Demo - "One Shot, Don't Miss"

   The disquiet of "What You Wish For" gives way to the grim, disorienting landscapes of "One Shot, Don't Miss." In this story, PFC John Hatfield flies into Iraq with his reputation preceding him. He isn't just a crack shot - he never misses. Stationed on patrol, his colleagues explain to him how to spot a suicide bomber: they're the ones that don't stop their vehicles. Hatfield is instructed to shoot the driver of any vehicle that doesn't stop. When he's confronted by such a situation, he aims at the tires instead. He is, of course, reprimanded for the failure to follow protocol, but when Hatfield vaguely threatens his commanding officer he is able to negotiate his discharge. His girlfriend Kendra has just had their first child, and she's upset that Hatfield has revoked not only their insurance but also their only source of income. He returns home to face an unhappy Kendra and a deeply uncertain future.

   "One Shot, Don't Miss" is most similar in theme to "Stand Strong." Kendra is as one-dimensional a character as Amy, and for most of the same reasons. Kendra wants Hatfield to support the family and is angry at him for failing to live up to that commitment. She shows no other desires or ideas. Like James McMurray, John Hatfield takes on a job he hates in hopes of upward mobility. He wants to go to college and the army is his only means of ever making enough money. Like McMurray, Hatfield’s ability is seen by others as a tool they can use. He is only valuable insofar as he uses that ability within the limits and directions set by others.

   Unlike James McMurray, John doesn’t have a sense of lineage. They are both cogs in a machine, but James's life is leavened by a sense of familial responsibility. The moving ambiguity of James's reaction to the course of life he chose by allying himself with his father is replaced with Hatfield's desire for a family unit that he will likely never have. He doesn't have parents or friends, only Kendra and their daughter. 

   “One Shot, Don’t Miss” is about the those left out of the shrinking middle class. The metaphor of the Iraq conflict, still so fresh when this issue came out in 2005, helps illustrate the struggle as Wood & Cloonan imagine it. Hatfield, like all the other soldiers, fights in an endless battle with no real opponents and a shifting landscape upon which he never quite knows his place. He doesn't know what the obstacles are, much less what will help him overcome them. He is adrift - the featureless white backgrounds of the Iraqi desert mirroring those of the homefront. Though Kendra is shallowly rendered, she asks important questions. Where will the money come from now? They had to borrow from her father to even get Hatfield to qualify for the GI fund and now face the prospect of telling him that Hatfield quit.

   Kendra thinks Hatfield couldn’t hack it, but the problem is much more complex (that the story so clearly illustrates the fact, while Kendra remains belligerently ignorant of it, is to Wood & Cloonan's discredit because it makes Kendra all the less likable and her point of view that much more difficult to integrate into the story's themes). Hatfield makes the distinction men in war are told not to make when he calls killing “murder.” For Hatfield, though, it’s an even more ethically charged proposition because he can kill so easily. He cannot miss when he fires a gun - if he wants to kill a man then that man will die. The dilemma is keenly portrayed in the scene with the suspected suicide bomber. There is enough ambiguity in the situation to offer the possibility that the truck isn’t loaded with explosives. We are never told if the truck, in fact, exploded and all Hatfield's commander intimates is that the PFC disobeyed orders. Hatfield does not see the conflict as the others do. For them, it’s a fight. They have to assume the worst because they cannot guarantee that they will survive otherwise. For Hatfield, he knows that he has the better of every gunfight he’s in.

  The matter at stake is competing virtues, and how economic conditions put people into such untenable binds. Hatfield has an ability that seems designed only for killing. Take the best sharpshooter in comics [Bullseye, left] for example. The ability to shoot things with unerring accuracy seems to be primarily suited for extermination. More particularly, in his historic moment, it makes Hatfield suited for military service. Hatfield is unremarkable in any other way, as Cloonan’s art so potently illustrates. When we first see Hatfield, his face is reflected in the window of his troop transport plane. His eyes are hooded and covered in shadow, his features undistinguishable from all the other soldiers. The only thing that singles Hatfield out from the crowd is his ability to shoot, and he refuses to use that ability. The only thing that makes him special is a thing he is not suited to do. He doesn’t want to fight, to kill, to be injured or maybe to die. Economic necessity forces him to do it. After returning home following his discharge, he finds Kendra sitting in a darkened kitchen smoking. Her eyes are also hooded. He hands her all the money he owns, a measly wad, and goes into the other room to see his daughter. The final splash page is of Kendra and Hatfield, their backs to each other and divided by their shadows. She is holding their money and Hatfield cradling their daughter. The competing claims on Hatfield's life, money or family, are starkly opposed.

