Review by Frank Plowright

Spaceships in SF are sleek, efficient creations manned by crew members proud of their jobs and their missions, with authority stemming from a resolute Captain well aware of their duty. What if that’s just the peak of the quality pyramid, though, and like all other trades, further down the organisation there are spacecraft with less capable crews. Welcome to David A. Goodman’s Space Job.

Danny Sheridan has spent five years as an assistant chef, but is deluded enough not to question matters when he successfully applies for the job of First Officer aboard a spacecraft. It’s par for the course on the George HW, Bush, which features a sloppy, dysfunctional crew taking their lead from their captain, who’s no figure of respect and considers duty something to be shirked rather than embraced. There’s in-fighting and jealousies among the crew, never mind the problem of one of them being an alien.

Álvaro Sarraseca’s art serves as a metaphor for the entire project. He distinguishes the characters and places them in locations, but there’s not enough to those locations to convince. It’s little more than the bare minimum required to define a spacecraft or the individual crew quarters on it. Likewise Goodman’s script has jokes, some good ones among them, just not delivered at a punchy enough pace. Some sympathy for the cast might help, but each is introduced with the single characteristic defining everything they do. The repeated joke that works best is Captain Olivier’s constant attempts to avoid talking to the Admiral.

Joke, pause, reaction, pause… it works on film, but diminishes comedy in comics.