Starslip Crisis

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• Starslip

Webcomic by Kris Straub, a hybrid Science Fiction / Fine Art comic.

Set in the year 3440 on the Terran Directorate Ship Fuseli, formerly the Crimson Fall, a 'luxury battle cruiser' converted into a museum ship. Originally built so that the crew would get a morale boost of the opulence of the Fuseli, the caviar rations made the crew sluggish and easily overcome. The ship was repurposed as an art museum.

The comic is named for the Starslip drive, the main form of FTL for the universe, which actually slips between parallel universes, and is normally kept to a very close set of universes where you switch places with a copy of yourself in that universe. Because so many alternate universes use the drive the changes are so small as to be non-existent.

Originally named Starshift Crisis until a potential legal issue caused a change in the comic in the "Overdrive" storyline. Afterwards all mention of Starshift was changed to Starslip in not only the domain name, but the comic itself. After "The End of The End" the comic was renamed again to simply Starslip.

The Crisis in the title refers to prolonged use of the drive is not only causing the differences between slips to result in more noticeable changes, but having a negative impact on the future.

Main characters include Memnon Vanderbeam, the fussy, arrogant curator of the Fuseli; Cutter Edgewise, the drunk ex-pirate who is now Fuseli's pilot; Mr. Jinx, a cirbozoid, a Stoic insectoid with Bizarre Alien Biology, whose race has repeatedly faced extermination at the hands of others.

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Tropes contained:

• Alternate Universe: Starslip drives switch with a double in an alternative universe.
• Fan of the Past" Memnon is very much a fan of the past, being an art curator. His art exhibits include the last remaining copy of the Catwoman film as well as World of Warcraft.
• Faster Than Light Travel: Starslip
• Future Slang: Mostly parodied with "Space" being added in front of everything.
  • Taken even further with Zillion's "Deep Slang", to the point of exasperation from the strip's readers and characters alike.
• Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act Deep Time used to kill Hitler then go back in time to save him as a way to pass weekends.
• I Didn't Mean to Turn You On: Poor Holiday...
• Infinite Canvas: "The End of the End", where the Starslip website itself was destroyed.
• Noodle Incident: Hyper-Maine's accident
• Post Modernism: The Starshift to Starslip switch
  • And, more recently, "The End of The End" which also switched the title again to Starslip.
• Serious Business: Fine Art is really, really important. At one point, Memnon's art curation skills save the universe.
  • "In order to save your life, you must make a classic, lasting piece of art. Now."
• Space Does Not Work That Way: Memnon has his degree in art, not science...
• Space Pirates: Cutter has the eyepatch and everything. He was a pirate science officer.
• Stable Time Loop: Used several times by both our heroes and Deep Time. One strip even thanks Heinlein/
• Starship Luxurious: The Fuseli itself
• Talk Like a Pirate: Cutter not so much, but his friends back in the Space Pirates, oh so yes.
• The Scrappy: Zillion with his deep future twang.
• Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo: the islands of Japan are now In space.
• Time Police: Deep Time
• Tricked Out Time: Memnon uses A2-Z to compute a certain important Starslip path, but instructs him not waste computational time answering questions he answered the first time.
  • Deep Time especially abuses this. At one point they attack the Fuseli and go back in time to plant hypnotic triggers in every member of the crew. Some more harshly than others
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Much of the humor can come from artistic related puns, while art context is at least once the key to saving the galaxy.
• What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome: "This will be... MY GREATEST CURATION EVER!"
• Year Inside Hour Outside: When a Deep Time agent needs to think they will time travel away to think and come back a second later. At least one agent wastes his entire lifetime on a stupid idea, asking a friend to stop him from wasting it on that idea.