Mooncop

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. (Sept.)