Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Eduardo RissoThe Eisner Award-winning creators of 100 BULLETS — return to Vertigo with a new 9-issue miniseries, kicking off with a debut issue priced at just $1.00!
Set in a post-apocalyptic near future, SPACEMAN tells the story of Orson — a hulking, lonely loser who spends his days collecting scrap metal and dreaming of the startrekking life he was promised.
That is, until he finds himself at the center of a celebrity child kidnapping case. Seeing his chance to be a hero, Orson takes matters into his own hands…but will his actions only cause more heartbreak?
Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso are back, and have brought with them a mountain of a man with unfulfilled goals, who is struggling to get by. And, the good folks at Vertigo have enticed us further by pricing this at one measly dollar. Is it worth your one hundred pennies?
Find out after the jump!
Spaceman presents the Batman ‘66 of worst case scenarios for our planet. If environmental issues got worse, that would be one thing. If the environment gets fucked, and our celebrity worship becomes even worse, we might be able to deal with that. If the environment is dead, we worship reality stars and we have devolved into Idiocracy-level dumbasses, we may be able to still survive. But if all three of those happen and the world’s governments collapse… to quote Commissioner Gordon, “the sum of the angles of that rectangle is too monstrous to contemplate!”
That is the world we are dropped in when Spaceman begins, and we first meet our protagonist, Orson. Orson is a genetically engineered man, designed to travel to Mars; the only problem is that there is now no infrastructure to get there. The man created for one goal cannot achieve that, and now is, basically, a man without a place in this world. His lumbering frame but childlike mind make him a poor candidate for just about anything, and so he finds himself fishing for metal in the water surrounding his city.
It took me two readings to be comfortable enough with the dialect spoken to be able to read the issue quickly and without re-reading certain lines over and over again. The language is a combination of abbreviations, simplifications, and adding “-ee” to the end of words. As i mentioned earlier, it reminds me a bit of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, where language has devolved to the lowest common denominator. This isn’t that extreme, but between the language and the even greater focus on celebrity culture, Idiocracy seems like a pretty good comparison.
The celebrity-focus was not an angle I expected this book to tackle; when I think of a world where government has failed, I don’t think that we expect TV networks to carry on. But here, they have carried on and seem to have thrived – the kidnapping of a reality star becomes the story that everyone is talking about. What is interesting to me about this angle is that we see people both skeptical of the reality of the story, and yet totally enthralled in it.
Even though we are given no idea how or why the world became this way, Risso’s artwork brings us into that world in a seamless fashion. This world looks both technologically advanced, and yet crippled by pollution and laziness. The scene with Lily, the virtual sex slave, illustrated this perfectly: we see even the world’s oldest profession, prostitution, reduced to something even less about real human interaction, and yet far more advanced than anything we have today.
Risso is especially effective in the dream sequences on Mars. These are about as far from 100 Bullets as you can get, and Risso nails the terrifying and lonely images of Mars in Orson’s head. Like so many of us, Orson’s dreams are places for wish fulfillment; he simply wants the chance to do what he was engineered to do. Even though his visions seem mundane one second and dangerous the next, these dreams represent the pinnacle of his purpose, and since he can’t achieve his purpose, he is rudderless.
Continued belowIn a way, this reminded me of Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, a film about being trained to kill and then being denied the opportunity to do so. Although, I’m not sure that Orson is even aware of just how sad his situation is; sure, he wants to dream so that he doesn’t have to face reality, but everyone else seems to pity him more than he pities himself. Because of that, even though he is physically intimidating, his situation is so demoralizing that he appears to be nothing more than a sad sack.
I wonder if the name Orson is at all related to Orson Welles, the filmmaker who famously never lived up to his own legend. Welles, at 27, co-wrote, directed and starred in what some consider to be the best film of all time, Citizen Kane. However, after Kane, Welles never again achieved that type of success again. Is Azzarello, in naming the Spaceman Orson, saying that, much like Welles, Orson will never live up to his potential, and is doomed to spend the rest of his life striving for an unachievable goal?
The book has a very cinematic feel to it, and so I’m not surprised that I’ve referenced four films in my review. Azzarello and Risso are creating a story here that, to me, evokes the feeling of some great films, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (in its futuristic coldness) and Brazil (in its lingering sense of dread and complacency), more than it evokes their previous work, or even comic books in general.
As someone who tends to read books that are more structured like serials, where each arc builds upon the last, creating this continuum that the reader gets to ride along for, it is refreshing to read something smaller in scope, but not in ambition. I would never expect a story about genetic engineering, space travel, and a fallen society to fell so claustrophobic. Nothing is quite as it seems, and that makes it unnerving. Even the name Spaceman suggests that; here is a word that evokes hope, and yet is used here as a slur against Orson. This book is powerful and unique, and something that belongs in your pull list for the next eight months.
Plus, it’s a buck, ya goof!
Final Verdict: 8.4 – Buy
