By Warren Ellis and Jason Howard | Image Comics 2019
Strange and dystopian futures, are one of writer, Warren Ellis's calling cards. Cemetery Beach re-imagines the concept of ancient Moon landings or ones before the one in 1969 by American Astronauts.
Warren Ellis postulates that the Americans had secretly sent a previous expedition years and years before 1969, when rocket technology was just beginning. Unfortunately, this first expedition settled in on the moon, never returning to Earth. And instead of dying, they built a gigantic city on the dark side of the moon.
Years later, again secretly the Americans sent up another expedition to check in on these moon guys who've built a gigantic city and set up their own sort of government and set or ruling guidelines.
The guy sent up, unfortunately is caught by the locals and these first four issues are basically his tale of trying to escape and get back to Earth. Warren Ellis has a unique voice, a writer who can take any kind of plot and put a really weird and interesting spin on it. Instead of taking this concept on a straight hard-boiled sort of way, like the average sci-fi writer might, he inserts a shit ton of wacky technological gags and political commentary, it's a wit both sardonic and frightening. I love it.
Artist, Jason Howard again does a great job illustrating a Warren Ellis story. Their previous team up, was the amazingly weird and dark series, "TREES", also from Image Comics. Howard is one of the most skilled comic book artists in comics today, in my opinion. He does all the art, from lines to colors. His sense of energy even in the stiffest of story moments, is superbly attractive. His ability to synthesize his line work with his almost surreal sort of coloring, makes everything he does eye-catching.
While, I don't believe CEMETERY BEACH, is quite as good as their previous book together, TREES, I will give this story a few more issues to prove me right or wrong.
