Mooncop
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
The Guardian cartoonist relates the daily deadpan adventures of the last policeman living on the moon
"Living on the moon…Whatever were we thinking? ...It seems so silly now.”
The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon. Each day that the Mooncop goes to work, life gets a little quieter and a little lonelier.
As in Goliath, Tom Gauld’s retelling of the Bible story, the focus in Gauld's science fiction is personal—no big explosions or grand reveals, just the incremental dissolution of an abandoned project and a person’s slow awakening to his own uselessness. Depicted in the distinctive, matter-of-fact style of his beloved Guardian strips, Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. Gauld captures essential truths about humanity, making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 caf with an honest-to-goodness human waitress.
