by Ted McKeever (writer/artist/colorist/color separations/creator)
Lettered by John Workman
Edited by Shelly Roeberg
Published in 1997 as two issues dated July and August by DC/Vertigo/Warner Bros./Time Warner.
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"Two for the price of one! Three for a dollar! Step right up! Hey, you think it's possible to mail back the unused portion of Mom and Dad for a complete refund?"
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Review by William D. Tucker.
Here's the love child of Weapon X and Animal Man if they honeymooned in Westworld.
Junk Culture. Two word title. Two sisters, Eve and Lola. Twins. Dual natured mixture of meats'n'robotics-cyborgs, if you like. A mad scientist tells us that one sister inherited a good nature and the other one an evil nature, but that turns out to not exactly be true. Through a series of mishaps and fuck-ups involving both bad luck and bad design, the twins discover the artificial nature of both themselves and their world. Eve and Lola respond with a combination of both violence and amusement. Two issues. Across two months. Published by DC Comics/Vertigo. I half-expected the villain Two-Face to show up, but this is a creator-owned title by Ted McKeever, so no dice. We do get back cover ads for Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin on both issues, though.
At first, Eve and Lola think they are typical teenage protagonists of a corny, mildly edgy sitcom-esque storyline. They live with their clueless father and their doting mother in the at first sarcastically and then allegorically named Newtown. Sarcastic, at first, because Newtown just seems like a mildly R-rated version of Riverdale, and then later it turns out to be a facade for an elaborate experiment to make Eve and Lola think that they are real human beings. The residents are professional actors. Behind the scenes lurk heavily armed henchpersons ready to intervene if the twins go off-program in some catastrophic manner. Which, of course, they inevitably do, bringing about the total destruction of this highly dubious experiment.
I suppose a major idea of Junk Culture is that the artificiality of the scenario extends well past the core story of the lab grown twins. A major strand of the narrative involves the aging scumbag rockstar Al Roma, who is a creature of the music industry. Roma thinks he's a genius and entitled to unlimited sex and fame even though he's a big ugly hack. Lola has been brainwashed to have a fangirl crush on Roma, which sets up one of the best visual gags in the book. I suppose there's the implication that the dinosaurian rockstars of the late 1990s require a secret army of mind-controlled cyborgs to maintain ticket sales. Moreover, this is a story published in two separate issues that really should've just been one double-sized one shot. Artificially stretching it across two months seems like a meta piss take on the bizarre and arbitrary way American comic book publishers slice up narrative into twenty-two or twenty-four page segments per issue whether or not that's the most effective pacing for a given work. Junk Culture is art-object-as-comic-book-industry-gouge.
One of the more amusing moments involves Eve and Lola availing themselves of an arsenal of guns and armor. The main sidearm they expropriate looks very similar to the futuristic handgun Harrison Ford used to retire rogue replicant skinjobs in Blade Runner. Junk Culture puts the blaster in the hands of the replicants, and the gun sights on foolish human Frankenstein types. Ain't that a bitch.
1997's Junk Culture, curiously, seems to anticipate more well known works of end of the millennium pop culture. The similarity to 1998's The Truman Show is self-evident, although the Peter Weir directed film is more about perception and persistence freeing its protagonist from an artificial world as opposed to applied violence. 1998's video game Metal Gear Solid explored a conflict between clones who find themselves fighting a proxy war on behalf of shadow government/mad science factions emanating from the depths of the American military-industrial complex. And, of course, 1999's The Matrix gloried in kung fu and firepower as it explored armed resistance to an imposed virtual reality system of oppression. Junk Culture is more downbeat than these more well-known movies, and even suggests that the cyborg twins are doomed to fall even as they destroy the idiotic world that birthed them. Ted McKeever's off kilter character designs puts across a world mired in greed, stupidity, and pretension. Even a mad scientist's grandiose revelatory monologue comes across as a Frankenstein seriously failing to grasp his own endeavor. Eve and Lola's rampage isn't quite what we want, but it's probably better than we deserve.
By the way, my second favorite visual gag involves an army of ants swarming a spilled soda. It's mean-especially towards comic book dorks like myself-but it's too damn true.
