Years ago, the moon colony had been a significant achievement, a true testament to science, engineering, and human endurance. Now, the place has lost its magic and the colony is slowly dying. The mooncop patrols through the remains of a once robust institution, watching everything fall away while finding he cannot escape it himself.
This is the world of Tom Gauld’s “Mooncop,” and it might sound dreary and overly existential, but I promise you, it’s very funny, not to mention poignant and strangely touching.
Written and Illustrated by Tom Gauld
The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. Depicted in the distinctive, matter-of-fact style of Tom Gauld’s beloved Guardian strips, Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. Gauld captures essential truths about humanity, making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one.
Tom Gauld’s comic strips are consistently clever, wry, and ridiculously funny. Most famous for his work in The Guardian, his cartoons cover topics as broad as literary theory to fairy tales to video games. Chances are, you’ve seen a Gauld comic around, with their geometric, easily digestible designs; intricate hatch work; and overall sense of the absurd. There’s a strong chance you’ve shared them around, too. “Mooncop,” his latest graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly, maintains that wit and irreverence, all while adding a great deal of existential empathy and heart.
Gauld hovers between a cinematic and matter-of-fact style. His images are huge, often in widescreen, with the vast expanse of space all around him. He thinks nothing of spending a few pages just making sure we’re aware of the locations and geography, even though there’s hardly anything on the moon except these box-like constructions its inhabitants drift in and out from. However, the staging and compositions are flat and the layouts direct. He prefers to show a character from the side, giving us an objective look into their world.
With his hundred pages, Gauld also takes some time to slow down, to linger on the rhythm of the story. This works well for the type of gags he’s drawn toward. Much of the humor in “Mooncop” comes from interruptions to the mooncop’s routine. Most of the time, he just drives around, ending up at a small precipice, eating donuts and drinking coffee from a robot vending machine. There’s not much crime on the moon, and the mooncop simply observes, dreams of Earth, and stares out into space. When he’s called, it’s because someone is trespassing on some old equipment or an old lady’s dog ran off. “Don’t you have any real crime to deal with?” one of the colonists asks. “Not really,” the mooncop admits. Therefore moments where the donut vending machines tries to give him 20,000 glazed donuts and 1700 cups of coffee, elicit some nice laughs, not just because they’re genuinely funny (which they are) but because they’re such ridiculous interrupts to the routine. He encounters a sad little therapy robot and his constantly shrinking apartment building feels more and more ridiculous with each missing floor. There’s another great scene where he encounters Neil Armstrong.
I also laughed way harder than I should have at the sight of the dog in his space bubble.
While the rest of the equipment and people around him are being replaced by robots and automatons, the donut vending machine is traded out for a full café, run by an actual human being. The mooncop and the barista hit it off, turning more and more toward each other as their world continues to unravel.
This is where “Mooncop” is at its most effective and emotional. It’s almost apocalyptic, in a way, with how everything is closing down and disappearing. Yet these two people still manage to find each other. I don’t think it’s any mistake that every case the mooncop encounters has to deal with something missing being found. Mooncop himself is isolated, both from Earth and from the people in the colony he’s protecting. Earth is so abstract and far away, it’s something he can barely comprehend; yet he feels slighted when his fellow colonists abandon the moon base. He doesn’t know the life he wants to make for himself. “It is very beautiful. I forget that sometimes,” the mooncop admits to the barista.
“Mooncop” makes for an interesting read. Slow and deliberate, the book isn’t about grand gestures or insane spectacle. Instead it’s more special and rewarding for its lingering gait. But the jokes are all top-notch and borderline farce, each gag and situation perfectly suited and tuned to the material. Gauld’s artwork is built by geometric designs, but he does wonders with depth and shading thanks to his intricate hatchwork. There’s a lot of blue on each page, and I think it’s welcome to the usual deep blacks you see in a lot of science fiction stories. Not only does it make outer space seem more lively and magical, but it also helps us tune into the mooncop’s loneliness, mild depression, and eventually comfort and coolness. Just like Gauld’s strips, this book, in addition to everything else, is fantastic to simply look at.
Final Verdict: 8.5. An existential, deliberate, and exceptional farce.