   “One Shot, Don’t Miss” isn’t so much a story as it is a bleak portrait. It’s one of the most sophisticated issues of Demo, and one of the most emotionally affecting.

Next Week: “Mixtape” and biting off more than you can chew

Demo - "What You Wish For"

   "What You Wish For" is, quite frankly, more than a little problematic. Ken, a newly married and generally contented guy, brings his wife to visit the place where he grew up. Formerly a suburban neighborhood, it's now a ghost town, abandoned and overrun with weeds. Ken remembers being bullied for his mixed heritage (his father a white, American soldier married a woman of Japanese ancestry) by all the other townspeople except a gardener - the only other Asian in town. When Ken's puppy is killed by the racist father of a racist bully (also the gardener's employer), Ken loses it. All the rage he feels is released and he reanimates the town's dead animals. His zombie puppy kills the racist patriarch and the other animals begin killing anyone nearby. In the middle of the rampage, the gardener warns Ken that "hate will eat you too" and, just like that, Ken stops animating the animal corpses. The adult Ken recalls the gruesome event over an image of young Ken rubbing his puppy's ears while the bloody carcasses of the murdered townspeople lie sprawled all around. Ken remembers it as "the one day I lost control, the one day I got mad. The one day I let those feelings out." He doesn't tell his unnamed wife but he shares a look with his dog, the same dog he brought back to life now grown, and ponders the wisdom of the gardener's words. "That gardener was right, hate will eat you up, if you let it. I stopped in time, and yeah, life is good now. But I will never forget how close I came." The final image is of the town, in the fading light, peacefully nestled under a clear sky and gentle mountains.

   "What You Wish For" is, most earnestly, a cautionary tale against letting the hatred of others consume you. Racism creates a cycle of anger and retributive violence that will never solve anything. This is clear. However, the metaphor that Wood & Cloonan use to tell this story is more than a little extreme: Ken kills the racists who have made his life painful. It seems a rather disproportionate response to say the least. Wood & Cloonan seem to want to illustrate the destructive anger that the victims of racism feel and this would be all well and good if Ken didn't murder an entire town because he was bullied. This is terrifyingly close to many other incidents of violence in North America in the last decade and a half (Columbine being the most seared into the public imagination) and the resemblance, unacknowledged by the text, leaves this reader with a gnawing sense of disquiet.

 

  The weaknesses of Wood & Cloonan's extended metaphor in this story are multiple. The most uncomfortable is the fact that the text seems unaware of the irony of Ken's statement that he will never forget how close he came. How close to what? Murdering an entire town because he was angry? Oops. Ken's power seems to be that he is friendly with death [see cover, above right] and that he can bring back dead things. Perhaps he brought the dead townspeople back to life and they all ran away, thus leaving the town empty. There is no indication in the text that this happened, but one might imagine that if Ken did kill a whole town he would be somewhat less contented. The lack of acknowledgment for this incongruity is glaring. Furthermore, the seemingly well-adjusted and happy Ken stands at odds with the text's two moments of fleeting recognition of the disturbing magnitude of his actions. The first is the look of fear on Ken's parents' faces during his killing spree before they slam the door on him, potentially implying that they never spoke to him again. The second occurs in the panel where young Ken sits with his puppy, surrounded by the bodies of those he's killed. The caption reads "not mad anymore." Madness seems to be the realm to which young Ken fled when his puppy was killed and it's quite possible that the whole event was a macabre fantasy rather than an enacted massacre. Ken even admits his recollection isn't entirely reliable: "I remember that day well enough," he says. Yet the text on a later panel when Ken stops by his old house asks "did they deserve it?" implying that the racist townspeople did, in fact, die. The resurrected puppy would imply that Ken does, indeed, have the power to reanimate the dead and would give added credence to his recollected version of events.

