THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID COMICS – Issue #3.

by Jon Abrams | Tue, 02/09/2010 - 00:01

Location

DC Comics
1700 Broadway
New York, NY
United States

 

Today’s comic is Demo #1, released last week by Vertigo Comics (them again!). Demo is a series written by Brian Wood and drawn by Becky Cloonan. It’s a black-and-white series that was originally published independently and has now been picked up by Vertigo, to be both reprinted as a collection and relaunched as a new series. I will definitely be going back to read the previous collection, because I liked this new issue so much.
 
The overarching concept behind Demo is that these are short stories (one issue apiece) that focus on various, seemingly random young people who suddenly develop amazing abilities. If that sounds a little like X-Men to you, then great! – whatever it takes for you to check this book out. But there aren’t any eye-lasers or metal claws here. Not to knock superheroics, because that’s one of the things that comics do best, but Demo is a rawer and more emotionally sophisticated look at what it would be like to suddenly develop supernatural powers that can’t be easily explained or controlled.
 
In the new Demo #1, titled “The Waking Life Of Angels,” a young woman named Joan is having a terrible time getting a decent night’s sleep. When she closes her eyes, she’s visited by a dream – a dream in bits and pieces – which seems to be a glimpse into a future where someone is about to fall from a great height. Joan gets it in her head to save this person, and using the bits and pieces of information she has so far, she sets out on a quest to do just that.
 
It’s a relatively simple set-up that gains depth and weight with the well-matched contributions of the two creators. Brian Wood, whose diverse and thoughtful work I have seen before in DMZ and Northlanders (don’t worry, I’ll write those up soon) has a strong sense of emotional detail, and as a comics writer specifically, he has a great ability to direct his artists to their most affecting performances. (It’s been explained to me, and I’ve been learning, that a huge part of effective comic book writing is the ability to communicate goals and concepts to the rest of the team.) As a result, Becky Cloonan does some incredibly affecting work here. Her drawing style here is very simple, clear, and immediate, and that’s why it’s so good at conveying the emotions present in the story. The key to great black-and-white art is the ability to use blacks and whites well – which sounds obvious, but it isn’t at all. The ink is perfectly deployed in this comic – the real world has texture and so do the dreams; the characters have weight and also a kind of dreamy weightlessness. The art is sketchily beautiful, and the words complement it in all the right places (there are several wordless panels that are as memorable as any), all of which adds up to an ideal example of short-form storytelling.
 
Demo #1 costs $2.99, which these days is a very fair price tag for something of this much quality. In the back pages you also get a tag-team recounting of the project’s history from the two creators, a few pages of preliminary sketches and page layouts (particularly educational for aspiring artists), and a short preview of issue #2.
 
This one is highly recommended. (Spoiler warning: This column probably won’t feature too many things that I don’t recommend.) When I get a chance to read through the collected first series of Demo, I hope to write about that too.
 
 
 
THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID COMICS – Issue #3.
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