Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, howard chaykin, image, matt fraction, satellite sam

Repeat Review: Satellite Sam #1 by Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin

Published Wed, 03 Jul 2013 04:12:57 -0500

Last updated Wed, 03 Jul 2013 05:04:14 -0500

REPEAT: This article ran last week, but the comic is out today (and available at Image Expo yesterday). We thought a repeat may be in order…

With a book like this, it's tempting to conjure up a conversation.

"Howard, what do you want to draw?"

"Sharp suits from the nineteen fifties! Science-fiction! People smoking! Men with jaws! Babes posing in lingerie! Crowd scenes! Metal staircases!"

And then Matt Fraction went away and wrote Satellite Sam. It seems to perfectly play on Howard's own interests and tastes. A procedural drama on the set of a popular science fiction TV show in the fifties, filmed and transmitted live across the USA, with all of the problems such a scenario presents itself with, the solutions engineered with only a few seconds notice, and behind the scenes, plenty of dark derring do.

Mad Men meets Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip would be the easy hook, but thankfully this is much better than that. It uses the Watchmen trick of hanging all the genre details around a serious crime, and then seeing how they all play off the new situation. How people who are concerned with one aspect of the world, getting one thing done to the degree that it takes up all of their time and effort, are suddenly derailed by their best laid plans ganning a glae.

There are political manoeuvrings that seem separate to the main thrust of the show, though no doubt will be revealed as part and parcel of the mystery. But it all adds to the comprehensive detail at all levels of the show, from writing, to acting, to paying for it all. The comic creates its own internal bubble of a world, as if is a satellite itself, orbiting the world that it broadcasts to. And bubbles are meant to be popped.

There's one scene in particular in which a character leaves the studio on a mission, and the closed cramped quarters of the studio, cut by harsh verticals break out into the outer space of the city outside. That, and the return to the studio directly mirrors the plot line in the TV show, which it then directly affects and intermingles with. It's a really impressive effect, emphasises the theme of how workplaces always create their own satellites, divorced from realities until it's too late and the air locks blow open. There's an early incursion from the money men who are ejected, but there's only so long they can be allowed to be a satellite, Sam.

For both Fraction and Chaykin, this is their most impressive work for some time and I will be itching for the next issue.

Oh, and talking of scratching that itch, here's the Midtown variant cover.