Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Eduardo RissoFrom the Eisner award-winning team behind 100 BULLETS comes the sci-fi story of Orson, a man genetically engineered to withstand the harsh journey to Mars and finds himself trapped in a seriously harsher reality. On the outskirts of the flooded city, Orson’s on the trail of some bloodthirsty pirates. Seems they’re both after the same precious treasure. The only difference is that Orson wants the treasure alive…
Brian Azzarello. Eduardo Risso. Anthony Burgess. Russell Hoban. Ingmar Bergman. Trust me, it’ll make sense when you read the actual review after the jump.
The best comics establish a dialogue with the reader. This dialogue is entirely imaginary, of course, unless you’re a lunatic who sits there pretending your comics speak to you. Still, it’s an important step toward involvement with any work, comic book or no — the sense that your experiences and viewpoint can meaningfully contribute to how you interpret the work at hand. The ideal way to do this is through scarcity. Unlike a novel, where you can assign imagery to the text, or visual art, where you can impose a narrative (or at least a line of thought) onto a still image, comics fulfill both of these functions, leaving little space for the reader’s sense of self. Film and animation and that stuff operates in a different way (obviously) — with comics, the onus is on us, as readers, to extract the information. How much we take usually works in an inverse porportion to how much of ourselves we put in.
That’s why Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s Spaceman is so engaging. Their past collaboration, the mega-epic 100 Bullets, worked the same way, but the world it presented us was concrete and real. Spaceman is separate from our hoo-man world, but only by a matter of degrees — and the interactivity comes in when we can piece together the steps from us to them. Language is a classic literary tool in demonstrating a “different” future — take the crypto-Slavic Nadsat language in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, or the post-apocalyptic shattered grammar of Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Both of those books rely on the reader immersing themselves in that manipulation of language and picking it up as they go, whereas Azzarello’s future low-talk in Spaceman is a dialect common to the here and now. The uneducated of the future speak in text messages. There, but for the grace of God…
Tonally, Eduardo Risso is as perfect a match for this style as any artist could be. He has a genius’s gift for composition and lighting, and the way he drenches every page in shadows leaves all but the most crucial details up to our imaginations. The darkness produces a profound sense of unease, and in the crashed-out pirate future of Planet Earth, we can only picture for ourselves just how rotted and scarred the world is. Even in the cramped “present-day” scene, jammed full of people and screens, there’s still so much left to our visualization, most potently the angry protest mob. The storytelling of Spaceman thrives on details — a grown-out goatee from one panel to another, the flies buzzing toward exposed organs, the frayed hem of a tank top. The only place these details disappear are in the space scenes — to emphasize just how much nothing these guys landed on.
The paucity of exposition in both script and art also untethers the specific time that this is taking place (other than the obvious “near-ish future”). There are signposts pointing in different chronological directions simultaneously — consider the prehistoric, apelike construction of Orson. A man built to herald a ships-not-shelters future, but modeled after our cave-painting past — and he’s up on his reality TV, too.
Spaceman isn’t yet a third complete, but it already evokes such an intriguing picture of the future — it exploits its medium masterfully, rather than bludgeoning the reader with the usual sci-fi damage of long-winded alternate histories and fetishistic gadgetry. It could go in any number of directions from here, but that’s the sign of a successfully built theatre, isn’t it? At this stage of its deployment, Spaceman is like Ingmar Bergman’s classic, The Seventh Seal — not in terms of its plot or characters, mind, but in the way that Bergman used the barest cues (some trees, a stagecoach, a film-studio village set) to create an entire world for Antonius Block to travel, and without knowing otherwise, a viewer would never see it any other way.
Final Verdict: 9.5 – If you’re not buying this you’re even worse than all the writers here who didn’t vote for the same things I did in the 2011-in-review ballots
