The end of the world isn’t really the end. Sure, when the end comes a lot of people will die and the world will never be the same, but it will still be there, and as long as there are humans there will be some new world order to pick up the pieces and rebuild into something new.
Whether that new thing is a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to people’s imagination, but it’s interesting to see what people can come up with.
Let’s take a look at the latest comic to imagine the end of the world: “Junk Rabbit”.
Written, illustrated, colored, and lettered by Jimmie RobinsonCover by: Jimmie Robinson
A new hero rises from mountains of consumer waste, mass homelessness, and devastating climate change. Some call the hero a myth, an urban legend, but others know that it’s the JUNK RABBIT come to life!
JIMMIE ROBINSON brings a new take to the dystopian tale of how climate disaster alters not only our world, but also the heroes that literally rise from it. Swamp Thing meets RoboCop.
The world has ended, and in the case of “Junk Rabbit” #1 the apocalypse is one of humanity’s own making. Hyper consumerism and capitalist excess has created absolutely massive heaps of garbage and it’s gotten to the point where the planet just can’t deal with it all. This has led to America becoming a massive landfill where the rich get to live in isolated bubbles with fresh air and water while the poor are left to live on the toxic scrap heap of our gluttony known as the Sink.
“Junk Rabbit” #1 follows two sisters named Nada and Sylv who are attempting to survive in the Sink and stumble across a strange conspiracy involving the dead son of a wealthy political leader and a mysterious figure who has become something of an urban legend/religious prophet known only as Junk Rabbit.
“Junk Rabbit” #1 is both written and drawn by Jimmie Robinson and what’s immediately apparent is the comic’s incredibly strong world building. While the comic takes two pages to briefly explain how we got to this point and the broad details of the world, once that’s done the narration stops and lets the imagery and details of the world do the heavy lifting. The class divide between rich and poor is immediately understandable with the rich having clean clothes and a strange fashion sense, breathing masks when they head out into the Sink, and a tech centric culture that feels futuristic but at the same time it’s easy to see how it could have developed from our current social interactions and cultures. Meanwhile, the poorer residents of the Sink look run down, shoddy, and have developed a culture based around foraging for scrap and cobbling things together from what they can find.
It’s ideas like this that inform the actual story, which sets up a classic “us vs. them” narrative and has the wealthy lording their higher quality of life and understanding of power over the less fortunate, which sets up the need for a vigilante hero to rise from the waste and fight for those who cannot fight back. This is where the titular hero comes into play, and they are introduced at the very end of the first issue.
Since a book like “Junk Rabbit” #1 has such good worldbuilding, and since most of the first issue is spent setting up the main conflict, there aren’t that many problems with the writing. If you want to nitpick, the opening narration could be a bit shorter, and there’s a romance subplot between two of the characters that doesn’t feel too well set up, but these are just minor problems in what is otherwise a very good first book.
Jimmie Robinson’s artwork in “Junk Rabbit” #1 is a fantastic example of visual storytelling and perfectly epitomizes the idea of “show, don’t tell”. On a macro level, it’s very clear that a lot of thought and effort went into showing the literal wasteland that humanity has created for itself, with piles of highly detailed trash stretching as far as the eye can see. The class divide mentioned above is also easy to spot, with the poorer people dressed in shabby clothing and colored with a lot of drab browns and grays, while the rich have cleaner clothing with sleek tech that is plastered in advertisements. As for the people themselves, the facial and body details have a much more minimalist feel to them with very narrow lines and not a lot of attention being paid to personal details. Whether this was because Robinson wanted to focus on the bigger picture and didn’t have time for the characters is unknown, but it gets the job done and allows the reader to understand everyone’s motivation and thought process.
“Junk Rabbit” #1 sets up a post-apocalyptic hellscape that is both new and yet disturbingly familiar. Anyone who reads this book is going to recognize a lot of behaviors and motivations from other books, but it’s all presented in a neat package that makes the whole thing feel unique and different.
Final Verdict: 8.6- It’s a familiar story of the end of the world and the struggle for survival, but it’s got a lot of ideas that are very well presented and very interesting..
