Who Else Would You Expect To Meet On The Moon?

Mooncop, by Tom Gauld, is about a cop. On the moon. Hence the name of the book. He's the last cop on the moon, actually, because the colony is slowly drying up. Everyone is moving back to Earth, either because they're being replaced by machines that do their jobs, or they just don't feel like staying in an increasingly empty and isolated place.

Gauld draws everything from a profile perspective, and reuses particular locations to show how things are winding down on the Moon. The few buildings have even fewer lights. The cop's apartment building keeps getting smaller as people move away and their units are simply removed from the structure. The color scheme is a deep blue, trending to black sky, with everything else in various mixtures of white and grey. The view might be tremendous, but the day-to-day living situation is lacking in color variety.

It's presented in a way that both the reader and the cop are aware of the general trend, but because he's living it, and we don't really know how much time is passing between scenes, he doesn't entirely grasp how far it's gone until the very end. Time slips away when you aren't looking, and then you turn around and shit, what happened? Why am I still in this job, where'd everybody go? That kind of thing.

It's a book where you could easily read things as being funny or depressing. He requests a transfer, which is denied, but they send him a robot to act as therapist. Except the robot can't move over the Moon's surface, and almost none of the outlets are suitable for it to recharge. Could be funny, or could be sad that they half-assed this attempt to improve what they think is his mental state, without even considering his situation.

Which fits with the officer's reactions through the story. Some of the time the changes leave him feeling lost or useless. Unable to really understand why no one else wants to stay. Other times he's still able to appreciate what brought him to the Moon in the first place, even if he serves almost no purpose.