Lost On Planet Earth #2: Run Away, But Forward

Visaggio throws it all in this issue. It seems she didn’t have enough with the first one’s emotional shock, and the narrative includes everything possible, from a crush to exploring the radicalization of someone in an unfair system, the kind of losses that come from that (like disconnecting from your conservative parents or having a heated up discussion with your idealist friend), or family’s homophobia.

The part of the issue I’m definitively sold on is the revolutionary criticism on a colonizing mindset and space operas like Star Trek, who rely on human conceptions of ethical imperatives to show some galaxy dominated by our knowledge, our ethics, our way of thinking… This book is really presenting itself as a vision of how people are left appart from that vision, either cause of their non being humans, their lack of productivity for an explorer set system or their rejection of that system’s ideals. I really like how, with a lot of comedy parts to it (like Velda’s “Bad Influence” t-shirt” Basil’s sister playing video games, or Basil’s obvious crush on Ethne), it digs into the breach that happens between wanting to maintain your system of beliefs and change.

There are a few things that bug me in the narrative, like how everything is extremely fast paced, and we turn two pages from a fight with a (possibly ex?) friend, the family dinner, then fastly comes the father’s homophobia, and we face in the same issue most things that two panels ago were just subtext. I feel like sometimes this book, if it were food (like that very focused-on-the-lunch cover), it would be sometimes at the verge of burning.

The art, however, compliments that fast burned story incredibly well, backing the characters’ expressions, the shame, the anger, the blushes, the dynamic and revealing gestures, making every character’s personality and feelings well damn clear. And that last shot at the sky, as we get to feel the conflicts all exploding for Basil, is just an amazing one.