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.

A Whole New 52-Less World

It is Wednesday, and as it has since the inception of this publication almost three months ago…

…this means the end of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives broadcast day.

Which feels like business as usual, but… something is missing… Oh right! There’s not a single issue of DC Comics’s New 52 in the take this week! That explains why my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to stop asking whoever’s milling around the Archie comics rack if they “wanna see the Old 5-2″, looked at my take this week and only said, “Bomb Queen? No refunds if the pages stick together, Rob. And no, I won’t shake your hand. Or anything else.”

It’s gonna be a weird week with almost no DC books to review, but check it out: we’ve got a new Mark Waid and Marcos Martin issue of Daredevil, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Rizzo’s Spaceman #2, Neal Adams art and script on Batman: Odyssey, Jonathan Hickman’s followup to FF #600, and a new Angel & Faith from Buffy Season 9!

This is going to be an interesting week; without the new DC books, we’ll have a chance to review some different stuff, and without that New 52 pressure (And since a series of head and chest colds here at the Home Office are starting to dissipate), we should be able to get a new episode of the Podcast in the can.

But before any of that, we need to read the new stuff. So see you tomorrow, suckers!

Mork Calling Orson: Spaceman #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ground Control to Major Tom: commencing countdown, spoilers on. 

Here’s the thing about Brian Azzarello, which you already know if you’ve read 100 Bullets: he writes a great crime story. I think that’s why, no matter what he’s writing, he winds up shoehorning a crime story in there, the way Robin Williams ramfeeds schtick into every Goddamned role he ever does, or the way low-level Internet writers about comics cram uncomfortable jokes about their balls into their reviews.

And there are times when it’s a welcome addition, like the toy in the bottom of a cereal box – after all, nobody’s gonna bitch about a hard-boiled crime story stuck into in a Batman comic. Others, like when he made John Constantine a gay-trolling ex-convict in Hellblazer, it’s a less joyful little discovery, like scratching your balls and saying, “Huh… what’s that lump?”

It’s too early to tell how the crime story he’s stuck into Spaceman will come across: Cracker Jack prize? Or ball tumor?