The Juniper Lodge

This collects multiple stories from creator Dustin Weaver’s “Paklis” anthology, with some co-writing work from D.J. Bryant and Jeremy Barlow.  I could give you individual write-ups of “They’ll Bury You Where You Stand!,” “Mushroom Bodies,” “An Empty Shell in the Ocean,” “Defects in the Hand-Drawn Line,” and the title story but they can all be summed up in the same way:  Beautifully illustrated tales of surrealism and indigestible weirdness that never got their hooks into me.  To be fair, “The Juniper Lodge” itself does generate some appealingly Lynchian surrealism and it, like every other story in this collection ends, without really going anywhere.

The one story that did stick with me is a two-page autobiographical piece Weaver put in the “Extras” section of this collection called “Quitting Comics.”  It details how he got into comics during the Image Boom of the 90’s, how he eventually signed an exclusive contract with Marvel to do twelve issues of “S.H.I.E.L.D.” with Jonathan Hickman, how that turned into more work for the publisher, and his eventual escape to do “Paklis.”  Weaver’s desire to do something other than the same old superhero is understandable, even admirable, and it’s clear that he’s proud of what he was able to do with this anthology.

Yet I could only read “Quitting Comics” and think, all of the stuff I’ve really enjoyed from him has been written by other writers.  Primarily Hickman, who he did a couple of issues of “Avengers” and parts of “Infinity” with, and Kieron Gillen, who illustrated a memorably Sinister issue of “Uncanny X-Men.”  This, combined with what I had just read, left me thinking that “1949’s” real issue wasn’t having too little space to tell its story, but that it was representing the upper limit of its writer’s capabilities.  I’m still all for seeing Weaver continue to create comics, just so long as they’re written by Hickman, Gillen, or other writers on their level.