Mooncop

July 25, 2016
Like a Jim Jarmusch view of a fiercely inglorious future, this cool, serene, and funny graphic novel imagines what outer orbit life might be like many decades after it’s an accepted fact. A nameless mooncop patrols the flat lunar plains amid an ever-deepening sense of ennui. He achieves a 100% success rate on his reports because there is no crime to report, investigate, or solve. One of the original settlers confides in him that, like many others, she’s leaving their shrinking colony: “Whatever were we thinking? It seems rather silly now.” Gauld (You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack) plays with this sense of “Now what?” in a manner that is almost as bleak as the modular retro-1950s structures and spacesuits rendered by his stripped-down, blue-tinged artwork. But the deadpan humor leavens the hopelessness that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the anonymous policeman, who’s just happy to see his automated doughnut machine replaced by a café with an honest-to-goodness human waitress.

October 15, 2016
Colonizing the moon once must have seemed a good idea, but as this quietly dour graphic novel opens, the last settlers are packing up and returning to Earth. Among the few remaining inhabitants is the titular mooncop, whose duties now consist of such mundane tasks as searching for a lost (spacesuit-clad) dog or retrieving a Neil Armstrong automaton that wandered off from the Museum of the Moon. Lonely and bored, he submits a transfer request that's denied. Suspecting depression, however, area command sends him a defective therapy unit that promptly breaks down. As lunar population dwindles to almost nothing, the cosmic constable discovers an unexpected reason to stay put. Gauld, who draws a weekly strip for Britain's Guardian, uses a boldly minimalist stylethe characters are just one stage beyond stick figuresthat's augmented by deftly placed crosshatching and the use of a single cobalt tone as the only color, making the landscape truly a blue moon. A drolly melancholic tale that's more an exploration of inner than of outer space.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)