Third Places and Negative Spaces: The World of “Meat4Burgers”
"Meat4Burgers: Welcome to Burgertory," by Beck Kubrick and Christof Bogacs, is an uncanny look at a fast food job.
Draining. Exhausting. Soul-sucking. These are terms one might use to describe an encounter with an eldritch being; they’re also all ways to describe working an especially atrocious job. There’s a whole school of storytelling that makes these metaphors a lot more literal, including a number of recent books where workplace stresses turn speculative. There’s also a similar approach in which an awful, numbing job is a kind of afterlife or purgatory: consider Emily Schultz’s memorably surreal novel Heaven is Small, for instance.
It’s this category that Meat4Burgers: Welcome to Burgertory falls. Beck Kubrick and Christof Bogacs co-wrote it and Kubrick illustrated the main storyline, and this collection abounds with shorter pieces from a host of guest contributors. The characters in this are all employees at a fast food restaurant with a supernatural twist — but in a very different way from, say, Trve Kvlt, a terrific book in its own right that would make an excellent double bill with this one.
It begins, as these stories often do, with an arrival. In this case, it’s protagonist Trace, who appears in the back room of a fast food establishment with no knowledge of how they got there or what their name is. “Trace” is the name on an employee nametag that they’re given after arriving; as soon becomes clear, they aren’t the first employee to wear it. And, presumably, the same is true for all of Trace’s co-workers.
Among the qualities that make Meat4Burgers unsettling is the way that Kubrick and Bogacs repurpose workplace lingo to ominous ends. “It’s the manager. He’s coming for a performance review,” for instance, would be unnerving in most situations; here, though, with the restaurant in a kind of purgatory — where leaving the building threatens an even worse fate — and that’s before we get into what the customers demand of them.
Kubrick’s art finds a good middle ground between cartoonish and realistic; the details of the location are appropriately dingy. After all, it wouldn’t be a proper purgatory if this was a gleaming, brand-new establishment. The vibe is somewhere around “this establishment was built in 1983 and hasn’t been renovated since,” which seems appropriate.
That relative groundedness pays off very well when Trace has to interact with their first customer, which takes on a metaphysical quality. The customer — a human-shaped figure in coat and hat — gradually becomes more shadowy; the shadows become negative space, and then we see Trace suspended within that space. It’s a great way to evoke a fundamentally alien metaphysical experience, and to illustrate the full range of how bizarre Trace’s experiences are.
It isn’t the only place where Kubrick’s art gets a subtle place to shine. There’s also the matter of Val-U-Vincent, the store’s mascot, whose costume may have uncanny properties of its own. What’s notable here is the style in which the Vincent costume is drawn, which evokes the illustrations of Ron Regé, Jr. — an apparent homage that adds another layer of style to this particular narrative.
Welcome to Burgertory finds a good balance between telling a self-contained story and setting up bigger questions for Kubrick and Bogacs to address later on. (Kubrick’s website describes this as an ongoing series.) The premise — what if your fast food job was so bad it became the stuff of horror — has its comic elements, but Kubrick and Bogacs bring its nightmarish elements to the foreground quickly and efficiently. Hell might or might not be other people, but purgatory has a deep-fryer on the premises.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
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