Move boxes with comics to put them on a shelf often leads to less busy ways of spending time: i.e. reading said comics. This time one of them was Orbiter by Ellis/Doran which, of course, I had to reread right there on the spot. The spot being the floor. Cold floor, comic warm. So good, and that lead to me picking down Young & Adlard’s Astronauts In Trouble. (Please be kind to yourselves and pick up a hardcopy of this.)

Nothing makes me proclaim “we need to get out into space now damnit!” as much as comics. Movies are make-believe and books are too abstract. Comics though, they’re the real deal. They make the brain itch in that good way. The images are a bit like photos, they don’t lie (or so we’re told by ideological shrill merchants lying through their teeth) and the fact they these are made of ink instead of silver gelatin won’t change anything. At least, they shouldn’t. Don’t you dare to mock me, they are photographs but of dreams and not the eye. It’s true.

Truly true. Otherwise they wouldn’t make me jump up, press my hands against the glass of the window and stare towards the sky. As Warren Ellis himself wrote in the Orbiter foreword: “Because it’s too important a thing to allow it to die in the sky.” This is true about many things for me, and this is why I really really really love this medium. Mark my words: photograph of dreams.