Spectacular Space Loop

Javi de Castro is a Spanish comic artist and illustrator who started out self-publishing fanzines and webcomics. In 2019 he released the webcomic The Eyes, which brought him a nomination for the Eisner and Harvey 2020 awards.After several graphic novels published, The Spectacular Space Loop is his first children's comic.

Testing the new jetpack his family built, Cosmo winds up lost in space, his journey back home introducing him to new friends and facing him with various trials and opponents. If that seems pretty straightforward, rest assured that-true to its name The Spectacular Space Loop is absolutely not a straight narrative line, and it isn't simply the plot that will have visually minded readers returning over and over to obsessively reexamine every detail of its grand design. The last page, you see, only gets you through the first half of the story. You must flip the book over to get the second half of the story, which loops back through those same pages and panels, now upside down. It's not just an efficient use of pages and panels but also a transformation of the entire visual experience. Cosmo's rescuer in the first half flips over to become a heinous enemy in the second; a dance flips over to become a fight; and entire environments flip over to become creatures, presenting a gob smacking manipulation of visual space that hearkens back to MAD magazine fold-ins. More than a fun, fast space adventure, it's a triumph of design that will open a world of new possibilities to readers with strong visual art inclinations, and also a lesson in the value and potential of physical books.