A Star Called Sun TP
A Star Called Sun TPCartoonist: Simon Roy
Publisher: Image Comics
Publication Date: February 2026
I think the phrase “world building” is a little overused these days, to the point where if something is aggressively associated with it, I might roll my eyes a bit. It sometimes feels like a warning sign that you’re going to be overloaded with mythology that may or may not add to reader/viewer engagement in a work. Which is a long-winded way of me establishing that I’m hesitant to use the term “world building” here in writing about A Star Called Sun, the new book out this month by Simon Roy.
And yet, one of the most striking things about A Star Called Sun to me was its worldbuilding. Roy’s new book opens with a character breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the reader, welcoming them to the broken down futuristic-looking tank in which this character has made a home (see above). It’s a wise move, and one that helped me get engrossed in this book from the very start.
A problem I frequently have with fantasy and sci-fi comics is that they give me a paragraph or two (often on the inside cover) of the aforementioned worldbuilding mythology before I have even gotten my wits about me in the book. There’s no reader investment on my part, nothing to relate to, and absolutely no chance I’ll remember whatever details they have so painstakingly labored on. This book wisely gives us an assured narrative voice, a guide to all the excellent sci-fi weirdness that is to come in the 200-some pages of A Star Called Sun.
The character, who is a fun analog for Roy himself, then walks us through the stories we’re about to read, going into a backroom in the tank where he has set up a comics studio, and he tells us where they were all first published. It’s a great way to introduce us to the world and give us an index for a book that is told in stories like this one.
And the stories are as imaginative as the entry point. The seven pieces that make up A Star Called Sun were created from 2017 through 2024 (or maybe 2025? it was unclear to me when the seventh piece, Vanguard was created), and while they are not interconnected, they do share a rewarding sense of thematic unity for anyone who reads this book in one sitting, as I did.
These are stories with fantastical space settings that find ways to simultaneously speak to the past, present, and possible futures of humanity. And they are stories that use one of my personal favorite science fiction tricks — one that was for my money most expertly deployed by the great Ursula K. Le Guin — incorporating touches of anthropology, especially the third story, Pride of the Central Republic, my favorite of the individual chapters here.
If you’re familiar with Roy’s past work, you know the cartooning is impeccable, with relatively lightly-paneled pages chock full of some of the best sci-fi designs in all of comics. Roy works in those designs between stories in this book, adding background about their places within the worlds where his tales are set. My favorite artwork in this book comes when Roy (frequently) draws broken down or degenerating futuristic sci-fi tech, from mech suits to the tank in the opening to spacesuits housing doomed astronauts.
No idea if this is intentional, but Roy has a real knack for taking his own fantastical designs, aging them, and delivering them to the reader broken, as if to say the future will bring both innovation and decay. And really, if I had to pick a lone unifying theme for this book, that might be it. This too shall pass, and then something new will hit us, and then that will pass too.
It’s a nice message for 2026, and it makes for a book of great comics.
A Star Called Sun is out this month via Image Comics
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