posted 01-29-2002 12:50 AM               

Larry Young and Charlie Adlard spin another tale of Astronauts in Trouble in Space: 1959: the story of the man who beat Neil Armstrong to the moon by a full decade. You didn’t know America sent a man to the moon in ’59? Of course not – the story never got out, despite the presence of intrepid Channel Seven news team Kit Draper and Chet Archer. National security, don’t you know.

While reporting on a police shooting, the Channel Seven team finds a strange badge that eventually leads them to Peru, where the Aerospace Intelligence Taskforce (AIT – get it?) is preparing a missile test in an effort to leapfrog the Russians in the space race. Things do not go according to plan, forcing Taskforce commander Col. Macadam to reveal his trump card: a completely fueled rocket ready to go to the moon, right now. The only question is, who’s going to fly it there?

Space: 1959 is a relatively short story -- an example of a ‘Pop Comic,’ designed to be a quick burst of energy that grabs your attention and then runs with it. The book includes a number of great shots and scenes, handled well by Adlard – when you read the part where Macadam pursues a saboteur, have some kind of bombastic orchestral score playing on your stereo. It’ll work nicely.

The short length does have one drawback, at least in my eyes. We jump from the reporters’ discovery of the badge to their arrival on the base ten days later, and only get a few dialogue hints as to how they found the place. Young does such a good job setting up our hard-boiled news crew that I wanted to see them crack the case. But really, this is not their story; it’s Macadam’s, and anything that doesn’t fit that story gets stripped out so that things can keep moving – and move they do. Until the very end of the story, there aren’t many quiet character moments here, but that is not to say the characters aren’t well-drawn. They are, thanks to Young’s dialogue. (There are times it creeps to the edge of cliché, such as in Macadam’s ‘no Russkie’s gonna beat the US of A’ attitude, but it never goes over that edge – after all, I’d expect a military man in the 50s to have that mindset.) But the characters don’t really have a chance, or a need, to change or grow the way Dave Archer does in Live from the Moon..