Lost On Planet Earth #1: Perfection Is A Heavy Weight

It’s hard to read Lost on Planet Earth and not know Visaggio and Aguirre (Morning in America creative team) are Star Trek fans. Those uniforms, the futurist utopian society in which money doesn’t matter anymore, the fact that a “nobody” with effort and time can become a Star Union captain, even the beautiful concept designs of star ships, exam pods and all the technology we see in this issue reminds us of the Star Trek verse. But this is not a Star Trek comic, by far.

This story is taking us not to the stars or this world’s fleet, but to normal people’s daily life issues, to everyday pains and to a girl obsessed over perfection who throws it all away when she realizes perfection was forced upon her like a burden. When she realizes the too much, too difficult daily life she carried to perfection was too much for her and definitively not what she wanted. And when she meets an alien girl with whom she sets up for a date to explore her very own and yet not-so-known Earth.

The art of this issue is beyond perfection, and even if the story so far hasn’t turned intricate or gone anywhere spectacular, it lifts this little jewel of self realization. Each background and view of city skies and every article of clothing is carefully designed to tell us something about these places and people. Having a story start with looking at the sky only to later look right at the ground and make that ground interesting and fantastic, is something the creative team masters here. Something that is reflected in the precious and punk-ish cover art of the issue.

There’s a charm in this little story about perfection and the breaking of it, specially if you have fallen yourself to those habits, that questions everything we deemed perfect about sci-fi utopias. It forces us to look to the ground and our everyday lives and see the majesty of that. And heck, for what this story has already told me and the precious character designs and landscapes that have guided me through it, I can’t wait till I discover more of it.