Traveling to Mars
Roy Livingston is finally going to make something of himself. This wannabe rocker turned pet store manager is going to be the first person to set foot on Mars. It turns out that Roy’s terminal and inoperable Stage 4 Cancer is of a special variety that doesn’t do well in space. Which makes him the perfect candidate for a one-way trip to the Red Planet. Once he’s there, he just has to claim it for the Eazy Beef corporation and they’ll own all of the natural gas reserves there, saving the Earth from its energy shortage, and becoming the new ruler of the global economy in the process. All he has to do is survive the time for intense personal introspection about all the failures in his life the trip will allow for, and the efforts from other corporations to try and stop him along the way.
“Traveling to Mars” is written by Mark Russell and illustrated by Roberto Meli, and if you think that summary of the story sounds like a real downer, you’d be right. Roy lets us know right from the jump that his life has largely been a big waste and the portrait of him that emerges over the course of the series likely won’t change the reader’s mind. Then you’ve got the little indignities of space travel that he has to suffer through, conversations with his mom that drive home the whole disappointment factor, and elements of satire about human nature as seen in the deteriorating condition on Earth that were so funny I forgot to laugh. Put these all together and you’ve got a strong contender for the biggest bummer (American Comics Edition) of 2025.
Which, I actually wound up kind of respecting in the end. Failed attempts at humor aside, Russell and Meli are committed to their vision of Roy and his trip and it actually started to grow on me the more I read. I started to get more interested in seeing what happened between him and his ex-wife, and there was also that curiosity about what awaited him on Mars. Things never stopped being less than a bummer at every turn, but it didn’t feel like the creators were trying to grind down their protagonist in the process. This definitely isn’t for everyone, but if you’re in the mood for something that’s entertaining in a low-key depressing kind of way, this will do it for you.