Junk Culture

 

Ted McKeever Junk Culture (1997)
I gave up on the Vertigo imprint around 1996 because they seemed to have run out of anything worth publishing, which is annoying because it means that I missed this. I gather humanity as industrial commodity may be a theme running through a lot of McKeever's work - with which, by the way, I'm only loosely familiar. It informed Plastic Forks and here it is again; except where I felt Plastic Forks seemed to sprawl a little, this is just two issues and is tight as fuck. Also, McKeever's occasionally random narrative swerves are far more effective in this more confined space, creating a truly weird dynamic rather than feeling as though he's making it up as he goes along - as he has admitted he often is - and has just thrown something absurd into the mix to see if it works.

Junk Culture is a fairly familiar story in terms of people as commodities, nothing startlingly original and hardly worth mentioning here, but the way it's told is astonishing and powerful - violent, expressionist, and even comical. The new thing which McKeever brought to the table was therefore not the actual story so much as how it would feel. This one packs a fairly serious emotional punch transposing the industrial violence to what may as well be the town from those Back to the Future movies, yet without going all self-consciously David Lynch. It may even be one of the greatest things Vertigo ever published, and the art is amazing, obviously.