Project Telstar was the first of three themed anthologies from Adhouse, featuring a ridiculous amount of indie comics creators all throwing a short story into the mix. Anthologies are always hit and miss, but the Science Fiction-themed Project Telstar, printed in black, white and metallic blue (featuring futuristic rounded corners!) contains barely a single duff story, setting an almost impossibly high standard for the anthologies that followed, Project Superior and Project Romance.

It’s with some trepidation, then, that I have to deliver this fact. I was kind of disappointed by Jeffrey Brown’s story in this one.

Hear me out on this - it’s not that the story is bad, because it isn’t. It’s got everything you could want from Brown’s non-autobiographical work: action, comedy, some tragic romance. The problem, in fact, stems from just this. Where almost every other creator at least appears to have gone outside their comfort zone and created something unique and occasionally, very profound, it feels a little like Brown has taken a fairly standard approach with his work and just chucked in a token robot for good measure. Where’s the adventure?!

Admittedly, out of context, it’s great - it’s about a man in space who breaks up with his long-long-long-distance girlfriend, and then, awaking the next morning from a drunken stupor, discovers that in his heartbreak, he programmed his robot to be a violent killing machine that he must then disable. It sits unassumingly alongside the stories of Project Telstar or any of Brown’s other work, though notably in tone it’s most like Brown’s super-hero parody, Bighead, than anything else. Still, we knew Brown had more than this in him, if only because a few years later he finally finished the brilliant Transformers parody, Incredible Change-Bots, which features a far more compelling story about robots and space travel, and one which treats the subject matter as more than the mere background elements of a stock Brown romance plot.

Still, if you’re a fan of the work of Jeffrey Brown, then the Project anthologies remain a must-buy. Mainly because they’re a must-buy whether you like Brown or not. The sheer amount of creators I’ve discovered from this line can’t be understated.

Of particular genius in Telstar are Joel Priddy’s Long Slow Flight of the Ashbot, depicting a robot surviving (barely) as he floats in space until the end of time, and Gregory Benton’s Passover, a story showing the final remnants of the human race deserting a polluted and destroyed Earth in brilliantly pedestrian fashion. Best of all, though, may be Paul Rivoche’s Robot in the Rain, mixture of detective noir and cold-war sci-fi aesthetic with an undercurrent of paranoia so powerful you’ll have to use a crobar to prise the book away. Project Telstar outdoes itself in every possible way, and even if I was a little hard on Brown’s contribution, that’s only because the rest of it sets an incredibly high standard. For what it’s worth, Brown’s inclusion in Project Superior, the second part of the Project trilogy, is far better. But I’ll get to that next week…


Buy Project Telstar from Amazon (UK)
Buy Project Telstar from Amazon (US)
Please be aware that Project Telstar is out of print, so availability may be limited and prices may be ridiculous.