The Bunker

(Image, 2003)
™ and © Image Comics, Inc.

Many dismissed Image in its infancy based on the oft-criticized, super-hero-dominated output of its founders. Back then, few would have ever guessed that the publisher of Youngblood, Spawn, and WildC.A.T.S would one day lay claim to a line of comics as diverse as many of its more respected competitors.

But Image has done exactly that, and Mutard’s black-and-white, digest-sized story of friendship and change is diametrically opposed to those early comics in just about every way possible. Mutard tells the sad, often heartbreaking, story of teens Jason and Annie, platonic best friends who grow apart as they grow up. Jason finds himself dealing with an ever-growing sexual attraction to her, while Annie’s path toward maturity takes her the other way, diminishing their friendship.

The hook to the story is that, while all of this is going on, Annie’s dark secret drives her to the perceived safety of Jason’s upper bunk every night, while he sleeps below her. Jason’s room becomes a bunker of sorts, teeming with unspoken tension between these two friends who spend their nights mere feet apart. Through this tension, Mutard painfully but convincingly portrays the agony of change brought on by growth. Not since Craig Thompson’s Good-bye Chunky Rice has this kind of loss been so heart-wrenchingly portrayed.

Kind of deep for an Image book, no? No. The editors at this unfairly maligned company know talent when they see it, and they’re not afraid to publish it. Kudos to them.

— Jim Johnson

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Artist

#1

February, 2003
Cover Price: $9.95
2 copies available from $4.98

Bruce Mutard