Mooncop

By Tom Gauld. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Hardcover, 96 pages, 2-Colour, 2016. 

"At once hilarious and achingly melancholy, [Mooncop] reads like a requiem for the future we were promised decades ago that never arrived. A quietly essential read for anyone who grew up reading sci-fi."—Wired

"Living on the moon . . . Whatever were we thinking? . . . It seems so silly now."

The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon.

Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. capturing essential truths about humanity and making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one. Like his Guardian and New Scientist strips, as well as his previous graphic novel, Goliath, Mooncop is told with Tom Gauld's distinctive, matter-of-fact storytelling and dry humor — an approach that has earned him fans around the world.

"Mooncop [is a] light, rueful comedy, whose motor is the absence of anything happening [...] long, lovely silent passages...Even when dreams don't quite work out, the book suggests, it can still be possible to find beauty in them."—The New York Times

"This British cartoonist is a master of heightening humor through restraint."—The Washington Post

"Mooncop is a great exercise in restraint: a brief page count, panels with an Ernie Bushmiller level of minimalism, emotions expressed with body language and a few words...Gauld mixes sweetness and melancholy in a story that's slim but not slight."—Paste

"A short comic, but a resonant one...leave it to Gauld to find the quiet bit of poetry in bad news."—GQ

"Cool, serene, and funny... like a Jim Jarmusch view of a fiercely inglorious future."—Publishers Weekly

"In Gauld’s hands, even the moon... is really just another setting for a beautifully-observed story of daily life, its worries and frustrations."—Creative Review

"Gauld['s] minimalist aesthetic and deadpan sense of humor ... work wonderfully together to bring levity to the emotional crisis in these pages."—The AV Club

"The subject and setting [of Mooncop] are perfectly suited for the artist who has steadfastly developed an impressively dry, quietly absurd sense of humor."—Noah Van Sciver, The Comics Journal

"At its heart, Mooncop provides an optimistic, rich metaphor for life... a fun, clever meditation on what it means to be human."—Nerdist

"The humor in Mooncop is quieter, sadder, more humane ... the detail [Gauld] packs into each panel is gorgeous: the empty landscape of the moon is made up of thousands of tiny wiggly lines, a sea of stone set against an indigo sky."—The Seattle Review of Books

"[Mooncop is] as slight and lovely as its themes are ponderous and difficult... This is a small book with a big heart, and it sticks with you."—Flood Magazine

"Slice-of-life science fiction and masterful cartooning make this a can’t-miss release."—Blastr