In Robert Alexander’s 2021 documentary, A Man Named Scott, the titular Scott Mescudi — best known to music fans as award-winning and zeitgeist-capturing rap artist Kid Cudi — explains that his sudden fame took a terrible toll on his wellbeing. A kind of dehumanization can occur when someone is thrust into the limelight, making that person into more of a commodity and a symbol than a person in their own right. Mescudi has beeen very open about his struggles with anxiety, depression, and even imposter syndrome, channeling those feelings into masterworks such as his Man on the Moon album trilogy. His honesty and sense of humanity amid all the concept album pomp and circumstance is one of the main reasons why his music has always spoken to me.
Now, along with the fantastic team of cowriter Kyle Higgins, artists Marco Locati and Igor Monti, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, the musician and actor brings that insight into the human condition and the disaffectedness that comes with fame to a fascinating new book from Image: Moon Man.
Ramon Townsend has become an overnight sensation after saving his crewmates from a disastrous shuttle mission to space. Townsend might be a hero, but he’s visibly uneasy when asked about specifics surrounding the journey. All we know as the reader is that whatever happened up there, it changed him in more ways than one.
Mescudi and co. take this archetypical superhero origin story in some interesting directions in this first issue, but make no mistake: This is not the action-packed romp that you might be expecting from the front. The fantastic abilities and deep space mystery of it all is mostly set dressing to prop up the real story at the heart of the book: Ramon’s struggle to ground himself in the here and now. He comes home to find that he doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere, even in his own skin. His family is mad at him for selling out and working for a megacorporation and the rest of the world just wants a piece of him to use for a soundbyte. It’s telling that one of the lightest moments in this issue is a panel in which a beleaguered reporter expresses genuine concern for him. It’s one of the only times Ramon seems to relax in public. The writers and artists imbue each small human interaction with emotional weight.
Ramon never wanted to be a hero. He joined the space program because he wanted to see the stars, to get out there and be a part of something bigger than himself. To have that all implode in such a drastic way, no matter how fantastical the circumstances, is clearly a huge blow. Now that he’s back on Earth, he doesn’t quite fit the person-shaped hole he left behind. He’s escaped a trauma, but he can’t figure out how to heal from it just yet.
Ramon is still haunted by what happened up there, as we see in a series of gorgeously illustrated splash pages. It’s not totally clear what he and his team encountered, but Locati and Monti treat us to some truly dazzling cosmic imagery to break up the strictly human elements of the story. The art here is no less impressive, however, as all of the characters’ body language and facial expressions tell us so much about their state of mind and their place in this world. Ramon may find it difficult to talk about his feelings, but the tilts of his head and the invisible weight on his shoulders speak volumes. When we do get a bit of action at the end of the issue, it’s rendered in a way that tells us that Ramon is just trying to get things done as quickly and discreetly as he can. He may be a budding superhuman of some kind, but that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable with it yet. There are a few moments here and there that still feel unclear even by the rest of the book’s oblique standards, but that appears to be by design at this point.
As I said earlier, the general concept behind this book may sound a bit familiar, but this creative team takes those tropes and uses them to craft an extremely compelling and human story. Rather than focus on the triumphant side of a superhero origin, Moon Man is focused on showing us the personal cost of a journey gone awry. It’s a book that ends up feeling deeply personal, yet undeniably cosmic in scale.
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