Comics: Demo

[ceri]

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.

Stories made in America about the emergence of superpowers tend to work in the shadows cast by existing superhero continuities. Mostly they're stories whose premises take as given some of the superhero conventions but not all. Thus, for instance, the still-well-worth-reading Squadron Supreme mini-series from twenty years back, in which a world's equivalent of the Avengers take on social problems from within the framework of costumed (though no longer masked) crimefighters and doers of good deeds. Or, for that matter, Watchmen, in which a bunch of people keep trying to act like superheroes despite the world not supporting their endeavors the way DC and Marvel's universes do. Revisionist and reconstructionist series like Astro City deepen the psychological foundations and enhance the reality and importance of normal people, while keeping the guts of the superhero conventions firmly in place.

I like all that, you understand. I like good superhero tales, though at this point I've read enough of them that it's hard (though not impossible) to show me new work that doesn't feel like basically more of the same. But I also like what Wood set out to do, which is to toss the entire superhero framework and start fresh in the here-and-now.

We get a teenage girl with powerful psychic powers who's being medicated to suppress them by doctors who don't seem to have a clue what's up with her and only the vaguest implications that there's some medical awareness of powers like hers turning up in anyone else, and a 20-something goth discovering just what her family legacy involving referring to her late father in the present tense is all about, and the sniper who never misses, and the girl whose words make others do what she says at any cost, and more. Nobody thinks of putting on a costume and fighting crime. Mostly the powers are a burden, and figuring out what to do with them that isn't soul- and life-destroying is hard work.

But the format left me feeling unsatisfied, again and again. We get epiphanies, mostly, but epiphanies are often not the most interesting or significant part of a person's life. It matters what we do with insights once we've had them. This really struck me with the sniper's story. He refuses to kill as ordered and gets a dishonorable discharge, and we see that it's very hard back home (he joined up out of real need for himself, his wife, and their child), and then he's back home and sure it'll work out...but will it? I'd have preferred to see a story about him two or five years later, with his moment of refusal the subject of a brief flashback or something. Most of the others have more sense of capturing what matters about the life in crisis, but still, this could really have used some shifts of emphasis.

There's an art problem, too. Cloonan's work has some real strengths, including very strong stark brush work that is absolutely perfect for some moods. But there's also a sketchy lack of detail that badly let down some pieces. Most particularly, one of the stories has a Chinese-American protagonist and I didn't know until several pages in and very explicit scenes of the prejudice aimed against him and his mother cued me in. Up until then, I just thought he was another dark-haired kid, and even knowing what he's supposed to be, it's hard to find much sign of it in his appearance. I grant that working in color makes such things easier, but black-and-white artists do manage it.

The series shifts in emphasis as it goes on, Wood's concept of it evolving. That's not a problem. Works do that, and serial ones do it a lot. I'm a big fan of making it up as you go along, and of changing direction when it seems like the old course has gone dry. In the case of Demo, the shift is to an increasingly naturalistic set of slices of life. There's at least one evocative piece that may (or may not) be pure memory and daydream, and works well precisely because earlier stories establish a context in which the gone might live on via mix tapes, and might not. Kurt Busiek has commented on loving the freedom to play with such things in the world of Astro City, where because so much is possible, the audience is at liberty to read things several ways, and Wood does some good stuff with it here. At least one story is clear-cut entirely naturalistic, and a couple more are up for grabs.

Then there's the last story. This is the one that enraged me. "Mon Dernier Joûr Avéc Toi (My Last Night With You)" is a nearly wordless piece in which two beautiful young people, clearly much in love, have a wonderful day and evening together and then jump off a roof hand in hand.

Let me tell you about why this enrages me.

You'll have noticed in earlier posts that I think a lot about mental well-being. More to the point, I struggle with it myself. Whatever will to keep living I have, I earn through my own sustained toil and persistence in the face of grave continuing physical and mental interior challenges and am given as a gift through the generous encouragement, advice, and support of those who love and like me. And from that starting point, I'm concerned about quality of life in general, with how many of the problems that afflict people like me and people unlike me thanks to insecurity, lack of confidence in their ability to manage life's challenges, lack of the resources that might help them do better, and all that stuff. Living is hard, but it's important (I believe) to keep trying even when at the moment it feels sterile and doomed, because change comes unexpectedly and without life there is no prospect of relief at all. Death ends hope.

So very little offends me so deeply as the glamorization of the surrender that tempts me nearly every day. It's bad to say to the world, "Oh, see, these beautiful people, la la la, and look, they get to go out so gorgeously, isn't that wonderful?" Nothing in the story provides the slightest reason to believe that in their world there'll be any different outcome than the one here—it doesn't use any of the world built up previously to illluminate the choice by changing the context and outcome. It's just another damned glamorization of early capitulation to death. There are people on my friends list from their teens to their forties for whom this is no more trivial or hypothetical than it often is for me: they've been tempted by the urge to do what these beautiful young things have done, and it's wrong to feed that ravening beast.

So in the end, no recommendation here for Demo.