Junk Rabbit #4 // Review
Ashleen says that she knows where the revolutionary is. She’s willing to give the authorities the information so long as she gets a trip into the domed city. There’s a guy in a position of authority who considers her offer. What could it hurt? If she turns out to be lying, he can always send her head back out of the dome as a warning. Things are as grim as ever in Junk Rabbit #4. Writer/artist Jimmie Robinson continues his walk through a dark cyberpunk dystopia that features a bit more heroism than previous issues in the series, making it also one of the more appealing ones.
It’s a risky proposition. Ashleen has been tracking the Junk Rabbit for quite some time. If her information turns out to be true, she could get an operation that would allow her to breathe inside the dome and even turn into a productive member of dome society. If not, she’s dead. The truth of the matter is that she knows what she’s doing, and she’s not telling the authorities everything that she knows. She might be looking to capitalize on the system, but there might be a little more going on than meets the eye.
Having had a hell of a time outlining all of the background on the cyberpunk dystopia in question, Robinson is now ready to dive more deeply into the central conflict of the series. Ashleen’s journey into the dome is actually a lot of fun. The contrast between someone from the outside and the clean, antiseptic, commercial consumer-space of the dome is an enjoyable one. It’s easy to feel for the title character, but Robinson also does a really good job of making Ashleen an appealing, relatable character who might be making questionable decisions in hopes of improving her life.
Robinson’s art is clean and simple. Once again, the scenes outside the dome suffer from Robinson’s precision. The world beyond the dome needs to feel squalid and decayed. Robinson’s art is far too neat and tidy to bring that across with any degree of success. To his credit, Robinson focuses the scenes outside of the dome on the characters who inhabit it. The world around them appears as a fine khaki mist, which locks in some degree of atmosphere. The scenes inside the dome are far more comfortable aesthetically. They live and breathe in a way that maintains the tension through much of the issue.
The dark background of Junk Rabbit finally has a complex conflict in the foreground to keep it moving. All of the concern about authorities looking for the revolutionary has been really engaging and everything, but it’s been done before so many times in the pages of so many comic books. It’s nice to see something a bit more fresh. Ashleen is one of the more interesting characters to come out of the series thus far. It’s nice to see her enhance the originality of the series, if only for a few pages.
