Mooncop

The Guardian cartoonist relates the daily deadpan adventures of the last policeman living on the moon

"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. Each day that the Mooncop goes to work, life gets a little quieter and a little lonelier.

As in Goliath, Tom Gauld's retelling of the Bible story, the focus in Gauld's science fiction is personal--no big explosions or grand reveals, just the incremental dissolution of an abandoned project and a person's slow awakening to his own uselessness. Depicted in the distinctive, matter-of-fact style of Gauld's beloved Guardianstrips, Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. Gauld captures essential truths about humanity, making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one.