Space Happy (1953)

 

Happy indeed! A joyous confection of SF-art cliché: the handsome space captain, wearing a version of the Superman costume, though with a rocket-ship rather than an ‘S’ on his chest; the beautiful spacewoman, kneeling and for some impenetrable reason wearing a cape (what good is a cape in vacuum? we may ask); the bizarre glass cookie-jar helmets; the way their spacesuits are tucked into their boots without any kind of vacuum seal. They both have air-hoses feeding into their helmets, but neither of them are wearing any kind of backpack or air-cylinder, so perhaps these hoses simply open into emptiness. The spacewoman has unrolled a blueprint of whatever structure they have come to the moon to build, but since the spaceman is pointing back where they came, it looks like they've travelled to the wrong bit of the moon to start building. Or perhaps he is simply pointing at the gigantic silver spaceship in admiration: ‘look, it's like the design on my costume! Cool!’ She is armed, a ray-gun holstered at her waist; but he appears to be carrying a futuristic cake-icer or perhaps an artificial insemination device. If it too is a ray-gun, perhaps of a different design, then he is being somewhat delinquent in the way he is carelessly pointing it her. 

That the scene is set on the Moon is made evident by the Earth, large in the lunar sky; but in this future world Saturn appears to have shifted orbit and moved much closer to the Sun: it looms in the top right of the image. The title of this colo[u]ring book, Space Happy, edges out of proper grammar: it looks not as though the images of outer-space, to be coloured-in, will make you happy, rather, after the model of ‘slap-happy’, as if space has rendered you incoherent or punchdrunk. As perhaps it has.

A more serious point is in the technique of this image. The artist, Tran J. Mawicke (1911-88), has evidently executed it quickly. It is not slapdash on the level of brushwork, though it is derivative in terms of content, and clumsily bodged-together in terms of composition. The shading on the rocket in the background, and the spot of light on the Earth, indicate illumination coming from the top right; but the shadows of the two humans can only be being cast by light coming from lower down and the left—although the pool of shadow directly between the spaceman's two feet suggests a third source of light, directly above his head. A cursory look at the image may not notice this, but closer attention reveals it has been constructed much in the way that modern-day A.I. builds its uncanny valley images: a rummage through the artist's memory of science-fictional elements, assembled without too much consideration of their mutual relevance or interconnection, lit incoherently, a visual melange. Get happy.