Spaceman #6

"The Shores of Mariana" (6 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

Surely it's with his characteristic deliberateness, but Brian Azzarello's world for Spaceman is dizzying.  Orson's oceanside slum of crumbling buildings and impromptu junk yards exists somewhere in the same geographical world as Tara's adoptive celebrity parents and their plush mansion.  Each is situated somewhere in relation to a vast city separated from Orson's salvage ocean by a gigantic wall under military guard and which Orson and the other orphans, including Tara, plan to break into.  This says nothing of Mars, which may be easy to identify geographically, so to speak, but whose actions are so far impossible to verify even happening.

But they're both mercenary objectives:  Tara's kidnapping for the ultra-rich sheik and the subsequent scramble to claim the reward or re-ransom her, as well as the four spacemen's Mars mission to prepare the planet for lucrative human habitation, which is hijacked by Carter's self-aggrandizing quest for Martian gold.  Both have casualties, it seems, at the hands of Carter.  He's the muscle man for Tara's kidnapper, and he makes short work of Lilly and her fellow thugs with a butcher knife, and he's at least suspected by Orson and Ottershaw of having killed Spender because he wasn't happy with their decision to dig for gold.

At least Carter's plans are clear.  Orson's are, quite frankly, baffling.  He doesn't want to return Tara to her parents initially because he's not convinced they weren't responsible for her kidnapping in the first place, a suspicion the detectives in charge of handling the case also shared for a time.  Thanks to Tara, he now knows they're being followed by the producers of her reality television show, so he and his young orphan friends conclude that this stunt must be part of the show itself and that they therefore have an opportunity to win it as well.  Huh?  So the next steps are to buy a gun on the black market and tickets into the "Drise" beyond the wall.  What's the plan, Orson?

If his plot doesn't yet make any kind of sense, Azzarello's satire continues to surprise.  Instead of making his re-imagined world of urban decay and widespread flooding more foreign as his story progresses, it actually becomes increasingly familiar.  Though some remain as type-driven as ever, most of Azzarello's characters, including, for instance, the television producers, are becoming more human and nuanced.

[June 2012]