Spaceman #9

Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Eduardo Risso

Spaceman is a very cool comic.  It is set in a world feeling the effects of environmental collapse, where the rich live in walled communities (called the Dries), and everyone else lives in flood-ravaged ruins of former cities.  Our hero is Orson, a 'spaceman', the result of a genetic engineering program.  He looks more like a neanderthal than a man, and has great strength and resilience.

He has stumbled into a kidnapping plot involving Tara, a young girl who has a key role on a reality show called The Ark, which involves a pair of movie stars adopting children from around the world.  Orson rescues Tara from her kidnappers, and finds himself now the target of any number of factions.

This final issue has Orson and his fellow Spaceman Carter working to free Tara just as the police descend on her new kidnapper's location.  There is a lot of chaos.

What has made this series stand out is Azzarello's use of his own invented English slang.  People speak a patois that is easily understood, and clearly extrapolated from how we speak today, and it's pretty fascinating.  Azzarello has become quite fond of puns and word games (read any issue of his amazing Wonder Woman), and it wasn't until the very end of the issue that I became aware of the one being used in Tara's name.

Eduardo Risso is always an amazing artist, and when working on Azzarello's scripts, he shines particularly brightly.  Vertigo has seemed to have diminished in the last couple of years, but they are still putting out some of the best new comics out there, and this is definitely a title that deserves as much acclaim as Azzarello and Risso's 100 Bullets did.