Comics: Demo

Demo
Written by Brian Wood, illustrated by Becky Cloonan
12 issues collected into one trade paperback, published by AIT/Planet Lar, $19.99

This is hard to review. As with Local, Demo consists of 12 independent stories, and in this case there's no linking narrative—this is purely a mosaic of a world. The problem for me is that of the dozen stories, I like about half of them a lot, find most of the others okay, am disappointed by a few, and am enraged and disgusted by the last to the point where I can't in good conscience recommend buying this to anyone. So I'll break it out into pieces.

The world in which some people are developing unprecedented powers and abilities and others have had them in secret for some time is a classic in several genres and media: superhero comics, manga and anime about psi powers and other secret forces, and on and on. It's great stuff, because you can say all kinds of things about the real world and about your influences (both what inspires you and what repels you) in the arrangement of stuff in your own take. Good ones do, among other things, what Samuel Delany calls the retroactive invention of genre. By making us see scattered sources as adding up to something and coming together, they change how we view our own literary and artistic pasts as well as telling good stories of their own. I love this stuff and am always up for interesting new riffs, and since I enjoyed Local so much, I thought I'd roll right on to the thing Wood had done right before.

Fairly early on, I became both fascinated by the kinds of stories he was telling and annoyed at some of their restrictions. Good part first.

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