Comics: Local

[ceri]

Local
Written by Brian Wood, illustrated by Ryan Kelly
Published by Oni Press, hardcover, $29.99

This is a set of twelve single-issue stories that add up to something larger.

At the heart of Local is Megan McKeenan, whom we meet right on the edge of adulthood. She might be a bit under 18, or a bit over; what matters for the story is that she's in that realm where independence is possible but still very hard. You can read the entire first chapter/story, "Ten Thousand Thoughts Per Second", at Oni Press' site, a page at a time, and I recommend it. It took me a few pages to realize just what was going on, and then I fell in love with it. I've been there so often and had such a hard time describing it.

From there we follow Megan all across North America and through most of a decade. In some chapters she's front and center, like her heartbreaking experience trying to cycle through identities while working at a movie theater in Halifax. In others, she's present only in the most marginal way, like the one about the members of a band in Richmond, VA, retiring after 15 years together, their individual and shared experiences and recollections woven together. We see her younger brother trying a different path to establishing his independence and failing catastrophically at it, and we get looks back into the past, and especially into what Megan's rebellions mean to her mother and why her mother's willing to support them.

After the first couple stories, I had some real suspicion that this was going to be a glamorization of the young drifter's wonderful life. It isn't. The chapters focusing on Megan's own failings and repeated self-sabotage are compassionate but not condoning in the slightest—there's no question but that Wood and Kelly can sympathize without excusing. And the last chapter reminded me very much of the experience of my real-life friend who came closest to this kind of existence. As he did, Megan finds that she can take a lot of value from what she went through but still want not to keep doing it forever, and prepare for something else.

One of the chapters really didn't quite work for me. It involves a suicidal hostage-taker, and while one of my above-mentioned friend's friends has twice been in such situations, they are rare and it just felt like a bit melodramatic intrusion into the flow of the whole. But even it is well-done, and isn't any weirder than real life actually is sometimes. And the rest is so solid, and the whole so satisfying, that I have no problem recommending this as an example of what the marriage of prose and illustration can do for telling stories about the real world as well as about fantastic ones.