Demo - "Breaking Up"

Moving away from the grim and maudlin "Mixtape," Wood & Cloonan tell a somewhat similar story in "Breaking Up." It's about, quite surprisingly given the title, the end of Gabe and Angie's relationship. The plot skips achronologically about their time together, highlighting the pettiness and selfishness that ultimately lead to the parting. Though it seems to have at least a structural similarity to the recent Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Zooey Deschanel movie 500 Days of Summer, "Breaking Up" is a bit more Slaughterhouse 5. Gabe is, somewhat, unstuck in time. He has perfect recollection. The narrative skipping around has actually been Gabe's memories and it seems as if he lives in multiple moments simultaneously. Or, perhaps more accurately, he doesn't live in continuous moments. He's a bit like Dr. Manhatten, without the nudity and super-powers. Not a bad comparison because he often seems, well, dickish. This is partly because he's reacting to things Angie once said to him - his memories of her, her contradictions, her capacity for cruelty. Like a lot of the female characters in Demo, Angie doesn't come out looking too great. But neither does Gabe, who's a mess of insecurities, thoughtlessness, and little emotional infidelities. For all that, though, the ending of the story is quite poignant. After a highlight-reel of Angie's worst moments, Gabe recalls the good ones, the ones that brought them together, the selfless acts, the intimacy. He asks Angie if they'll still talk. It's both sad and pathetic and Wood & Cloonan hint at the remarkable grace of forgetting.

Grace is, for some odd reason, the word that keeps popping into my mind with this story. Whereas "Mixtape" seemed so concerned with making a point about forgiveness that it couldn't quite articulate, "Breaking Up" shows how horrible memories can be. Yet, they are often all we have of some people. Gabe, like most of us, is drawn to selfish memories when he's hurt, moments where he was slighted or wronged or, in hindsight, he was lied to. Angie is, of course, not a liar for having said one thing and then having changed her mind about it later, but Gabe can't distinguish the past from the present. At different moments in the story, he actually responds to a comment Angie made in the past as if she had just said it.

Wood & Cloonan use memory and image here to great effect. This story is permeated with questions about the power of the image over the failure of textual language. That old comicbook battle: are we art or are we literature? I don't think that Wood & Cloonan are drawing a line in the sand or anything - this story is just one long reflection on how important, but ultimately ambiguous, all representations (like art or memory) must be.

Cloonan doesn't illustrate Gabe's memories from his point of view: he's visible in most of them, for one thing. That helps add a layer of ambiguity to the story. Though Gabe professes to have something akin to photographic memory, he actually defines it as an aural skill. "Well, not really a photographic memory per se, but I do have this spooky ability to remember things people say, forever." He locates his memory not in image, but in language.

But this isn't prose; it's a comicbook. As such, we get something that doesn't quite feel like an approximation of Gabe's powers in visual form. There is an heightened sense of representation, or interpretation. These are images, and so cannot be Gabe's perfect recollections. This demands a lot from Cloonan, who does outstanding work in this issue. She chronicles changes in hair-styles, weight loss and gain, time, a vast range of emotions, and what might be Gabe's receding hairline. [Not sure about that last one, but I'd like to think that was a little flair she added to Wood's script.] These images, we are reminded, are not Gabe's memories. They are the images constructed around the conversations he recalls. They are unfixed. There is only one single moment when the picture is from Gabe's point of view. It's Angie, above him, while they're having sex. It comes immediately after an image of Angie being comforted by Gabe, tears running down her face. They're both dressed in black, and she's holding a picture frame - someone she loves has died. The wordless montage at the end, in which both these images are featured, comes in response to Angie asking Gabe if he really wants to stay together. Whereas the images of the fights and the damage done is mainly about the things that Angie said (the promise to love Gabe forever, the mocking laughter, the passive aggressive threats) the "silent" moments are of the enduring moments. The ones that he will miss. The ones Gabe cannot hold onto with such certainty because nothing was said.

Comics cannot capture sound, but can convert it into image. Wood & Cloonan are aware of that formal limitation and exploit it. Gabe's perfect memories must remain vague to us. Tone of voice, inflection, volume - these things can only be hinted at in text, just as they must remain ambiguous for the listener. Angie laughs at Gabe when he asks if she came during sex, and one presumes Gabe felt the laughter was mocking. When he remembers that Angie told him that he "should feel threatened by" her ex-boyfriends, or when she tells him to "start acting like a fucking man," they are moments out of time, out of context. Gabe can certainly remember the context, but he still divorces the hurt from the full complexity of its cause. The ambiguity of how to read those moments in the text highlights the visual interpretation that Wood & Cloonan create. Memory, we are reminded, is a similar interpretation. A similar piecing together of disparate moments to create a reality.

There's a film school adaptation of "Breaking Up." The film lacks Cloonan's subtlety and range, but it's worth watching nonetheless, for two reasons in particular. First, it's fun to see someone try and adapt a structurally dense story. Second, it can help to see someone else's interpretation to help define your own. I mean no slight to the filmmakers when I disagree quite strongly with their version of this story. They choose to make Angie a bit cutsier than I read her and Gabe a little more immature. I don't think that they achieve the weighty silence that Wood & Cloonan emphasize visually, but that's probably as much a difference of media as it is a stylistic choice.

What the adaptation really points out, though, is how much Wood & Cloonan's work uses comics in a way that film is unable. Film, as a medium, has a much different relationship with memory and ambiguity of perspective. This particular film doesn't seem interested in dwelling on the gaps and inconsistencies of memory and their relationship to images. Instead, it plays a slow song behind the series of good memories.

The story ends on a familiar image for Demo: a splash page of a city skyline buried under a looming sky. The difference with this image is the clouds and night sky, black and white never mixing. One can't tell if it's white clouds on a black sky or vice versa. A fitting way to end a story so concerned with how the limits of the image to transfer meaning.

"Breaking Up" is one of the more compelling issues of Demo. The conflict is more complex, better explored, and presented with nuance. It's no insult to say that this issue is no "Watchmaker" (Issue #4 of Watchmen), because what is.

Next Week: "Damaged"