Lost On Planet Earth #5: Not The Brightest Future But It’s Ours

Not gonna lie: epistolary approaches to stories always get me in the heart, and Visaggio shines in this issue with the letters that come and go through the different characters at different moments in their lives, as we feel time pass in the story. Epistolar nostalgic beautiful feelings is something this comic excels at, with a combination of amazingly otherworldly art and fantastic lettering, especially with the contrast art, color and letter recreate between epistolar passages and regular scenes.

This constant delivery of otherworldly and beautiful surroundings in contrast to characters feeling too much emotion has served this story amazing, and here it puts it in perspective and makes criticism and fairness of the various difficult situations its characters survived. I gotta say it’s at this “recap” point that I feel the narrative falls into some clichés (like the queer woman married to a man for convenience, the revolutionary who’s really a hypocrite or stories surrounding falling in love over some mutual attachment), which I felt I needed more of this story to totally feel or believe fully.

Nevertheless those details, the execution is remarkably beautiful, the art is tense and on point through all of the issue, and the actual ending of the story is perfect in how it places almost all the characters in a believable place. The last page closes the circle of this complicated story about how space exploration scenarios widely seen as utopic will still fuck people up and isolate them, but with a twist of some hope in growth and connection from those difficult seeds that we have seen develop in the whole story.