Demo - "NYC"

   The cover to Demo #1, without much subtlety, tells you what this particular issue - and the series as a whole to some extent - is about. The two teenagers on the cover stand out, both in garb and color, in an expanse of nearly identical figures. This isn't just an iconic representation of how teenagers feel, or want to feel, but the mission statement for Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's whole series. They want to tell stories of super-powered teenagers that aren't super-heroes, that aren't just the same Marvel/DC tights & fights. They want theirs to be a book about kids with strange abilities that stands out from all the rest.

   "NYC" lays that out pretty clearly on the first page. Marie - a good super-hero name, shared with the power-draining X-Woman Rogue - asks her boyfriend if he feels different. "You know, like that you have something special, an ability or physical trait of some kind that sets you apart from everyone else? But, like, you don't wanna tell anyone, in case your family and the rest of society gets freaked out and treats you weird, all prejudiced and shit? You know what I'm talking about? You know that feeling?" Her boyfriend, Mike, armed with the kind of spiky punk-rock hair that requires a near toxic combination of glue and eggs, tells her that he does. "Isn't it fucking great?" he adds, smiling like the cat that ate the bird.

   Wood and Cloonan open Demo with this reclamation of the potent metaphor of super-powers as the physical manifestation of an adolescent's emotional state. The scene doesn't make sense given the series of events that the story then tells us in flashback, but its primary function here isn't to provide an ending to a particular story but to prime the reader for what Demo will be about. These aren't teenagers who dress up in spandex and punch the similarly garbed embodiment of their anxieties or obstacles. Oh no. These are teenagers whose powers as often as not are the problem, but are also the thing that define them in opposition to the society against which they wish to stand. It's more like Wood and Cloonan are trying to continue what Marvel's creators did in the early sixties rather than write the next Image super-hero book with a twist on the Marvel formula (hero with a power that is also a curse, misunderstood by the world he/she has sworn to protect).

   The biggest problem I have with "NYC" is that is feels a bit too much like a project. Marie has powers that her bitchy, one-note mother forces her to suppress. Her powers are representative of how she feels: "I'm a freak," she tells Mike, and that's all we're really given. But, for the purpose of this story, we don't really need to know more. She's an everygirl, the likeness of anyone who has ever felt as if she's been forced to deny herself. Marie and Mike run away from home (we are not given an indication if Mike has a home to run away from, but one can assume), from metaphorical wasteland known as "The Suburbs," to New York. Marie's powers are dangerous and, when she stops taking the drugs that inhibit them and finally lets them out, she demolishes their car and puts a crater in a parking lot. Teenagers, clearly, will explode if they are forced to live in the suburbs and not be themselves.

   The whole issue is dripping with the kind of self-righteous individuality that teenagers feel, and as such it works. But Marie's powers are far too vague a metaphor and she has no personality beyond them. The "self" that she suppress amounts exclusively to the exploding brain waves her mother fears. The script leans heavily on the art to really convey that this is more than just a whiny teen: when she unleashes herself, Cloonan illustrates the scene as if it were a mirror shattered by a punch. It' s violent and scary and it more than justifies the various expressions that Cloonon draws passing across Mike's face as Marie sleeps beside him, spent by her outburst. However, Marie, and Mike to a greater extent, remain types - typical teenagers who feel suffocated by their parents and their suburban world, who feel dangerous because they have no desire to fit in to that world. They represent feelings but take on no feelings of their own. It's too big a metaphor with too little to support it. The issue boils down to "teenagers feel like they don't fit in." 

   Though difficult to differentiate between Wood and Cloonan's contributions to the script, Cloonan's artwork gives the story the ambiguity necessary to undercut the sometimes reductive metaphors. The establishing shot of the first page, before Marie asks Mike if he's ever felt different (why would she ask him this when he already knows she ran away because her parents' didn't like that she can blow up a car with her brain?), is of the pair, huddled together in a cramped panel heading toward the subway. Their heads are down, Marie's arm is across her chest as if she's clutching her stomach, in hunger or in pain, with their features barely sketched in. These two teenagers are having a rough time of it. They might have found themselves in the big city - Marie can blow things up with her brain waves to her heart's content, and Mike can finally grow his hair like Polar Boy from the Legion of Superheroes - but life didn't get easier. They sacrificed something to find themselves. The final panel, by contrast, is a full page splash of New York City. The city skyline rests at the bottom of the page while the clouds rise into an empty sky. The juxtaposition between this and the cramped opening panel only heightens the impact. Sure, this might be freedom, but the opportunities possible will quickly be foreclosed and all that Marie and Mike will be left with is their sense of identity, their rebellious posture, and each other.

   Throughout the series, Cloonan changes up her style, sometimes drawing in thick lines, sometimes delicately thin, but she leaves fingerprints floating in panels every once in a while. The tactility of her work is quite remarkable and, in the case of "NYC" manages to add layers to an otherwise unremarkable story. As the series progresses, Wood's scripts seem to rise to the challenge of her art, her use of empty space and her ability to capture haunting vulnerability. And the lack of color only pulls the best out of her. Whereas a subsequent book like American Virgin featured a lot of her fabulous figure work and expressivity, Demo really gives her the chance to make the art the showcase feature of the comics.

   Next week: "Emmy."