by Daniel Casey

I adore a small but vibrant kind of science fiction movie—space madness, losing one’s mind due to the monotony and vastness of space. At once oddly specific and broadly applicable, the space madness trope is one of the few truly unique aspects of science fiction. Such a psychological preoccupation can be best understood as a mid-20^th century Space Race/Atomic Age neurosis—a needless worry that in reality masks a deeper more practical anxiety.

Often this anxiety has results from the moral damage of imperialist ambition, exacerbated by an existential fear of the unknown. Essentially, the effort to reconcile who you think you are with what you do for a living, compounded with being adrift in a consuming abyss space, drives one crazy. As with many tropes, it’s easier to trace through film—Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Moon, Disney’s fantastic The Black Hole, the awful but for some reason adored Event Horizon, and the excellent but often disliked Sunshine.

It’s in this tradition that Garth Ennis’s new series Caliban looks to be developing into an excellent space madness story. Ennis has said that the story owes its genesis to the Alien franchise. “Caliban first began bubbling away when I learned there was going to be an Alien prequel—not just my favorite horror or sci-fi flick, probably my number one suspense movie of all time. Even to this day I find myself idly wondering about various aspects of its story. When I saw Prometheus, I realized they’d gone in a different direction, but I had so many ideas of my own I figured I had enough for something completely new.” While the impetus for the series might have been Alien-that is the easiest comparison for the first couple of issues-Caliban is more than an Alien knock-off.

Caliban is on its way to becoming a bizarre allegory. The opening presents us with some standard types running the eponymous ship—the distant by-the-book navigator Karien, the gruff engineer McCartney, the pragmatic pilot San, and the pensive Nomi—easily setting the Alien-like tone. It is through Nomi that we first experience this universe; her journaling provides the device to convey backstory. Voyagers travel at warp speeds, in stasis, to work distant mines for resources needed on Earth. Earth, here, being some kind of hyper-industrial dystopia, “a tumor breathing though a smokestack.” In this future, space travel has revealed a cold universe of uninhabitable planets devoid of complex life. Humanity is alone in the universe.

This knowledge seeds space madness. “Infinity sounds pretty good, until you’ve been staring out the window at it for a while.” “You have to ace a lot of tests to qualify as crew, but none of them are absolutely foolproof.” O n their voyages, crew members endure constant artificiality. The literal and figurative distance from humanity has both mental and physical side-effects. “Your body adapting in way you don’t dwell on. Stillborn things that go straight in the trash.” After being doted on by a male crew member, it’s clear that Nomi has suffered miscarriages and perhaps necessary abortions. In space, there is no life.

Just when this elliptical foreshadowing begins to suggest itself, the action of the story crashes into us (again literally and figuratively) as the Caliban collides with a gigantic alien vessel. Travelling at warp speed, the ships merge, the collision is of two objects attempting to occupy the same space; these foreign bodies are melded together. Damaged, the Caliban expels into space hundreds of miners in stasis pods (stillborn things?), the shock of the sudden stop causes the crew members to vomit and bleed, and it’s soon made clear that there are individuals caught between the two ships dead or dying. The first issue ends with this proof humans are not alone; it ends with the counter-intuitive assertion that there is other complex life out there and that encountering it could end life as we know it.

Ennis is creating something that falls in line with the Alien franchise, if examined from an angle similar to that David McIntee expressed in an article from The Guardian from about five years ago, “Alien is a rape movie with male victims…And it also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth. It is a film that plays, very deliberately, with male fears of female reproduction.” This is a bit too far for me, but I certainly agree that the bizarre mother issues of the Alien franchise is an expression of confusion and fear of reproduction. Caliban is operating is this kind of wheelhouse—it is presenting a story of life beyond male or female, feminine or masculine, one that is wholly alien.

This alien life is terrifying because it is completely unknown and seemingly unknowable. Especially to a human mind that in this scenario for all its technological intelligence is obviously merely a pre-adolescent in the universe.

When the second issue gets underway, Nomi and San exploring the alien craft stumble upon a room housing pods of perfectly preserved creatures. It is a vast array of species, each of which is embalmed, suggesting this alien ship may be an ark or a mausoleum. When Nomi approaches one of these pods she inadvertently opens it sending the specimen pouring out over her and disgorging its stillborn contents upon her. It was one of the more putrid scenes I’ve seen in comics or film.

At this point, the two encounter their own ship’s captain and the rest of the surviving crew. Gathering themselves and initiating protocols to salvage their ship, we are reminded this is a space madness story. Karien shows up suddenly to dispassionately and brutally murder a crew member assigned to seal up the alien ship. Karien barely speaks, and when he does it is in detached obscure assertions, “Inefficient. Experimentation. Analysis. Augmentation: physiological, biochemical.” It is the navigator Karien who is the madman, and we now have to search our memory of the story up to this point and ask, ‘Did he know what was going to happen? Did he have a hand in it? Or has he been ‘corrupted’ by the alien ship or aliens?’ These questions give us the suspense that will be played out in the forthcoming issues.

I did not know of Ennis’s work before Caliban, but paging through his previous titles (Preacher, The Punisher, and Crossed to name a few) I got the impression that they were written as much to provide visual splatter as for their stories. I don’t doubt that upon reading the storytelling was more than mere gore, but it seems pretty clear that Ennis made his nest egg on appealing to the fans of splatter-violence. Which makes Caliban even more intriguing. Thus far, Caliban has resisted the aesthetic of ultra-violence, while not in any way shying away from powerfully disturbing and visceral existential concerns.

If Caliban continues on its current trajectory, we will see either Nomi or San become dynamic characters in opposition to Karien. Again in the vein of the Alien franchise, we will see female protagonists survive and care for surrogate children. This story and the questions it provokes participate in the feminist narrative initiated by Ridley Scott’s character Ripley. Caliban doesn’t imitate this narrative; rather it expands and complicates the narrative, transgressing our understanding to demand we think harder and better. I find it difficult not to welcome a comic that makes these kind of demands on me.

Daniel Casey created the poetry and fiction book review Gently Read Literature and has written on North American soccer for several sites. Daniel came around to comics when he was 37 years old. His rambling and grumbling can be followed on Twitter @misanthropester

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