   Regardless of whether or not Ken actually did go on a murderous rampage or if he merely wanted to, the metaphor for letting go of hatred being the solution to racism is underdeveloped. Ken is happily married "to the best girl in the world." He has a condo, "a good job and a killer record collection, too." He is haunted by the events - not the deaths of individuals but of those deaths as signifiers of the possible magnitude of his rage if he unleashes it. Rage, an entirely understandable and natural consequence of racism, is a matter of choice. The language of choice permeates this story. Though anger is an autonomous response, to let go to of hate is a conscious choice, illustrated by the sudden and complete change that Ken undergoes after the gardener imparts his wisdom. To let go of hate is an individual proposition.

   The fact of individual choices being enough to overcome racism is hinted at as being insufficient early in the story when Ken defines the American Dream as getting "one up on everyone else." This prototypical individualist mantra (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) is briefly interrogated. But Ken is able to achieve those things after he leaves town and his condemnation of the American Dream is more a critique of suburban prejudice than anything else. He is not interested in how the American Dream functions except as a frame of reference to the bigots on his street. They are not even representatives of endemic or systematic racism. They are not the people who can pass Ken over for promotion or who will deny him a bank loan. They're just the dumb redneck racists, the easy ones to dismiss. 

   It isn't entirely fair to criticize "What You Wish For" for being a shallow examination of racism. The story is a shallow examination of racism but it doesn't set out to be much more. It is, foremost, a story about the need to let go of hate. What it does, though, is make me wonder about the limits of metaphor. Ken's unleashed rage is symbolic and, as such, engages in levels beyond the simple points of the plot. Ken's childhood town functions as little more than a reminder of the price of anger and a time he almost let rage consume him, not the site of a murderous rampage. It's not a real town; it's a nostalgic device. It has no function outside its limited mandate in the story. The fact that it is where Ken committed murder sits at odds with the tenor of the story. Ken's comment that he came "close" is entirely wrong because he didn't come close - he actually did let anger consume him for long enough to end lives. Just because those were the lives of poorly drawn characters for whom racism was their only defining quality and who didn't serve the text as actual characters, doesn't mean that he didn't cross a pretty clear moral line. The unsettling comparison to Columbine aside, "What You Wish For" seeks to actively engage in a metaphor for which it is entirely unprepared. The maneuvering of Ken from angry, possibly murderous, boy to well-adjusted member of society is probably the single biggest unresolved tension in the whole collection of stories. In the end, Ken's killing spree becomes a memory that makes him a better person - which makes "What You Wish For," quite possibly, the most disturbing story in all of Demo.

Next Week: "One Shot, Don't Miss"

Demo - "Girl You Want"

   "Girl You Want" seems to be an ironic but straightforward story about a girl who is physically transformed into what people want her to be. She's a shapeshifter with no agency - she is altered, against her will, by the people around her. Kate ("Katie, Kath, Kat. Is that short for Kartherine? With a 'k' or a 'c'? Even my name is what people want it to be.") is an angry teen. Understandably. We meet her at a house party where she is changing shape every time someone looks at her. She gets mad and storms out and we are left with the impression that most of her life is spent in a similar emotional state. However, at a Starbucks, Kate is treated kindly by a server [barista? I would much rather use "server"]. More importantly, Kate does not change when this server looks at her. Kate becomes mildly obsessed, believing that she has fallen in love with someone who sees her for who she truly is. Kate attempts to ask the server out on a date, but fails. She then follows the server home on the bus, downplaying the irony that she doesn't even know the girl's name. When they end up in a sketchy area of town, Kate is surprised. When the server picks up her daughter from the babysitter, Kate realizes that she, herself, has created an identity for this girl.

   Contrary to appearances (see what Wood & Cloonan did there?), this is not a story that explores the identity crises of a shapeshifter. Kate is not like Mystique from the X-Men or Chameleon (Boy) from the Legion of Super-Heroes. She doesn't change at will, nor use her powers for any purpose. She is changed. Because of this, Kate is deeply alienated. But not for the reasons she thinks. Other than the nameless server who sees Kate's "real" face, a transit worker and several people on a bus see Kate for who she is. She notices this and, instead of believing that either she has more control over her appearance then she imagined or that others are capable of seeing her real face, Kate chooses to believe it means that she's a screw-up. "Good job, Kate. You blew it. Stupid. Everyone thinks so." When she is denigrating herself for making the same mistake that others had made with her, though people on the bus are looking at her, she does not change. She looks in the mirror and sees her own face and, sorry for herself, claims that the fact she hasn't changed means that everyone sees her as a failure ("everyone thinks so"). Her interpretation of what they see is questionable at best. "Girl You Want," clearly, is not without the adolescent indulgence and self-pity that many of Demo's stories showcase so vividly. The climactic moment even happens in the rain.

