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Hey, it's easier to break your back once than walk back and forth with light loads...
 (From junkRIOT. Click on image to see full-sized image.)
Oh come on, like none of you have ever done this? I mean, you're done with your grocery shopping and you've a group of shopping bags just looking up at you with those pre-made plastic loops just looking so convenient and easy... and so you switch half of them to one hand and the rest to the other and struggle to the door while the circulation on your fingers is cut off bit by bit. (Of course, I'm old enough to remember when they didn't have plastic and you'd try to bring in four bags in one go, trying to grab the paper in such a way it wouldn't rip but bring in as much as you could to reduce the number of trips you had to take.)
It might be a guy thing though. I mean, I don't see many women struggling with a dozen bags and a door key (unless they're also juggling a kid or two, and let me tell you, those women definitely are able to do more than me, easily). But I guess that describes Chris, the main male lead of junkRIOT. He's fairly ordinary, all in all.
I'll say this. Chris is possibly the most likeable character so far of our three main characters, and is pretty central to the comic as a whole. Lina... well, Lina is Chris's best friend, and is a bit protective of him, but recently she lied about her and Chris's relationship status to another girl, Alice. And on the whole it seemed to be to protect him from Alice, whom he had a relationship with a couple years ago, until the death of a friend apparently led to them breaking up. I say apparently as we've not yet had the full flashback story telling of what happened to Brad, or how he died. *smile*
Alice seems to have dropped out of Chris and Lina's life after that, until graduation... and then showing up on his doorstep after losing her apartment. And on the surface, sure, it seems kind of crumby to show up on an ex-boyfriend's doorstep and begging for someplace to stay, even if only for a week, when you've not even talked to them or anything for two years before that.
Still, we don't really know enough about Alice's past to cast stones. To be honest... for some reason she reminds me of Gwen Stacy from Marvel's Ultimate Spiderman series (and once again I'll mutter a quiet curse to the writers and editors of Marvel Comics for taking a decent and viable character and killing her just for shock value - no doubt one of the reasons Marvel and DC are declining into ruin with their comic books).
What we've seen of Alice seems to suggest she's a nice enough girl, at that. I can understand why she might have dropped out of Chris and Lina's life after the death of a friend (in the cast page it states Brad's death shattered his friends and family's lives). Maybe every time she looked on Chris, she remembered what happened with Brad. Maybe every time she spent time with Lina, all she could think of was a friend who was no longer there.
It may have hurt less to abandon friendships than to live with the constant reminder of one who was no longer with them. And we all react differently when someone we love (be it a friend or family) dies.
No doubt we'll learn what happened to Brad. We'll eventually walk that dark path which broke up friends and has haunted Chris ever since. And it's something many of us can relate to. While I don't recall anyone in my school dying of drunk driving or the like while I was a student, we hear of these incidents in the news entirely too often. It hangs over our heads... and as kids we just shrug it off and pretend it can't happen to us, until it does.
And that is what interests me about junkRIOT. There is a bigger story here, one that promises to examine three (no, four, let's be honest here, Brad is still a part of the story even if he's not there in the flesh) people and the bonds that formed between them... and what happened to break them apart.
Going back to Lina, I understand a little why she might be setting herself between Chris and Lina. She wants to protect a dear friend from added heartbreak. I just have issue with how she went about and did that.
Anyway, things are looking rather interesting. Not only do we have the lies that Lina told Alice looming between them (and how long before those lies are revealed? I suspect it'll be sooner rather than later), but the unresolved feelings between Alice and Chris (I do wonder how they broke up; no doubt we'll observe that in flashback as well. *chuckle* Hey, what would we storytellers do without flashbacks? Meh, probably create flashbacks in that case. *grin*)
My only real gripe is the story is taking too long to tell. Part of it is the update schedule, which currently is Tuesdays and Fridays. Maybe in time Mary Mevis will manage a 3x a week update schedule, though considering the amount of detail Mary puts into each update, I sort of doubt it. Still, the best of stories take time to tell, and I don't see Mary as the type who'll rush this one.
It'll be worth the wait.
Robert A. Howard
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