in Drew Brockington’s CatStronauts series: Robot Rescue.

CatStronauts: Robot Rescue

Written and illustrated by Drew Brockington

Published by Little, Brown Books For Young Readers

The CatStronauts are four feline who work for the American space program Catsup. Blanket is the robotics expert of the team and he is devastated when his latest invention, the Cat-stro-bot is damaged during a mission to Europa.

Blanket’s superiors refuse to allow him to rescue the robot. So with his friends Pom Pom, Waffles and Major Meowser, Blanket steals a ship to safe Cat-stro-bot.

It will take six months to travel to Jupiter and back. Surely, someone will notice that the CatStronauts are missing! So the team create android duplicates to fill in for them in their absence. Nothing can go wrong with this brilliant plan, right???

Robot Rescue was rather entertaining. The characters were quite funny. The jokes weren't so bad. In fact, some were rather smart instead of silly.

Speaking of smart, the author/ illustrator Drew Brockington did a very good job at getting a lot of the details about space travel right. The space ships used would be rather slow getting to their destination as opposed to the warp speeds used in Star Wars and other sci-fi properties. Rations would be needed for such a long trip. Brockington even added Russian cosmo-cats into the mix.

Even though this story stars a bunch of kitties, there's still a lot of cool science stuff to be learned here.

The story itself was pretty good. The plot was actually quite unpredictable until almost the very end. Things also get a little sad, so you might wanna have some tissues handy. But above all, there's a lot of shenanigans in this graphic novel.

Yes, the CatStronauts steal a spaceship, but it was for a good cause. And yes, the Android's cause a ton of trouble, but it wasn't out of malice but comedic effect. But hey, children's lit is full of characters getting into mischief AND punished for it! Will the CatStronauts get their just desserts? You'll have to read Robot Rescue to find out for yourself.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.

CatStronauts: Robot Rescue was published in print and digital formats on April 24, 2018. It is recommended for readers aged 8 and up.

This review was published concurrently on Outrightgeekery.com.