Ministry of space
Damnit! I only went into the local comic book shop to start a subscription on Ex machina and I came out with all three issues of Ministry of space. I’m not complaining at all—it’s Ellis and he’s often worth it. But it sure would have been nice to say things like “I walked in there today and I didn’t spend a dime” at least once in a lifetime.
And it’s a really good “what if”-story about what it would have taken for .uk to win the space race and it’s effect on society and the colonisation of outer space. When it starts out everything looks like a utopia, but that’s a deception. The gosh wow factor that’s very much apparent in the first issue is soon overwhelmed by the darker undercurrents that float up towards the surface.
Chris Weston’s art is very good, and I think it gives it a feeling of the 1950s. Not that it looks like comics did then, but it’s more like the retro-airbrushed illustrations. This mostly goes for the look of the humans. The things around however are very much like how the pulp authors wrote about the future. There is one page in issue 3 where kids have their own backpack helicopters and their only protection is these leather helmets with goggles.
People complain about this, that Ellis describes the future of yesterday and not the cold and harsh worlds we like to imagine in today’s science fiction. But that’s the point. He takes this vision from the past and gives it a push. Or a nudge. The point is that by today’s standards this is something that’s much closer to dystopian than it would have been back then. I’ll have to spoil a whole lot if I’m going to explain it more and better, so this is it for now.
