Spaceman #9

"Red Crater" (Part 9 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

If its readers were expecting Orson's triumph, the conclusion to Azzarello and Risso's sci-fi fable must be devastating.

Engineered for survival in a proto-colony on Mars, Orson's apish looks and dim intelligence have made him an outcast whose destiny—as he feels his purpose to have been—is painfully unrealized.  And he fantasizes about the possibilities of a life in which he is capable, useful, and more morally and intellectually sophisticated than he is.  These flashes, though Spaceman teases several possibilities about their veracity, are actually allegorical alternatives to Orson's own bleak life, mirroring his problems but allowing the better Orson of his imagination to solve them.

Carter, on the other hand, is a darker, crueller but more capable, more intelligent, more manipulative and more self-interested counterpart to Orson.  He's confronted with the same existential failures as Orson, but he makes his own Machiavellian way in a strange world.  When his employer abandons his attempts to abduct Tara following the popular attention her kidnapping has attracted from viewers of her reality television show, law enforcement, and other criminal interests, Carter exploits Orson's generally trusting and overly naïve temperament as well as his deep-seeded desire to be a hero to steal the spotlight, recast himself as the selfless hero, and launch his own career as a "reality" superstar.  Orson and Lilly end up jailed—"charged" in a world in which that literally entails a financial transaction—for Tara's kidnapping.

In what might be the most surprising twist in an issue that defies expectation, Carter—at his own expense, though with money he acquired by selling out Orson—pays for Orson and Lilly to be freed and let into the "dries".  He even seems genuinely sorry, if unsurprised, that Lilly doesn't wait ten minutes for Orson.  If Orson's Mars-self is more morally compromised than he really is, Carter is less so.  He's out for himself, but he takes no pleasure in leaving Orson behind and, in his own way, makes amends.

But it's Orson's final visit to The Ark, where policemen Wade and Cass are now members of the Ark security team and Tara is returned to her adoptive family, that gut-punches.  Orson takes one more look, scattering the gathered fans in fear and garnering the derisive looks from the crew, and turns and leaves, not just the set but also the "dries".  He walks alone, into his even more desolate Mars imagination.  In a sly elision between Tara, the young girl, and "terra" the distant Earth seen from the Martian landscape, he gives his last painful goodbye.

[October 2012]