   But Wood & Cloonan's story is more than a mash-up of teenage pity trips. "Girl You Want" is a sad story in the way that many teenagers think their lives are sad. The simple dramatic irony is foreshadowed consistently. Wood & Cloonan are not trying to surprise the reader with the ending, but are trying to get inside the head of a girl with alienation issues. Kate spends much of the story angry, but she seems to revel in it to a certain degree. There is no indication that she knows anyone at the house party, no sign that she was invited. Only one person seems to even know who she is and she is rude to him when he asks her out. This young guy sees her as the sexy librarian because she works in the stacks, and Kate lashes out at the cliche more than anything else. Ultimately, the story is about how we construct alienating images of ourselves and others out of cultural detritus and cliche.

   Kate only transforms into cliches. One guy sees an older woman, possibly his mother. Another sees her as a spiky-haired punk chick. Yet another sees her as Chun-Li from Street Fighter (and not the version recently portrayed on film by Smallville's Kristen Kreuk). Wood & Cloonan are not criticising cultural icons or cliches, at least not with any sustained attack. They are commenting on how these images get deployed in relationships. And, surprisingly, these relationships seem to be nothing but emotional. The forms Kate takes on are designed for emotional attachment, not sexual fantasy. None of the fantasy images of Kate, not a single one, are particularly sexualized. Even the horny librarian is demurely clothed. Given how highly sexualized most images of Mystique are [see left - seriously? That's where she puts the gun?], it's rather surprising that the fetishes on display in "Girl You Want" are so tame. It seems that what these boys want isn't to sexually objectify Kate. What Kate's can't see is that the desire isn't as predatory as she believes. They want companionship, as does Kate, but lack the ability to visualize that relationship outside their very limited fantasies.

   The limitations of these fantasies, most painfully for Kate, lead to alienation. Kate can't connect with anyone else, but neither can anyone really connect. The boy who just wants to date Chun-Li [right] is doomed to be disappointed. Only the nameless server seems well-adjusted (and she's a fan of indie music ... so there's that). The only time Kate feels a human connection is at a Starbucks, a formless ahistorical space if ever there was one - a clue that, perhaps, her feelings are less than authentic.

   Cloonan doesn't change up her artistic style within the issue when illustrating Kate's changes. Though the stylistic variations of the preceding chapters of Demo plainly establish that Cloonan could draw Chun-Li as a manga babe, or the pierced and spiky punk Kate in a different style, Cloonan's art portrays each transformation within the visual syntax of this story. All the metamorphoses occur within a consistent stylistic universe. The effect of this decision actually de-emphasizes Kate's transformations. This isn't a story about how reality is represented and the artifice of any such duplication. This is a story about how the limited grammar of desire leaves people feeling alone. 

   "Girl You Want" is actually a rather big-hearted story, dressed up as a self-pitying emo song. The story suggests that people can't really be blamed for their fantasies, and that, to some degree, this is because we are unable to separate cultural cliches from our lived experiences. Kate doesn't see herself any more than the nameless server or the video game fetishist see her. She wants a connection based on more than just superficialities, but is unable to imagine it.

Next Week: "What You Wish For" and the limits of metaphor.

Demo - "Stand Strong"

   If the angst-filled adolescent histrionics of the first three stories in Demo made you suspect Wood & Cloonan were going to hit the same note over and over, then "Stand Strong" will try to punch your face. It might not actually hit you, but it's going to swing.

   James McMurray is up for promotion at the factory where he, his father, and his grandfather all work. He's not sure that he wants to settle into this life, and goes to see his friends. They look pissed. Flashback to thirty-six hours earlier. James and his girlfriend Amy are having a fight about his lack of initiative. Amy wants a better life than their parents, James objects to the implication that there is anything wrong with his parents, and they argue. Turns out that James just doesn't really want to break into the factory and steal the payroll, and resents the fact that his childhood friends only want his help because he is super-strong. He deliberately screws up the theft, which results in his friends getting fired. Back to the pissed-off friends, thirty-six hours later: James breaks up with Amy, ditches the gang, and joins his father and grandfather for a beer.

