Spaceman and the Territorial Space Marine Corps. It's an odd tag-line to have when there are 5 people in the picture. Did not think that one through.
The Adventures of Spaceman was looking promising for a while. I finished about ten pages in as many days and was delighted with the results. I’d learnt some lessons from Matt Cubed about black and white comics, and that getting a bit more black in gave it a bit more definition (and if anything, a comic set predominantly in space should give you plenty of opportunity for more black), I was happier with the writing which was at least partially planned, and some of the jokes made me laugh at the time. There is a very sad reason for why I stopped drawing this one, a reason that to this day haunts me.
My pen ran out of ink.
It is the most pathetic of reasons that if anyone else had uttered those words I would have scoffed and turned away, clear in my mind that the person declaring such a pathetic excuse for halting production on an otherwise promising-to-themselves comic was a moron, a buffoon and several other undesirable things that I did not wish to associate with. Unfortunately it’s true. I’d been using a different, thicker, beefier pen and it ran out. By the time I came to replace it, I just wasn’t in the mood to draw the comic any more, so it languished at the ten-page-mark in the way that so many of my comics seem to.
Spaceman is the story of the last British man alive. In space. Simon Paceman lives in a time where nationality as an aspect of identity means very little to anyone with political borders all but disappeared what with the colonisation of space, and symbols like flags are worn merely as novelty historical heirlooms to a distant past. Simon lives with a family prophecy that his life will never amount to anything, and in the course of trying to prove that wrong, ultimately proves it to be right.
Now this set up ultimately proves problematic. To have a comic about someone not succeeding in his aims is to have a comic where not much actually happens. You could have a Wile E Coyote and Road Runner scenario where no matter how hard he tries, the status quo is restored each week, but I was looking to do something a bit more than that and to hopefully build some form of narrative with the characters. In short, a Road Runner cartoon would be destroyed by making the characters talk, but in a story where characters talk, having the status quo restored each episode invariably renders the talking moot. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but long explanation short: I wasn’t and am not entirely happy with the set up.
I am tempted to revisit Spaceman, as there were characters I had created but never really introduced. In fact, only two characters from my sketch of the Territorial Space Marine Corps feature in the comic at all, and one of them is only in it for a grand total of one panel.
Incidentally, Spaceman also features in a game by the marvellous Cathelius Games and a sequel is planned (where we learn from the mistakes made in the first one, because it has its quirks) so in some ways, I suppose I can’t help but come back to S.Paceman and his colleagues at some point in the future. I actually recall really enjoying scribbling out a few little comics for some of the different characters that you could play as.
The first ten pages or so are included in the rar file below.
The Adventures of Spaceman – rar
Additional Notes:
Spaceman: Prelude by Cathelius can be found here and a sequel is being worked on. There is artwork for it and everything. The working title is “The Wrath of Stan”.