PROGRAM NOTES
For the record, I’m shamelessly imitating (rather crudely, and perhaps poorly) a style you can find here at Bubblegum Aesthetics, and I’m stealing terminology from Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends. Just so we’re clear. Consider this as much a review as an experiment in style. And a blog is such a perfect place for experiments in writing, isn’t it?
HARMONY
As the name might suggest, Local is a book obsessed with place. The artist, Ryan Kelly, draws with an almost painful attention to detail. The set pieces and backgrounds are echoes of the real location. The CDs in the bookcase are of local bands; the street corners are accurate reproductions, complete with the neighborhood café and grocery store.
Local is made up of twelve issues, each with its own location. One could argue that each issue is self-contained. And, in a certain sense, each issue is separate from the next. The geography of each place is radically different, and it is the geography--or, more accurately, the topography--of each place that provides the architecture for the story. The plot is thus forced to conform to the space: though the plot flows through each issue, it takes the shape of its container, its locale.
The stories take on an almost parasitical relationship to the place they are in. Each issue gorges on the essence of the place, and as Megan--the protagonist--wanders, imbibing the topography, she becomes more layered, more three-dimensional. The valleys of her life etched deeper, the peaks of her experiences forced upwards.
MELODY
Though Local differs from much of Brian Wood’s other work in that there are no political machinations (DMZ, Channel Zero, Northlanders, The Couriers, etc.), it has Wood’s trademark earnestness, worldly innocence, and attention to character. And those are necessary here. Local is, at its core, a coming-of-age tale: Megan grows from a 17ish girl to a 20-somthingish woman. Without a certain innocence and earnestness, a tale like Local would be either a farce or something other than a real coming-of-age story (think Kipling’s Kim).
And, remember, Wood knows how to write coming-of-age with heartbreaking grace. Matty in DMZ and Sven in Northlanders are both examples of this gift. Adding Megan to this list demonstrates Wood’s virtuosity: a privileged kid intern to a war journalist, an emotional teen-ager to a leader, and now, a restless girl to a knowing woman.
COUNTERPOINT
Local possesses the twin hallmarks of American literature: symbiotic relationship to place and the nomad, coming of age. In short, it possesses the vivaciousness of the borderlands. Wood picked places that are in flux, places of movement, of in-between-ness: Minneapolis’s Uptown, a lonely diner off the highway in Montana.
In more ways than one, Local is driven by that power of location, that power of the borderlands. After all, comics, itself, is a borderlands medium. It is found between high-art and lowbrow, between genre and literature, between text and image. And Local is a comic birthed in those borderlands. In this way, it is comics at its best, at its truest. Wood’s great feat is that he did this without slipping into the intentional self-awareness of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles or the wry irony of Bill Willingham's Fables.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Invisibles or Fables. They, too, demonstrate the power of comics as a genre, they simply do it in a much more traditional way than Local. After all, Local is in the mold, not of Blankets, Maus, or Persepolis, but of the pulp monthly, and the rules of the monthly comic are far more rigid, style and genre-wise than that of the “graphic novel”. Wood wrote a story that straddles the borderlands of comics as well as any superhero-retake (think Watchmen or Planetary) or genre work (think Scalped or Vinyl Underground), and he does it without irony or genre-pastiche.
IMPROVOSATIONS
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child; when I became an adult, I put away my childish things. For now we see as through a glass, darkly, but then we will see face to face.”
- 1 Corinthians 13
“The Mississippi served them as a magnificent image of the sordid Jordan.”
- Jorges Luis Borges, A Universal History of Iniquity: “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell”
CADENCE
The heart of Local is in the final issue. It is, to borrow from Louise Gluck, the magnet of the piece, and the key Megan carries with her throughout Local is like a piece of iron. The space in the last issue, the stillness of it is like that final tonic chord after the dissonant restlessness of the first eleven issues.
That harsh seventh of Local, that driving force, is loss and growth and beautiful immaturity in its essential shape. The final issue is a Megan’s acceptance of a borderlands’ existence. On Jupiter, a planet whose atmosphere is in constant motion, the red spot is a place at once moving and staying still. That quality of peaceful restlessness, of a home in the borderlands, is a fitting ending to Megan’s--and Wood’s--wandering exploration of the borderlands, the land of in-between.
|