Life on Another Planet

Nah, not as good as anything else by Eisner that I've read. This one felt like Eisner was channeling Frank Miller: it was dark, cynical, political, tone-deaf to anything beyond white guy stuff (ALL of the 3-4 ladies were either sex objects or shrews), and feeling very dated. It was also very talky, which made it a slog to read. Consider Exhibit A:



SO TALKY.

It's weird that Eisner, who was such a force in advancing the medium of graphic novels/comics/comix/”sequential art” would have, well, not really used the medium well this time. Talk balloons clogged everything, gumming up the whole story and leaving no room for anything but the barest sketchiest art. It was busy, hard to read, a big jumbled mess (with a big jumbled plot).

The story starts like Carl Sagan's Contact: scientists in New Mexico, listening for alien life, hear it (finally!). The rest of the comix is about how this news throws ALL OF 1970s GEOPOLITICS into disarray. There's a Nixon caricature (“Mr. Milgate”), an Idi Amin stand-in (I forget his name, but his “fictional African country” is called Sidiami), there's lots of Cold War Tinker-Tailor-Soldier-Spy shit (which feels soooo moth-balled now), and there's some Age of Aquarius-style New Age hippie caricatures.

It's all, well, very cynical, but also very narrow-minded. This might appeal to your old white grandpa. For me, none of it made any sense to me, none of it felt remotely relatable or real, and I didn't really care.

Eh. Nobody's perfect, even Eisner!