The New Space Age #3 Review: Mad Cave’s Magic Starship Finally Reaches the Cosmic Unknown

The New Space Age #3 (Mad Cave Studios, 2/25/26): Writer Kenny Porter and artist Mike Becker send Mark Mitchell on a reckless first contact mission when a crop-circle trail yanks his magic starship into deep space for a straight-up alien encounter story. The execution is energetic but uneven, with tense character beats undercut by rushed escalation and a messy third act twist that leaves the issue feeling more like a hard pivot than a clean payoff; Verdict: Worth reading.

• Writer: Kenny Porter
• Artist: Mike Becker
• Colorist: Kevin Betou
• Letterer: Buddy Beaudoin
• Cover Artist: Mike Becker, Kevin Betou (cover A)
• Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
• Release Date: February 25, 2026
• Comic Rating: Teen
• Cover Price: $4.99
• Page Count: 32
• Format: Single Issue

Covers:

Analysis of The New Space Age #3:

First Impressions:

This issue finally cashes the check the series has been writing since page one, putting Mark alone in the void and forcing the story to deal with what happens when you actually meet the thing in the sky. On that front, the book hits a satisfying groove, using voiceover captions and surreal visuals to sell the awe and terror of stepping outside physics, and you can feel the creative team enjoying the chance to get weird in a way that still tracks emotionally.​

At the same time, the script has that familiar genre itch where character logic bends whenever the plot needs a shove, so Mark’s impulsive choices and Bobby’s betrayal land with impact in the moment but feel a little engineered on reflection. You get strong scenes, especially Stacey’s confrontation with Bobby and the military showdown at the end, but the connective tissue between those scenes is thinner than it should be for a book that keeps telling you how high the stakes are.

Recap:

In the previous issue, Mark and Stacey committed fully to building a magic-powered starship to chase the crop-circle trail that stole Mark’s younger brother Joey years ago, but they hit a wall when they realized neither of them is an engineer. While they experimented through trial and error, the story cut away to Bobby West, a talented tech guy trying to sell his rescue drones to the military as life-saving tools, only to get kicked out when he refused to weaponize them. That rejection left Bobby frustrated and vulnerable, which opened the door for Mark and Stacey to recruit him as the missing piece of their project, and he latched onto The Stargazer as a way to use his skills to help people instead of getting them killed.

The trio pushed through a montage of testing, blending Bobby’s engineering with Stacey’s sigils and Mark’s obsession, until Mark insisted on a risky test flight that went harder and faster than anyone was comfortable with. The near-disaster made it clear that Mark’s urgency to find Joey had become a technical liability for the team and the mission, straining his partnership with Bobby and forcing Stacey into a mediator role she never asked for. In the final moments, Bobby quietly sent an email behind Mark and Stacey’s backs, hinting that he might undermine their trust if it meant salvaging his career and safety, which turned a hopeful collaboration into a ticking time bomb heading into this issue.

Plot Analysis (SPOILERS):

The New Space Age #3 opens with Mark reflecting on how the space program quietly died as humanity got too busy fighting at home to look up, arguing that what the world needed was a hard kick to start dreaming again. We see Mark test-flying a sleek magical prototype over the countryside while Stacey and Bobby analyze runes and argue about aerodynamics, with Stacey warning that the spell design is causing delayed activation in the upward climb. Mark brushes off another round of cautious testing, declares that the ship is space-worthy, and pointedly asks where they will put the seat for Joey, making it clear this whole project is still about his missing brother more than any noble mission.​

Back on the ground, Mark narrates how their blend of science contacts and magical allies made the ship possible while acknowledging the huge risks they are taking, but he frames it all as the return of that old feeling of exploration that once defined space travel. Stacey and Mark share a quiet moment where he admits he is terrified and excited in equal measure, comparing his expectations to the wild sci-fi comics he read with Joey and highlighting that tomorrow’s launch will be the biggest step anyone has ever taken. Later that night, Stacey approaches Mark to apologize for doubting him when Joey disappeared, then warns him not to let guilt drive his decisions, but Mark rejects the idea that he can simply stop feeling guilty until he brings Joey home, calling his failure to protect his brother unforgivable.​

