Achieving Stable Orbit: Spaceman #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Houston, we have a spoiler.

I have sat in front of this empty page for about a half an hour now, reading and rereading Spaceman #2 and trying to figure out how to describe it. I am finding it difficult. Normally this would be because I was shitfaced. In this case, it’s because there’s really nothing else like this comic currently out there… although in all fairness, I am a little buzzed right now.

Seriously: I can’t pigeonhole this book. It’s a crime story with an epic sci-fi element with pieces of cyberpunk dribbled in. It opens with a man holding a gun on a monkey-man and an Asian child in her underwear. It ends in a pirate attack. In between there’s an astronauts in trouble arc and the collapse of the world economy. There is also more than one gunfight, an evisceration, a drug overdose, and a man’s face torn apart by a spinning propeller. All of which sounds like it’s an enema bottle and a tube of astroglide away from being a high-budget German scheisse flick, but somehow it all hangs together.

So, You Want To Work Out Like Batman…

Sam DeHority recently published an interview on Men’s Fitness with John Romaniello, NSCA-CPT to examine whether the training regimen published in Matthew Manning’s The Batman Files is something an actual human being could do. The short answer? No.

What are the odds that someone could get through a regimen like this cleanly?
Zero percent. It’s too many elite levels of skill. For the highest one percent of one percent of the population, you can be good at just about everything and great at a few things. Let’s take someone who’s both big and strong, and has good endurance—someone from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby squad. I don’t think they could sprint 20 miles. A 4:50 mile is damn near a sprint, and those guys don’t have to deal with broken bones from fighting bad guys.

But…I’m no quitter! How bad could it really be? This, coming from a girl who can’t actually manage to stick to a simple plan of going for a walk three times week. Mostly because I’m hungover a lot and sunlight brings pain.

Workout plan and feelings of inadequacy after the jump