World Comic Book Review

26th March 2024

JUNCTION JONES AND THE CORDUROY CONSPIRACY #1 (review) —”Sooo … we’re cool?”

Script: TC Pescatore

Art: Locogonzales

Scout Comics 2023

YEAH THESE THINGS HAPPEN. Some dark night, you take a wrong turn down a long alley with no outlet, except way at the far end there’s a light and a low hum, if only you can reach it patching your way through puddles and shadows, and whatever lurks there. Yet, what lurks there might be the reason you came out tonight. This could be the right alley after all.

The whole plot to the new JUNCTION JONES #1 is plainly laid out on the cover. Start there and imagine a pair of private investigators caught in the headlights of an approaching armed patrol. What follows is one long joke, a very long joke, and a punchline.

The note taped on the street door on the grimy street where it all begins, says Jones and M. Niblets are “out on official business.” Looks normal, maybe a hundred years ago, or maybe today, or wait, is that a robot maid carrying groceries? And that guy talks in a strange script. An alien? This is the future? Same place as today, it appears, just older.

The black-and-white artwork by Locogonzales is beautifully done, distinct in proportions and details, yet wavy and cartoonish, too, like celluloid set out in the sun. Everything is overlaid in crisp gray tones, easily transposed in the imagination, or later editions, into color. The pace of shifting perspectives down the page makes the opening absorbing, and the long joke, when it comes, and comes, appropriately tense.

Jones has a gift of gab, or maybe that’s scripter TC Pescatore, who kept me in one swoop through to the end, when (only spoiler you get) the pair walk wonderingly back out of the alley. A newspaper clipping photocopied on a back page tells of a murder investigated by Sheriff Brigham Jones and Deputy Jeremiah Myers in Wells, Nevada, in October 1938. The true-life detail reflects the true-life tone of the drama, aiming to show how living with robots, and avatars, and aliens, looks much like the place today, and yesterday, just older.