You know, I like Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan’s Demo quite a bit. It’s easily some of the most compelling work being made in its genre today. But I’m not sure you can tell that from my review of the series. Basically, I had a few concerns about the creators’ approach to teen angst and the politics thereof, but I couldn’t figure out a way to express them without coming across as unnecessarily snide and condemnatory. So I was happy to get an email from Brian Wood in which he addressed some of those concerns, and even happier that he agreed to let me post the message here, as a corrective to my earlier take on the series. Take a look:
Thanks for the Demo writeup! It’s really gratifying that so many people respond to the book.
A couple nitpicky comments, though, if you would indulge me. 🙂
“I’m not really convinced that Wood & Cloonan’s outlook on American life is any more complex: Both tend to end each issue with a list of all the awesome punkrawk music they’ve been listening to, and Wood’s politics, as expressed in his Channel Zero books, are somewhat infamously nuance-free.
(I’m certainly dreading his examination of a soldier’s life in Demo #7.)”
You of course know that my Channel Zero was written 7 years ago, when I was pretty young and not really very nuance-free in ANY aspect of my work. Besides, if you concede that the line of dialogue you quote from Demo #3 makes sense coming from the narrator of the story, why not the same from Channel Zero’s characters? It’s not an autobiographical book, and no more expresses my worldview than anything else. And I would even go so far as to say it’s not MEANT to be a nuanced work, since it deals with a rookie political thinker struggling in a very black-and-white, right or wrong world.
I don