Where "Emmy" played with silence, "Bad Blood" narrates your eyes off. Another of Demo's simple, direct metaphors, it's also one of the most histrionic (though not the most - that's "What You Wish For"), full of angst-filled young adults and monologues. Though much of Demo doesn't reach for subtlety, "Bad Blood" grabs a pool cue and starts swinging.
Samantha meets her half-brother Sean, after more than a decade of separation and sporadic contact, at their father's funeral. Her mother left their father when Samantha was very young, and she barely knew him. Her mother dead over a year, Samantha feels detached and angry. She fancies herself an outsider and a rebel - so much so that she tries to offend herself by pretending she wants to hook up with Sean (who else could she be trying to offend? It's an inner monologue). The issue is basically a conversation (or, rather, a series of speeches) in which Sean convinces Samantha that she shouldn't be so hard on the old man. Then Sean tries to kill Samantha by crashing his car into a tree. When she doesn't die, he reveals that the Hurley family is immortal and that their father isn't dead. Samantha now has the chance to build a relationship with her father, free to start again.
Wood & Cloonan foreground the theme of death and rebirth that has been present in both "NYC" and "Emmy," and will continue to show up throughout the stories in Demo. Rebirth, for Samantha, is almost literal but serves primarily to indicate a paradigm shift. She is now willing to see her father as a man, not as a role model or the head of a "normal" family. She also has a large tree branch sticking out of her chest, but I'm not sure that's of thematic significance all on its own.
"Bad Blood" is not the most metaphorically arresting of the pieces in Demo. Nearly the entire issue takes place in Sean's car and the only conflict in the issue is whether or not Samantha is going to be able to come to terms with her father. Well, not so much her father but the idea of him. The thrust of the story seems to be the conflict between family as a socially constructed arrangement or as a generative and formative series of relations. Samantha's oh-so-naughty attraction to Sean draws attention to this dynamic. "Sean Hurley. My half-brother. My hot fucking half-brother, who, if he wasn't my brother, I'd be all over in a heartbeat." But he is her brother, and so that thought goes unrepeated. Family means something to Samantha, something more than a legal and biological association.
As the story progresses, we see that family means to Samantha. She has fond memories of Sean helping her to ride a bike and Sean gives insight into the cycles of pain that the Hurleys have inflicted on one another. That so much of this story happens off-screen, as it were, allows for the unreliability of our characters to permeate their dialogue with enough ambiguity to dampen the otherwise overly sentimental image of a rebellious daughter willing to give her delinquent dad a second chance. There's also the bit about the tree branch sticking out of her chest.
"Bad Blood" seems determined to uphold a pretty traditional version of the family, all things considered. A family is a collection of individuals related by blood (ooh, that's in the title!). The fact that Sean and Samantha have been apart for a dozen years but are able to reconnect and play the standard older/younger sibling roles seems to reinforce that. But ambiguity manages to invade the story. The world seems tiny in "Bad Blood." No one comes to the funeral. Samantha is jonesing for a cigarette, which conveniently leads to the particular convenience store where Sean wrote their names in wet concrete. Sean drives them past places that Samantha remembers - places to which the reader is not given access. All we can see is the occasional glimpse of forest. But this all fits into the difficulty of how we understand our families. Denying readers the source of Samantha's nostalgia (except for the convenience store, which is just a building and not at all able to withstand the anger Samantha directs at it) prevents access to the private world of history and anecdotes that exists between her and Sean. This removes Samantha's story from the realm of the "every-teenager" (Marie in "NYC") and, rather, reflects on how shared experiences may be part of the various social bonds that creates a family. Those locations mean something to Samantha because of the memories, the shared history, the emotional ties. To anyone else, they're just places.
The lack of demonstrated experience allows for readers to question those familial bonds. We get tiny glimpses of their childhood. Samantha's memory of riding her bike is a pretty standard idyll, but Cloonan complicates the image. In one panel, we see Samantha looking determinedly at her handlebars, her left forearm sporting a bandage and her cheeks flushed. This girl is ready to tear it up. Sean is holding her bike steady, squinting and sweating a little anxiously. There is a real intimacy to this panel, a sense of responsibility and reliance. Sean is there to take care of Samantha, nervous at her intensity, and she takes that for granted. The next panel, however, puts space between them. They both look blankly happy, devoid of personality and oddly distant. It's a touching counterpoint and a sign that the fond memories that cement their relationship might be the distorted recollections of a lonely girl. There's also the rather awkward loose thread of Sean's admission that not all of Old Man Hurley's kids are immortal, and there's really no way to know until you try to kill them. So, basically, he took a 50/50 shot that his sister would survive a fatal car crash.
"Bad Blood" is another step in the increasing complexity of Demo. The story is far more playful than either "NYC" or "Emmy" while still managing to take up some of Wood's favorite themes (rebellious youth, the concept of family). It's not subtle, but it's a more open to ambiguity and alternate readings than the first two chapters. And, come on, we all know who Old Man Hurley really is.
Next week: "Stand Strong"
No comments:
Post a Comment