Junkycable #1

Junkycable #1

Behemoth Comics 2021

For Mature Readers

By Claudio Avella

Year 29XX: Allister, the death surgeon and Cheap, the code thief, are two criminals and lovers out searching for their step daughter Siri. Their journey begins in the bounty city Nibel and will stretch to industrial city New Okinawa, and along this journey they will encounter numerous enemies, trials, cyborgs and nutcases, while a mysterious enemy emerges from the past to hunt them down.

This is one of those books where I kind of have no idea what’s going on and in this weird epic kind of way I like it. We do get bits and pieces here that let us know what’s going on and it comes together in a different kind of way so that Claudio has crafted a story that’s a much cerebral as it is visual. It definitely isn’t for kids or teenager per se because there is sex and adult circumstances not to mention drug use and nudity but it all works because of the science fiction nature of the book. I am fascinated by this and I had to read it three times before I felt I was ready to write this review just to make sure that I was going to get it right.

I like the way that this is being told. How we see the story & plot development moving forward through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented extremely well. The character development that we see is great and how we see the dialogue, character interaction as well as how they act and react to the situations and circumstances they encounter really do wonders in fleshing them out as real people. The pacing here is superb and as it takes us through the page revealing this world, this story and introducing us to the characters makes you stop, think and become fully engaged in what we see.

I like how we see this being structured as well as how the layers within the story emerge and continue from outside what we see. This too engages the reader as it makes you wonder just what happened in their past to make someone like Jolto come for them in a safe neutral zone. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as ho it moves the story forward is extremely well achieved.

The interiors here are incredibly interesting. The creativity and imagination is off the charts and when we get to see Janet and what she does well that’s just crazy good. The linework is smartly laid down and how the varying weights and techniques are being utilised to pull out the detail work that we see is fantastic. We do see a fair amount of backgrounds being utilised but i’d still like to see more because what we do see feels like a tease when the blank spaces com around. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a strong and talented eye for storytelling. The colour work is inspired through these crazy colour combinations that we see. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work showcases a great understanding of how colour works.

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There really are a great amount of these WTF moments that at first you think make no sense whatsoever and then you realise that in the grand scheme of things it does make sense and that kind of boggles the mind. I guarantee you that you will not find anything like this on stands today. That this highly resembles the great science fiction stories of the past, and by past I mean when I was a kid growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, and the sheer amount of fun that you will have reading this is something you shouldn’t underestimate.