Demo
w: Brian Wood; a: Becky Cloonan
32 pages, B&W
12 issue monthly series
$2.95 each
(UPDATE: After you finish reading the review, read a follow-up email from author Brian Wood, and a mea culpa from yours truly, here.)
I’ve long argued that superheroic (and supervillainous) behavior is not nearly as outlandish as its detractors make it out to be. Certainly there are countless superhero conventions that make little or no sense if viewed on their own, but the combination of heroism or criminality with self-conscious pageantry is as common as your local volunteer firehouse and as potentially earth-shaking as your local al Qaeda cell. I think blogger Jim Henley articulated this best when he said that people are exactly as outlandish as they feel they can afford to be.
So what about those who can’t afford to be?
Demo, an ongoing anthology series by writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan, is an investigation of superpowers freed of the narrative and behavioral constraints of traditional heroism and villainy. Each stand-alone issue follows a different young, superpowered person through a familiar struggle–the need to escape your parents, say, or coming to terms with the death of one of them, or falling hard for a beautiful acquaintance. In each case, the protagonist’s superpower plays a unique role in spurring the crisis in question.
But unlike most supercomics, Demo‘s young, lower- or middle-class, supernaturally gifted protagonists are not moving inexorably toward teamwork or confrontation with similarly powered characters of either similar or opposing viewpoints. They aren’t assuming secret identities, donning gaudy costumes, assembling a rogue’s gallery, training sidekicks, avenging their slain parents, exploring brave new worlds, or anything like that at all. They’re just a bunch of kids like any other, but with an extra set of problems–superproblems, if you will.
You simply have to hand it to Wood for doing what 50,000,000 superhero fans on the internet have been unable to do, which is to show that there really is nothing wrong at all with utilizing the fantastic basics of the superhero genre to tell a serious story. The ability to destroy objects with your mind, to control others with a mere word, to posess super strength, to change shape–strip these concepts of the extraneous crap that’s been layered onto them for several generations of corporately-mandated change-free comics, and what emerges butterfly-like from that chrysalis is a potentially fascinating way to examine the human spirit.
It’s not just the codenames and costumes that Wood wisely jettisons, though–fundamentally, it’s the need to resolve conflict (both textual and subtextual) through violent confrontations. Even the best Marvel superhero books–hell, even ones that were explicitly designed to supplant the traditional violent-plot-resolution paradigm, like Morrison’s New X-Men–pretty much have to end with a slugfest. Not so Demo. These stories end–and that’s not really the right word for it, any more than our own stories “end”–with characters sitting in bars without drinking, or walking around the city, or walking away. Wood’s ability to bypass the traditional limits of this genre make for a surprisingly liberating reading experience.
What about the stories themselves? So far, that’s the least compelling area for me. They tend to be pretty standard teenage-wasteland tales of the type handled with greater aplomb and sophistication by the likes of Phoebe Gloeckner and Craig Thompson (and especially Charles Burns, whose stunning Black Hole has already done for the mutant trope what Wood is trying to do with more traditional superpowers). Along the way you get the kind of rote suburbia-bashing you’d expect out of Good Charlotte fans–in issue three, for example, our heroine runs down a list of reasons she hates her hometown: “Sun. Manicured lawns. Golf courses. Automobiles. White people.” Um, okay, kid–just don’t be late for study hall. And while this shallow life-sux sentiment would be perfectly acceptable for the narrator to adopt, seeing how she is, of course, fictional, 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.)
But there are many moments that compensate for the simplisme. Each issue’s end is refreshingly ambiguous, refusing to serve up platitudes of either the positive or negative variety. Issue four was perhaps the most memorable in this regard: After reading those last few pages, I remember sincerely wondering what expression would be on the face of the main character in the final panel. Issue five expands that intriguing amibiguity to story length, with a seemingly strong protagonist revealed to be dangerously weak by story’s end. There’s a definite sense that the cumulative power of each new issue is greater than that of the last, which come to think of it is probably a better reason to keep buying the book than any I could offer you.
But the book’s other selling point is Cloonan’s powerful black-and-white art, which looks gorgeous on the high-quality paper stock Ait/PlanetLar has invested in for the series. Like a less manic, more manga-fied Paul Pope, her simple scratchy lines evoke the sullen emotions of the characters while imbuing them with an alluring gutter glamor. Moreover, the wide-open spaces and zipatone rampages of issue two show that she’s got many a trick up her sleeve. Occasional lapes aside (simplicity is her strength, but sometimes panels are so simple it looks like she was unable to draw them any other way), it’s difficult to imagine an artist better suited for this project.
(On a side note, it’s worth pointing out that Marvel is sort of running a parallel course to Demo with a series called NYX–which, of course, was once Wood’s to write, before a falling-out the nature of which I’m unsure of caused his departure from the book and led him to try out his ideas for the series in Demo instead. Marvel also did something similar with the first issue of its short-lived regular-joe mutant series Muties. In both cases there’s much more of a reliance on traditional melodrama–you can bet something totally awful happens, usually on a splash page at the end of the issue–and in NYX’s case there’s the format-driven need for decompression and cliffhangers. Demo‘s “one issue, one story, we’re done” take is like a breath of fresh air, and serves the material very well–we’re free to imagine what becomes of each set of characters, and Wood’s writing is open-ended and expansive enough to serve as a compelling invitation to do so. (Of course, one-shots or no, they really ought to be collected in a trade, which at this point is the, well, “format of record” for the medium. And my take is that this is a series worth remembering.)
There’s still seven issues to go, but I think I’ve hit upon the key to understanding Demo–it’s that the title means “people” in Greek. This is a series about superpowers only insofar as it’s using the basic conventions of the genre as a shortcut to the minds and hearts of the people who posess those powers. Quite simply, it’s a brilliant idea–hell, in this industry, it’s quite nearly a revolutionary one–one that I hope many more creators will utilize. And if it doesn’t put paid to the notion that you can’t do anything interesting with superheroes, nothing will.