Review: Junkyard Angels #2

Artist(s): PK Eiselt, Zachary Enea.

This second issue of Junkyard Angels keeps up the tension and weirdness quotient that pervaded the first one. Besides Jason, the boy with the mechanical arm, and Janey, the sister of Jason’s possibly dead boyfriend Bobby, we’re now introduced to a group of young characters who also try to survive in the new, harsh reality of a world devastated by a techno-virus.

Artist Zachary Enea continues to offer to the reader a large helping of nightmarish imagery, with the machine/dead human hybrids that populate the world. While the backgrounds are sometimes a bit too sparse for my tastes, the storytelling and body language always work well, which is surely very important for a story full of action sequences.

But this comic isn’t just a mecha-zombie slugfest, far from it. Jason and Bobby’s love story is still at the heart of it, with a prologue that reveals their meeting. Drawn in a manga-influenced style by Alo Perez, it’s a very sweet tale set in a hospital, which explains why our main characters all have artificial limbs. It also stands in stark and welcome contrast to the main story, which is very dark. Though the news of Bobby being still alive brings a ray of hope to Jason’s despair and a direction to the story.

This issue ends with Milton’s story, a back-up continuing the story of the previous issue, drawn by Juan Fleites (also responsible for the beautiful cover of the comic). This wordless, black and white disquieting tale of a man walking the streets of his desolate world could come from a John Carpenter movie.

The Junkyard Angels series is previewed at DoorQ (the prologue and back-up are new to the comic), and you can buy the comic from the authors (see the Facebook page) or from IndyPlanet. From the cover of this issue, we also now know that it’s a four-issue mini-series, which promises a definite ending.

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