At once hilarious and achingly melancholy, it reads like a requiem for the future we were promised decades ago that never arrived. A quietly essential read for anyone who grew up reading sci-fi.
Wired
$22.95 CAD/$19.95 USD
The Guardian cartoonist relates the daily deadpan adventures of the last policeman living on the moon
"Living on the moon…Whatever were we thinking? ...It seems so silly now.”
The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon. Each day that the Mooncop goes to work, life gets a little quieter and a little lonelier.
As in Goliath, Tom Gauld’s retelling of the Bible story, the focus in Gauld's science fiction is personal—no big explosions or grand reveals, just the incremental dissolution of an abandoned project and a person’s slow awakening to his own uselessness. Depicted in the distinctive, matter-of-fact style of his beloved Guardian strips, Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. Gauld captures essential truths about humanity, making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one.
Praise for Mooncop
[Mooncop] is one of the sweeter meditations on loneliness and isolation you’ll find on a shelf in any medium ... a piece of relieving escapism
Vulture
The humor in Mooncop is quieter, sadder, more humane ... the detail [Gauld] packs into each panel is gorgeous: the empty landscape of the moon is made up of thousands of tiny wiggly lines, a sea of stone set against an indigo sky.
The Seattle Review of Books
Mooncop is touched by nostalgia for the golden age of space exploration and an affection for the routines of small-town life, and Gauld finds humour and hope – as well as coffee and doughnuts – in his portrait of a fading utopia.
The Guardian
... In [Mooncop] ... Gauld envisions what our sad future is bound to look like [and a] sense of modest wonder at what we’ve achieved
The Globe and Mail
In Gauld’s hands, even the moon... is really just another setting for a beautifully-observed story of daily life, its worries and frustrations
The Creative Review
Gauld['s] minimalist aesthetic and deadpan sense of humor ... work wonderfully together to bring levity to the emotional crisis in these pages.
The A.V Club
Mooncop is a success by nearly any measure.
The Comics Journal
... cool, serene, and funny... like a Jim Jarmusch view of a fiercely inglorious future.
Publishers Weekly
Tom Gauld is the book-lover’s cartoonist ... silly, but in a serious manner, where a sandpaper dry delivery renders the absurd amusing
Paste
The subject and setting [of Mooncop] are perfectly suited for the artist who has steadfastly developed an impressively dry, quietly absurd sense of humor
Noah Van Sciver
Mooncop [is a] light, rueful comedy, whose motor is the absence of anything happening […] long, lovely silent passages ... Even when dreams don’t quite work out, the book suggests, it can still be possible to find beauty in them.
The New York Times
At its heart, Mooncop provides an optimistic, rich metaphor for life ... a fun, clever meditation on what it means to be human.
Nerdist
... an exploration of listlessness and loneliness. It’s a short comic, but a resonant one ... Leave it to Gauld to find the quiet bit of poetry in bad news.
GQ
... [Mooncop is] as slight and lovely as its themes are ponderous and difficult ... This is a small book with a big heart, and it sticks with you.
Flood Magazine
... a poignant, darkly humorous tale, as is to be expected from [this] irreverent illustrator
Eye on Design
