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Released by: ONI Press
Released on: February 12th, 2014.
With a nice glancing nod to Lost this new series takes five soon-to-graduate college students and upends their friendship.
The group decides to bury a time capsule so they can commemorate these times in the far-off future. However, as soon as they start to dig the hole for it, they find The Bunker, a submerged shelter that has all their names on its door.
Opening this, they soon find notes written to all of them by what claims to be their future selves. And that future isn't pretty, as the story jumps between that time, the present, and some key dates in between. What becomes clear, though, is that all of them have some part to play in the destruction of humanity and nearly all life on Earth…
There's Daniel Adamson, who's going to figure out how to manufacture vegetation and solve the world food crisis, only to have that be the cause of a plague as well as the mechanism for its spread across the globe. There's Natasha Losi who becomes first-lady to other group member Grady Potts' future-president, but whereas she'll sacrifice anything and anyone to get what she wants Grady is constantly thinking of the bigger picture. It's his note that has the most information and he's the one responsible for the creation of The Bunker itself. Then there's Heidi Ryder who has some childhood trauma to work out and her brother Billy who's conspicuously absent from the future-self missives.
With this new information in hand the group soon dissolves to infighting at this news plus the “rearrangement†of their physical and sexual relationships. What works best about this series is the interplay between not just the characters but the different timeline versions of the characters. The story from Joshua Hale Fialkov balances this exceptionally well and the sparse but emotive quality to the artwork by Joe Infurnari clearly conveys how the coming devastation hits home on a personal note with the group's members.
Terse, haunting, visceral and identifiable The Bunker is future-sci at some of its best.
