The Midas Flesh, Vol. I By Ryan North, Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb, Boom! Box, $15.

The myth of King Midas is obviously something Ryan North has been thinking about for a while. A 2008 installment of his webcomic Dinosaur Comics featured T-Rex and Utahraptor analyzing the story, their telling ended with the destruction of Earth in an instantaneous golden apocalypse. North has since extrapolated an honest-to-goodness comedic-sci-fi-adventure comic-book series from that line of thinking, and he even kept a dinosaur in it.

In The Midas Flesh, a group of three spacefarers—two human women and a talking raptor from a dinosaur planet—journey to the mysterious golden planet seeking the still-active weapon that destroyed it. In the process, North recounts his own version of the myth via flashback. As with all the dialogue in the book, he does so in the same relaxed, witty style of Dinosaur Comics and his Adventure Time comics. There’s more comedy and probably more fantasy to the proceedings than hard science, but, like all the best sci-fi, The Midas Flesh turns upon riffs on an idea. Plus cool drawings of spaceships and talking dinosaurs.