SPACE DUMPLINS

In a galaxy far, far away, a young girl and her motley crew of friends fight to save her father and the solar system from a destructive fleet of space whales.

After exhausting all other fuel sources, inhabitants of the universe now rely on the waste of planet-eating space whales, which is processed by "lumberjacks" like Violet's dad. Her impoverished family lives in a trailer park on a perilously stationary asteroid, unlike the upper-crust, who reside on perpetually moving, fuel-dependent space stations, where her mother is a day laborer. Lured by danger and money, her father agrees to an impossible mission and ends up missing. Violet and her newfound gang of friends—an erudite young rooster named Elliot who identifies himself as a chicken, an alien claiming to be the last of his kind, and a gang of her father's old cronies—embark on a quest to save her dad from a space whale and help stop a deluge of whale dysentery from drowning the solar system, but they learn that his disappearance is a part of something larger and more sinister. Thompson's art is wild and busy, with overcrowded, unconventional panel structures. The worldbuilding is a strikingly imaginative pastiche that seamlessly blends biblical references, poop jokes, and social satire. Fans of Ben Hatke's Zita the Spacegirl series should gravitate to this offering.

A weird and wonderful intergalactic tale.