   

   Once again, Wood & Cloonan explore family dynamics (and, once again, priorize the conservative nuclear family unit). Which family does James want, the one he was born into or the one he chose? It is clear that James's crew, where they call him Jimmy, is not the family he will choose. When they first appear, they are all angry - sneering and growling at James. We find out later that he deliberately screwed up their heist and cost them their jobs. Amy, for all the important truths that she speaks, is never without a sour and hostile expression on her face. It seems reasonable of her to want more than "12-hour shifts waitressing" or sitting "home alone on nights and weekends while you pull extra shifts and then come home stinking and too exhausted to do anything but watch TV." What's wrong with wanting a life of more than mere subsistence, a life better than the one your parents' had? But it is hard to like her with that perpetual grimace on her face. This, somewhat problematically, only serves to reinforce James's choice to ditch her.

   The fact that Amy and the crew only want to exploit James's strength isn't a critique of ambition or an anti-elitist reaction to self-improvement, however. Amy and the crew do not respect the basic decency of a person who works long hours to provide for his or her family. Amy doesn't want to work hard to improve herself - she just wants more money. In many ways, "Stand Strong" is a very conservative paean to the working man.

   Super-strength is, maybe, the most common super-power. However, it usually comes as a subset of other powers, something thrown in to make the fights more interesting. Spider-Man is super-strong but can also stick to walls, sense danger, and date women way out of his league. No one would identify Spider-Man, primarily, by his strenth. Even Superman's strength is secondary to his flight, speed, vision powers, and invulnerability. Almost every team, heroes and villains, have a strongman. Even Emma Frost has super-strength now when she turns into a diamond. The more typical "strong guys," like the Thing or the Hulk, are also invulnerable. You could list dozens of characters who have super-strength accompanied with another power. Rarely do super-heroes only have strength. Generally, strong guys are not the leaders or the brains of a team. They can be the conscience of the team, like Colossus with the X-Men or Thing with the Fantastic Four, and their strength is often reflective of a strength of character. The Cartesian mind/body split being thematically central, they represent the heart of the team, not its brain. They are the blue-collar workers of super-hero comics.

   Picking up where "Bad Blood" left off, "Stand Strong" isn't as interested in the super-power as either "NYC" or "Emmy." In the earlier stories, the focus was on how the protagonist's power damaged her life. Beginning with "Bad Blood," but becoming more pronounced in "Stand Strong," the power is a background feature meant to help illustrate theme. For James, his strength isn't a metaphor for conviction or clarity of vision. The achronological narrative of "Stand Strong" only emphasizes the fact that James can't fully embrace either option presented to him. He doesn't want to work in the factory all his life, but refuses to see that choice as something upon which to be looked down. James thinks that his strength, at least in the eyes of his friends, makes him a tool. "Big Jimmy the Utensil," he calls himself ironically. But, as his sabotage of the robbery proves, he's not just a hammer to be swung. Though it's never stated, there is no indication that James inherited his strength from his father, the way Samantha and Sean Hurley inherited their father's invulnerability. In "Stand Strong," James's strength demonstrates the life he is made for.

   Wood & Cloonan, here more so than in any previous story, play up the ambiguities. In this case, it's James's choice to embrace his father's lifestyle - the life, he believes, that he is built for but the life he doesn't want. Wood & Cloonan show how James is trapped between the two worlds. The same clean, white rooms appear in the Vice-President's office where James is offered the promotion and the apartment he shares with Amy. James also seems to be resentful of his father's constant attempts to keep him at the factory. "This was just meant to be a short term thing, you know," he tells his dad. "I always figured I would do more, somehow. Travel maybe." As his father explains, though, "we're not made for things like travel and college or whatever else you had in mind. C'mon, we're working class people." The iconic cover image of James holding a hammer, and the repeated use of that image in the story itself, creates a sense of James as an exemplar of the proletariat. He is the working class man, write large. His strength is as much the product of his toil as it is a sign of his ability to endure toil.

   But, the story ends with James joining his father and grandfather for a beer. The bartender notes that he's "the spitting image of the both of ya." James, head shaved and covered in tattoos, looks very little like his father and grandfather. To Cloonan's immense credit, though, a reader can tell what the bartender means. The men have similar jaw lines and, in faces so simply rendered, James's features echo those of his dad. In a two panel sequence, James looks over to his progenitors. Sitting side-by-side, they look like a time lapse photo. The second panel is of James, his tattoos hidden and his shaved head out of frame, looking surprised. He sees the resemblance now, too. On the next page, he surveys the bar and the page ends with a close-up of James's face, his expression painfully unreadable as the weight of his choice sinks in. The final splash page is of the town and factory, a black silhouette in a white sky. The page is mostly black, the dark world underneath the factory, the future swallowed up by the forces that shape James's life. The men in the bar all look so similar not only because they are related, but also because the factory makes people this way. James, like his father and grandfather, will be shaped and remade by that industrial force. 

