Joshua Hale Fialkov

On their way to bury a time capsule, five friends—Grady, Heidi, Natasha, Daniel, and Billy—uncover a metal bunker buried deep in the woods. Inside, they find letters addressed to each of them... from their future selves. Told they will destroy the world in the very near future, the friends find, over the next few days, growing further and further apart. Though they've been warned against making the wrong choices, how do they know what the right ones are? Can the future really be changed, or will an even darker fate engulf the world? This trade collects the first four issues of the ongoing series that Ed Brubaker (CRIMINAL, FATALE, VELVET) calls, “expertly done.”

The Bunker

Jeff James

In The Bunker, five friends decide to bury a time capsule in the woods, only to find the titular bunker when they start digging. Once inside the bunker, they discover letters from their future selves, who somehow sent a bunker full of evidence back in time to warn their younger selves about the impending apocalypse they will have a part in causing. It turns out this innocuous-looking group of young people includes a future president, a soon-to-be brilliant scientist and several other eventual movers-and-shakers. Heavy stuff for a bunch of recent college grads, no?

When I started reading The Bunker, it occurred to me to wonder whether I’d ever read a graphic novel with art I hated despite enjoying the story. I’m honestly not sure I ever have. Probably the only situation where I continued enjoying a book in spite of the art is when the artist changed for an issue of a comic I was already invested in reading. In any case, I really did not like the art in The Bunker, and the story didn’t do anything to win me over.

My biggest problem with this book is a serious lack of characterization thanks to an indistinct art style and some fairly underdeveloped writing. The art is so stylized that it becomes very hard to tell the difference between the extremely generic characters. The main visual distinction is that some of the characters wear glasses and some don’t, and one guy is bigger than the others. We get a bit of back-story here and there, but the author spends the most time on one of the girls, who remembers being raped by her uncle when she was young – i.e. the most cliché, heavy-handed way to make a story about a woman feel Serious and Real.

As for the dialogue, it’s oftentimes the case that every other word the characters say is “fuck”, and everyone speaks with essentially the same voice. One character does make a few unfunny and off-color jokes in the first issue… but then things get all serious and he stops behaving that way. After the bunker and its predictions come into play, this turns into a fairly serious-minded tale of doom-and-gloom.

Ultimately, The Bunker just felt like a weird kind of wish-fulfillment. Instead of discovering a more personal and believable secret from their future selves, the characters find out that each of them is an incredibly important world-destroyer and of course that they were able to figure out how to send a huge bunker back in time. I think it’s possible to tell an interesting story about receiving notes from your future self, but this doesn’t feel like the way to do it, especially because the details strain credibility in so many ways.

The worst part? This first volume is almost all setup and very little plot. Not much of substance happens after the characters find the bunker – they freak out and fight with each other and then eventually get around to dealing with one of their predicted catastrophes. Definitely a disappointment.

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Net Galley.

Jessica Nottingham

My quest to find a new graphic novel series to love continues! This time I decided to give The Bunker: Volume 1 a shot at catching my interest. See, the premise is what struck me. 5 friends who find letters from their future selves in a mysterious bunker. Letters that promise them they can change the fate of the world. They'd chosen wrong the first time, and the entire population of Earth had suffered. I wondered, would they do the "right" thing? I love stories where there's a thin line between right and wrong. I was so hoping for one of those.
 
I almost gave this up after reading the first page, simply because the dialogue bubbles in the first issue are horribly rendered for digital reading. I genuinely hope they fix this if they're going to sell digital copies but, as I had an ARC, I soldiered on. What was laid out before me was a story that slowly pieced itself together. The story line is a little choppy, which I guess is to be expected if you're looking at a series of events from 5 different points of view. Still, it doesn't make for the easiest read in the world. I constantly had to reorient myself to understand whose head I was in.
 
Which brings me to another issue I had, and that was the illustrations. I didn't dislike them entirely, but I was overly impressed either. The characters are inked onto the page in a way that makes them look gritty and unfinished. Almost as if they are in constant fluctuation. If this was the effect the illustrator was going for, they succeeded. The problem is that it makes the characters rather hard to distinguish between. My saving grace was that one man and one woman have glasses, and one of the other male characters is on the larger side. Again, I had to stop and reorient myself to who I was following in the panels each time they swapped.
 
There are, of course, underlying stories to each of these characters. Since this volume only compiles the first 4 issues, the reader only skims the surface of a few of them. I think this was my favorite part of The Bunker: Volume 1. I enjoyed getting to know each of these characters on a more visceral level, and I have a definite feeling that their backgrounds are going to be very important in the issues to come. This story is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a science fiction romp. Thus I can admit, I'm still intrigued.
 
So I'll happily give three stars to this first volume, and promise to be back for more. I'm hoping all the problems are resolved in the volumes to come, and that I can add this series to my "must haves" list.

The Bunker

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