Morrie “Muddy” Davis’ unit in Vietnam gets a surprise addition: a robot soldier called Joe. After a deadly ambush, Muddy is sent home from the war and told by creepy government men that “Joe” wasn’t real and to never talk about him. It’s now nearly 50 years later and Muddy is retiring his syndicated newspaper strip “Junkyard Joe” - and then Joe himself shows up on his doorstep! As Muddy realises what he experienced in the jungle as a young man really did happen, he also finds out the men who made Joe want him back - and will kill anyone who stands in their way…
Following Geiger, Junkyard Joe is the second book in Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s The Unnamed series, even though, glancing at the timeline at the back of this book, all of the characters have names… Welcome back to Stupid Comics! And like Geiger, Junkyard Joe is not very good and that’s entirely down to Johns’ writing.
Here’s the biggest flaw in the story: why would anyone design a robot for war that has the capacity to develop both PTSD and anti-war sentiments?! That’s an insane oversight.
We’re also told that Muddy’s strip is on the same level as Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. A strip from both is reprinted alongside one of Muddy’s and it really suffers from the comparison because “Junkyard Joe” isn’t just nowhere near as good as Schulz/Watterson’s comics, but it also doesn’t seem like something that would have the same appeal. It’s about a robot and soldiers in perpetual boot camp - why would that appeal to kids?
Johns often writes the kind of guff you see in numerous bland CW shows and he does it again here, cramming Junkyard Joe with trite, unimaginative cliches. You’ve got the one-dimensional baddies, one of whom is wearing a WW2 German helmet to really underline that he’s a baddie, who also does the usual “villain explaining his plan at the end in a lengthy monologue”. They also have this amazing plan to shoot cops in broad daylight - it’s actually quite smart if everyone else is as dumb as that plan because they get away with it until the plot needs them to be caught!
Muddy and his wife are similarly one-dimensional in how saintly good they are, ie. stereotypical sympathetic hero protagonists. Muddy’s new neighbours are Generic Family from Central Casting complete with the plucky young boy, the vain older sister, the grieving (but hot) widowed dad, and the “geeky” girl (because she wears glasses).
This family… It’s like Johns is replicating the same corny family drama we’ve seen in a thousand other forms of media. The unconvincing and forced “emotional” conflict where the kids yell at their dad about their dead mother, and the dad is the brave widower trying to do right by his kids. It’s cornball as all hell. It’s the kind of lazy family portrait you’d see in ‘80s movies - the book as a whole comes off like a watered-down ‘80s movie-style story; Uncle Buck meets ET.
The family characters are also pointless. The dad is in IT and moved to this small town for the job, so I thought this part of the story would tie into the company that made Joe - the dad works in the IT department of the company that made Joe - and that’s why this family is included in the story. But no, there’s really no reason for this family to be in the story besides being Muddy’s neighbours.
Gary Frank’s art is fantastic as it always is, it’s just a shame he’s drawing stuff that’s unremarkable in their ubiquity - the mundane landscape of a small rural town or the popularised version of Vietnam. I also liked how he adapted his usually highly detailed/complex art to suit the simplified style newspaper comics are drawn in.
Junkyard Joe is a junk addition to the underwhelming Geiger-verse series. Unless you can stomach a ton of cheese, I’d steer clear of this one.
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