Spaceman #1

"Chapter One:  This I Land" (1 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

"My life didn't come true" (Spaceman #1: 9).

Azzarello's vision of the future in Spaceman is singularly bleak.  The world is over-populated, over-polluted, and distracted by reality entertainment, sex, and drugs.  His protagonist Orson is a by-product, an apish man—with a heavy brow, a protruding mouth, large shoulders, long arms, and generous body hair—with low intelligence, engineered for travel to Mars, though his assignment never happens.  Instead, he's a fisherman whose confidante is an electronically facilitated distance-prostitute and whose friends are primarily drug-dealing kids, still dreaming of his would-be Mars mission, or with a little chemical stimulus imagining himself very literally on another world.  Though he's polite, gentle, and despite his intellectual shortcomings, fully understands his own position, there's little to redeem Orson's life.

By the end of Spaceman #1, though, Orson may have his opportunity to do and be something extraordinary.  Fishing well outside waters considered safe, Orson stumbles across a boat explosion.  In his efforts to help, he discovers the abducted adopted kid of mega-celebrities—chosen to be adopted, it should be noted, on a reality competition show—and, presumably, at least one of her kidnappers.

Azzarello's certainly got some interesting ideas in play with Spaceman, and though it's at times distracting, it probably helps that his futuristic slang slows the reader down.  The premise of a hero genetically designed for a specific purpose he is unable to realize is potentially fertile, and his depression and disappointment are inevitable, but the world Azzarello's built for Orson is so numbing throughout the issue that it's difficult to imagine relief for it.  It will take at least another issue or two to know whether his gamble with the tone pays off.

[December 2011]