Juvenile #1 // Review
The terrorist attacks of Red Christmas were horrific. millions were killed in hust a few hours. The chemical weapons used in the attack brought with them a horrible affliction: the juvenile virus. Infected kids could survive, but only with the right surgeries and the right cocktail of chemicals. Welcome to El Castillo--a center for treatment of teenagers. Welcome to the world of Juvenile #1. Writer/artist Jesus Orellana puts together a cleverly-structured, little dystopia for the page that looks remarkably promising. Orellana is working on a very small canvas with some very big concepts in the first issue of a five-part series.
There’s a new kid arriving at El Castillo. He’s a bit of a mystery from the outside. No telling what he did, but rumor has it that he killed a guard trying to escape from the last facility that he had been in. So maybe everyone’s going to want to stay away from him. Or maybe people are just going to think that he’s a little weird. (That’s possible too.) It’s not exactly like he’ll be alone in the shadows of the facility. There’s this girl...name’s Sara. She’s been spending a lot of time on the boy’s end of the facility, but she really wants to make cure that her brother is okay and the girls don’t exactly like her anyway. She might just get a little bit too close to him and find out something strange…
Orellana frames the basic premise of the series with impressive concision. The war. The disease. The facility. The community. The central two characters in the facility. It all fits together so well. The basic elements of the story and the world in which it exists are laid-out in a way that solidly avoids any long-winded exposition. It cuts right to the heart of the central conflict of the series while delivering all of the necessary basic details about it.
It all feels so very well-constructed on so many levels. And the themes that will be covered over the course of the five-issue series seem to be remarkably well-articulated from the first issue onward, so it’s really only a matter of following the lines of tension until they hit their inevitable conclusion at the end of the series. Orellana captures much of the tension of the drama with poise and subtlety that seems to work on quite a few different levels at once.
Orellana has developed a story that would work across multiple different formats. The clean architectural rendering of the facility along with the clever presentation of the drama make it all feel remarkably well-designed from the ground up. Looking at multiple point of view shots and close-ups in and around the facility, it would be difficult to imagine Orellana NOT having a detailed floorplan and blueprint of the place down to the last light fixture and power outlet. The series feels like it is remarkably well-planned from the very first panel of the first issue.
