Page 45 Review by Stephen
We're all a little wont to get in our own way, aren't we?
A deft, whimsical comedy set in the inky depths of space, adapted to comics by MOONSHADOW's Jon J. Muth from a Polish author (1921-2006) whom I shall now be searching out. Handily, there's a reasonably extensive background and process piece in the back, revealing along the way just how long this has been in the making.
You know the phrase "'Ave a word with yourself!"...?
That's precisely what space mechanic Ijon Tichy will be doing for the foreseeable future: attempting to extract practical information from himself as he was yesterday, as he will be tomorrow or indeed as the person he will become on Friday from the vantage point of the chap he has since become on Wednesday after leaving both Monday and Tuesday behind.
It's all in the hope of mentally unravelling and so fathoming the cause-and-effect complexities of time travel, before he mentally unravels himself, or even brains his more belligerent aspects with a length of lead piping.
At some point, one or two of them might even cooperate long enough to perhaps change the rudder outside, which was damaged on the very first pages by a tiny passing meteoroid, and was why he first set course for the temporal anomalies, in order to give himself a helping hand. He can't change it on his own because it's held on by a single gigantic nut-and-bolt screw, and he cannot reach round its fin to turn the screw whilst maintaining adequate purchase on the wrench round the rudder's other side. He tried that. The wrench flew out from under his feet and is now slowly orbiting the space ship, tantalisingly too far away.
It's more of a space rocket than a space ship: everything is extremely low-tech for, as I say, Tichy is more of a mechanic than a pilot. There aren't many switches; you pull levers instead. From the outside at least, it's no larger than your lounge, and our narrator is first discovered baking bread in an old-school electric oven. He looks out of a portal as you might your bedroom window at night, while his library houses a small coffee table and comfy armchair. The lampshade's very cosy. The ballooning space suit he dons in his initial attempts to fix the rudder is closer akin to a deep-sea diving affair - and that, from a century ago - but with a bell-jar helmet. There's no way it would actually fit through the hatch, but that's the sort of book this is. See gigantic nut-and-bolt screw.
As you'd expect from the artist on MOONSHADOW it is exquisitely painted in lovely loose washes predominately in lilac and yellow ochre over light pencil outlines, and I spent many, many minutes contemplating how Muth had managed to execute the wet-brush starscape behind the back-lit meteoroid. Gerhard on CEREBUS used to flick white ink onto black backgrounds with an old toothbrush.
As in the script, so in the art there lies comedy. I loved the star chart declaring his current course to be within decidedly dangerous territory, multiple red arrows warning "DON'T GO HERE" while other areas are marked "run away" or "yikes!" Thanks to all the vortex turbulence and gravity gone right wonky-woo, he keeps getting battered upside the head by a hardbound copy of the General Theory of Relativity.
Get ready for your own head to hurt in harmony with his. Not everyone enjoys their own company.
"Quick, let's go outside, we might just make it!"
The Thursday me grabbed the me that was I.
"But the rocket will fall into the vortex any minute now. The shock could throw us off into space, and that would be the end of us."
"Use your head, stupid. If the Friday me is alive, nothing can happen to us. Today is only Thursday."
"But it's Wednesday."
There's a serious flaw in Wednesday him's plan, just as there had been in Monday's and Tuesday's and from now on solving that will become key. That, and keeping track of himself:
The Friday me wasn't there; I looked in the bathroom, but it was empty too. I returned to the kitchen where the Thursday me methodically cracked an egg with a knife and poured its contents onto the sizzling pan.
"Where's the Friday me?"
"Somewhere in the neighbourhood of Saturday, no doubt."