Next week: "Girl You Want"

Blackest Night

   This isn't a review. Not even close. This is more of a lament for the fact that I let DC convince me that this comic was something I would be interested in.

   So, my reaction to reading Blackest Night #1, was very similar to how I felt after reading Battle for the Cowl. Now, I'm confident that this series will turn out to be far less a series of random fight scenes and nonsensical motivations than Battle for the Cowl. But I really had the feeling that I already knew everything that was going to happen in this issue. As if the actual series starts next month. It's the same feeling I get when seeing a movie that has its entire premise and plot outlined by the preview - Tropic Thunder being a particularly recent example. Or like when DC ruined the ending Watchmen by releasing the graphic novel adaptation twenty some years before the movie came out. The whole issue was set-up: outlining the characters, defining the conflicts, catching readers up on the relevant history, and giving a sense of the stakes at hand. Though these are necessary to tell a story that tries to balance a self-contained narrative and a reliance on years of DC continuity, after the months of preview issues, "Road to Blackest Night" tie-ins, interviews, and promotional images, this issue seemed perfunctory. 

  

   My problems with Blackest Night are more than a complaint about the set-up. Every issue might be someone's first. And, for the purposes of a collected edition, it's nice to be able to read a story that has a beginning. I understand that my dissatisfaction is based on external factors rather than the issue itself (which I thought was efficient and well-structured, though only superficially interested in character and theme). The problem is that I know that I'm not really the target reader for this (I don't particularly care for Geoff Johns's comics and the list of dead characters who are going to come back as evil zombies in this series consist mainly of the DC characters for whom I have fondness, and therefore no desire to see as evil zombies!) and I know that my tepid reaction to this series will be more a matter of my own preferences than of a failure on the part of Johns and Reis. I also know that it isn't fair to the comic itself to judge it based on how the months of promotional bombardment made the entire issue (save the last gruesome pages) seem extraneous. But, sorry DC, I'm doing it anyway. Your PR machine made me interested in the series, despite all my concerns. You didn't lie or trick me. You just got me to ignore the simple fact that this series would not be my cup of tea.

Demo - "Bad Blood"

   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"

Demo - "Emmy"

   "Emmy" is really quite depressing. Reading it, I feel like Wood & Cloonan set themselves the challenge of taking an alluring super-power and stripping it of any glamour, excitement, and appeal. Emmy is a young teenager who has the ability to make anyone do what she tells them to (we don't actually know that Emmy is her name, because no one ever says it, but it's the title and one can assume). At some point, she lashed out and shut her mother's brain off. Emmy takes care of her mother (who can't even take herself to the bathroom), pumps gas to pay the bills, and tries not to speak for fear of what might happen. She loses control when a customer sexually harasses her - though there is no clear indication, the text leads us to believe that her boss has been casually harassing for a while but that this incident is the last straw - and tells him to drop dead. He dies, her boss calls the police, and Emmy decides to run away. She whispers something to her mother before leaving and the horrified reaction of the police suggests that it was euthanasia. "Emmy" sits comfortably beside "NYC" as another angsty teenage story about how it feels, sometimes, that the only power we have is to screw up our lives.

   Mind control is a pretty common super-power, most often presented as a part of a telepath's repertoire (think the X-Men's Professor X or Emma Frost). When mind control lacks the other dimensions of telepathy, it's often in the command of a villain (Mentallo, Mastermind and his daughters also called Mastermind, the Controller, Gorilla Grodd, and the Purple Man, to name a few). In the cases of the villains, mind control is often associated with an elitist attitude, and it represents the power of rhetoric - I'm thinking particularly of Glorious Godfrey and the Hatemonger here. The villains who can trick your senses, or distort your emotions, seem sleazier. In part, it's because they can't be defeated by repeated punching. They stir up the base emotions, the dark fantasies and desires that are already present in those they control or direct. In many ways, the super-hero is the anti-elitist response to those scary men (yes, they are almost always men) who can trick you with their words. What makes the Purple Man, in particular, so scary in Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's Alias is not just the violation of having your will controlled by another. It's the lingering fear that you were really letting him control you, that some part of you really wanted to do those things. 

