Cosmonauts of the Future v1

Kids can ask tough questions. And, sometimes, when they don’t get any answers they believe, they will do their own very thorough investigation. In this case: Is the world run by robots or aliens?

Boy Meets Girl; Aliens versus Robots?

A new boy, Gildas, comes to school and instantly makes friends with a girl named Martina. She’s hustling kids on the playground for their lunch money with checkers challengers.  Gildas doesn’t fall for it.

The two have a lot in common.  She’s on a mission to prove that everyone else is an alien.  He’s on the warpath to prove that everyone else is a robot.  Together, they’re going to prove that one of them is right.  They’re open to either possibility, though, which is really sweet.  There’s no ego here; it’s all about discovering the truth.

Also, what are the ramifications if everyone else is a robot or alien?  Who can say what is real?

And what if they are watching?  Why, they’ll have to speak in code, which only leads to ridiculous conversations like this one:

The book is a light hearted take on the plans the two hatch to figure out who their evil overlords are, how they’ve so successfully overtaken humanity, and what they plan to do about it. Actually, they never quite figure out what their plan is after they get to the truth.  They just know that they have to prove it first.  The rest will follow.

Surely, that lack of a plan won’t backfire on them?

That takes them from the schoolyard to a far off laboratory. They are convinced news of the discovery of anti-matter is just proof that the robots/aliens are giving us advanced technology that we’re not ready for.  They just don’t know why.

The whole thing is adorable, with the kids going out of their way to prove everything is fake for reasons they don’t understand and without an idea about what to do about it.

But the truth must come out!

So you wind up with a mini-adventure story of two kids teaming up to take on the world.

It’s not quite a gag-a-page comic. Many pages do stand alone, but not all of them.  Trondheim lets the scenes play out naturally, even if they spill over to the next page.

It’s also one big story at work here, and not just a series of one-off gags.  These kids are making progress on their investigations, and Trondheim is going to show that.

The Art of Cosmonauts

Pipeline Favorite Manu Larcenet is the artist on this book.  (See “Back to Basics,” in particular, if you like this style.)  He’s a great match for Trondheim’s writing.  He provides the proper cartoony art style to match Trondheim’s off-kilter look at the world.  The characters have unique quirks, including Martina’s dark dashes for eyes opposite Gildas’ open circle eyes.

The kids are believable as kids.  Even without the presence of adults, they look like their age, and emote to all the extremes that kids do. They can bounce from boredom to extreme energy in a split second, and then back.

Larcenet’s style feels very organic.  There’s no sign of computers in his work at all. There’s barely a straight line in the book.  It’s all very hand drawn, with an irregular ink line that makes anything that’s supposed to look straight have a different kind of character.  His inks almost go into Charles Schulz territory to add interest.

Even his architecture is imperfect.  The perspective is roughly correct, but then the buildings are all hand drawn to the point where it looks like no ruler was even allowed.  Your mind fills in enough to correct it.

In Color!

Brigitte Findakly colors the book and is, for my money, one of the best colorists in comics. (She also colored Trondheim’s “Slalom” and Larcenet’s “Back to Basics” series, for two examples)  There’s nothing she colors that doesn’t look better for it.

Her style tends towards the more literal colors of every day things.  Few are the colorists who can pull something like that off without looking too simplistic and boring.   There’s a cohesion to the colors from the point of view of their brightness — even when they look like primary blues and greens, they’re really dulled just a bit to keep from burning your eyes out.  Findakly’s not big on using color schemes for scenes where one color dominates and everything else takes on that shade.

There are remarkably few shadows on these pages. Most are drawn either as cast shadows — on the ground below where someone is standing — or the occasional three-quarters shadow when someone is in the foreground, but the focus of the panel is a little more distant.  Findakly is adding that to the art, and not just copying from the outlines provided by the artist.  She knows where to add them for effect, and where to hold back because it’s not necessary.

Recommended?

Yes, it’s a really cute book with some very unexpected moments.  Trondheim does a great job in setting expectations early and then thinking about common every day things in warped and twisted ways to sustain it.

Sure, we all had that thought as kids about, “What if we’re all robots?” or “What if all adults are actually aliens?” But Trondheim gives us a story with two kids who actively pursue the matter.  Manu Larcenet plays them wonderfully on the page, with a very organic line and great storytelling.

“Cosmonauts of the Future” is a fun and surprising book that deserves a look if you want something in the sci-fi arena that’s a little more humorous.

— 2018.028 —

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