Launch day arrives, and Bobby argues they should collect more data before risking a full run, but Mark insists he has waited long enough and pushes ahead with a test outside the atmosphere while Stacey jokes and calls him an idiot for risking frying himself on reentry. Once in flight, Bobby confirms the systems are stable and urges Mark to return for more tests, yet Mark instead locks onto the energy signature of the last crop circle, treating it as a breadcrumb trail and abruptly rockets away despite Stacey’s frantic attempt to get him to slow down and let Bobby double-check the coordinates. The moment Mark disconnects, Bobby’s readings go haywire, and Mark reassures them over comms that he will be back before they know it, only to vanish past the edge of their instruments as he slingshots out of normal physics.​

Out in the impossible deep, Mark narrates that even theories about faster-than-light travel fail to describe where he is now, because the rules of light and sound are different and the stars seem pinned in place as he drifts through a surreal landscape. He tries the radio and gets only alien static, then something heavy strikes his hull and an enormous alien entity appears outside, prompting Mark to blurt a profanity before introducing himself like a classic sci-fi explorer and explaining that he is here to find his brother Joey. The creature never speaks in words he can hear, instead filling his mind with vivid images that show humanity’s wars, Earth’s past visitations, and memories of him and Joey reading a comic called Puzzle Home about an alien superhero, Gogioth the Samaritan of Saturn, whose mission was to prepare Earth for the stars while humans kept trying to kill each other.​

Through these images, Mark understands that humanity has not earned its place among the cosmos in spirit or in thought, so this encounter is as much a judgment as a greeting, and the alien clearly knows Joey, which both thrills and frightens Mark. Down on Earth, Stacey and Bobby realize they have lost contact and argue about how far Mark would have to travel to slip beyond the old space program’s long-range capabilities, which pushes Bobby to admit he has already sent the ship data and photos to an outside party in search of career security. Stacey attacks him with her metal-edged stage cards and warns that the sigil he is tampering with is unstable, right before it explodes in the barn and forces her to teleport home, where she tearfully vents her rage on her room before suiting up to confront him again.​

Stacey arrives at the barn in a blaze of magic, knocks Bobby flat, and calls him out as an “at sign” for sabotaging their work twice, while he defends himself by claiming Mark took his meal ticket once already and he just wants to make sure he can still eat after this astronaut cosplay stunt. Before they can finish round two, the military arrives and orders them to land their vehicle or be shot down, which prompts Stacey to stage an elaborate “floating cow” illusion that makes their craft appear wrecked while she and Bobby leap to safety. In the closing narration, Mark notes that the universe opened a dialogue and offered humanity an invitation to join other spacefaring species if it can behave decently, but five months later that olive branch has been set on fire as human authorities respond with fear and aggression; the issue ends on a somber “To be continued” tag and a teaser page for The New Space Age #4.

How is the story in The New Space Age #3?

On the writing side, this issue finally leans into its premise with purpose, but it does so with pacing that feels compressed in all the wrong spots. Mark’s impulsive decision to chase the crop-circle signature plays in character, yet the sequence from pre-flight jitters to “I am blasting off on a cosmic breadcrumb trail” skips over a beat or two that would let the tension breathe, which makes the big choice feel more like a switch being flipped than a culmination of rising pressure.​

Dialogue lands clean and conversational most of the time, especially in the early hangar scenes where Mark, Stacey, and Bobby bounce off each other with familiar banter and pointed concern, but the script leans on catchphrases and shorthand curses often enough that the emotional spikes sometimes feel muted. Thematically, Porter is reaching for a clear throughline about whether humanity deserves the keys to the universe, connecting childhood comics, abusive parenting, and institutional greed into a single question about maturity, and that connective tissue works conceptually even when individual transitions feel rushed.