   What Bendis & Gaydos do with the Purple Man is probably the closest mainstream super-hero equivalent to what Wood & Cloonan are doing with "Emmy." Bendis & Gaydos, however, explore the ways in which language and art create reality - the Purple Man is aware that he's in a comic and sees himself as the author. With "Emmy," Wood & Cloonan engage with the power of words in a very different way. The effects of language in "Emmy" are multiple. Most obviously, they subvert a typical super-power. Emmy's power manifests through language, like the magic words of several other super-heroes (Shazam/Captain Marvel, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Johnny Thunder). However, Emmy's words are less stable than Billy Batson's. She does not have a single phrase that grants her power (Shazam!); rather, she makes her desires manifest through words. When she tells the stranger to drop dead, he does. The conceptual object of her thoughts is made real. Emmy has the power of creation: she speaks, therefore it is.

   "Emmy" contains text that represents spoken and written language - that is to say, both dialogue and an interpolated document. The first words, and the majority of the story's text, are from some sort of journal, presumably Emmy's, which states that "I'm writing all this down, for you to read." The story, however, is almost told entirely through Cloonan's art. The journal itself simply comments on the action, providing context and limited background on the illustrated events. The text also does not read consistently like a journal or a letter. The "you" to which everything is addressed seems to be a reader who knows nothing of Emmy because it provides expository information, and yet the text reacts to her immediate actions. When the police come, Emmy looks scared in one panel and then determined in the next. In that latter panel, the text reads "No. No more accidents. No more pain," as if in response to her decision to euthanize her mother.

   For a story about the power of words, "Emmy" is almost purely visual and the language that does appear is often contradicted by the images. At one point, Emmy explains that "most people leave me alone now. They're afraid." The text overlays images of Emmy walking home from the gas station and encountering three boys building a bike ramp. Contrary to what we are told, they do not look afraid of Emmy. Their expressions are actually quite blank - confused and a little curious. Earlier, when Emmy says that her boss leaves her alone "mostly," it seems to dismiss his request for a blow job. Though language organizes her world, it often conceals its conceptual objects. The world that Cloonan illustrates for Emmy is barren and claustrophobic at once, a reflection of the limited options Emmy sees for herself. It's not a world of objects, or one densely populated with symbolic tapestries. It's slight, and it's grimy, and it doesn't always act as described. 

   Cloonan's work realizing this is quite fantastic. The opening panel is of a desolate road - the road down which those passersby who frequent Emmy's gas station enter and exit her life. It's the only access to a better world, and it looks like it isn't going anywhere. Emmy lives with her mother in a trailer park and any signs of the small town Emmy says she lives in are invisible. When she slips out of her trailer to escape the police, the final image evokes the opening panel of "NYC." There is no glorious splash of New York, like the one that closed "NYC." Emmy is not on the road out of town that we saw earlier, the road down which she was staring at the story's opening. Instead, she's running across a narrow vertical panel bordered by the white of the page and the words "the end" printed to the left of the image. The spatial positioning of the words, based on the way we read comics, puts them before the illustration of Emmy's escape - she is coming from nowhere with nowhere to go. If any two words impart meaning that shapes reality, it's "the end." 

   Language, ultimately, is only how Emmy conceives her world, just like any of us - almost all the words are hers. The story Wood & Cloonan are telling is a pretty slight one about how a teenager says something so horrible that it destroys her relationship with her mother. She has a more direct manifestation of a power that, Wood & Cloonan's story suggests, we all have. We can all make our desires real if we choose to act on them. We can all burn our bridges and hurt people we care about if we let ourselves. Emmy kills the stranger with her words after he propositions her, but she might as well have sprayed him with gas and set him on fire. It would have been easy for her because, in that moment, she snaps. She is aware of what she can do, but for the smallest fraction of time she no longer cares. Though Emmy has the power of language, she is unable to significantly alter her circumstances - if only because she doesn't the world she creates in language is such a terrible one. She has so completely internalized her own self-conception that she cannot see that she has foreclosed her ability to change her world. Language is how we organize our self-images and by denying herself language, Emmy allows herself to disappear.

Next week: "Bad Blood"