How is the art in The New Space Age #3?

Mike Becker’s art thrives once the book gets Mark out of Earth’s gravity well and into the weird, and the cosmic spreads are easily the visual highlight of the issue. The alien environment reads as genuinely other without collapsing into incoherence, thanks to clear silhouettes, strong panel framing, and a careful balance between detailed line work and open negative space that sells both scale and isolation.​

On the ground, the layouts are straightforward and functional, keeping action easy to follow even when magic sigils, flying cards, and military hardware share the same page. Character acting is solid, with Stacey’s body language in the confrontation sequences doing as much work as her dialogue, and Bobby’s guilt-ridden posture telegraphing his split loyalties before he opens his mouth. Kevin Betou’s colors do a lot of mood work, shifting from warm barn tones to stark white-blue voids and lurid alien hues in a way that signals each gear change in the story, even if a few crowded panels on Earth lose some clarity when saturated effects pile up.

Characters

Mark continues to read as a man whose entire personality has been bent around one unresolved trauma, and this issue pushes that obsession to its logical extreme by letting him ignore every safety protocol the second he smells a possible lead on Joey. That consistency helps the story, because even when his decisions are frustrating, they feel like the choices this specific person would make, especially after we see him tie his guilt about failing Joey back to surviving an abusive father.​

Stacey gets some of her best material to date here, positioned as both Mark’s emotional reality check and the only person willing to put her body between the project and the people trying to exploit it. Her anger at Bobby and her refusal to stay quiet after a lifetime of being forced to stay small make her instantly relatable, and the script wisely uses her internal monologue to frame the betrayal as a pattern she refuses to relive. Bobby, on the other hand, is deliberately written as a bundle of fear and ambition, and while his justifications for selling them out are thin, they track with someone who has already been burned once by institutional power and cannot imagine any path forward that does not involve handing their work to the nearest authority.

Originality & Concept Execution

The core hook of this series, a disgraced astronaut building a magic starship to follow crop circles and rescue his abducted brother, remains a fresh enough spin on familiar sci-fi tropes, and this is the first issue that fully commits to paying that idea off on the page. The silent, image-based communication with the alien, framed through fragments of an in-universe comic like Puzzle Home and the myth of Gogioth, gives the first contact sequence a specific flavor that sets it apart from the usual “translator device” routine.​

Where the issue stumbles is in how it layers human institutions on top of that cosmic premise, because the military swooping in and Bobby’s career panic feel more stock than the rest of the book’s imagination. The narration about humanity torching the olive branch is on point thematically, but it rides close to well-traveled ground without adding a radically new angle, leaving the originality score high for execution of the personal premise and moderate for the broader commentary.

Pros and Cons

What We Loved

• Vivid, surreal first contact sequence that leans into visual storytelling over exposition.
• Stacey’s fierce, emotionally grounded reaction to betrayal and institutional interference.
• Strong use of color and panel composition to distinguish Earthbound tension from cosmic wonder.

Room for Improvement

• Pacing around Mark’s launch and sudden jump into deep space feels overly compressed.
• Military intervention and Bobby’s sellout beat lean on familiar genre shorthand.​
• Some crowded Earthbound panels lose clarity when effects, sigils, and action stack together.

Art Samples:

The Scorecard:

Writing Quality (Clarity & Pacing): 3.5/4
Art Quality (Execution & Synergy): 3/4
Value (Originality & Entertainment): 1.5/2

Final Thoughts:

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The New Space Age #3 is the issue that finally makes good on the promise of magic starships and cosmic questions, even if it leans on a few familiar shortcuts to get there. If your pull list has room for one more mid-tier sci-fi book that blends heartfelt family obsession, scrappy occult engineering, and a genuinely striking alien encounter, this chapter justifies the slot, though readers who crave tighter pacing and fresher institutional drama may feel a small sting.

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