Written by G. Willow Wilson
Artwork by M.Okay. Perker
Printed by Berger Books /
Darkish Horse Comics
Neil Gaiman describes Air as a e-book that, “begins off as Rushdie after which parachutes off into Pynchon,” and that’s an ideal blurb. I undoubtedly wanted to buckle my seat belt and be aware of the closest exists for this wild, heady journey of a narrative.
Wilson and Perker’s first e-book within the Air collection introduces Blythe, a flight attendant who falls right into a cloak-and-dagger caper involving a good-looking man and a world-changing piece of expertise.
Certain, that’s the plot, however the story is a lot extra!
Amid the fights, flights, bruises and romance, Air turns the metaphysical and political panorama of air journey right into a literal factor.
What when you may dissemble the world as a collection of symbols, and in transforming them, transfer via area with a thought?
What if the world you conceptualize turns into bodily actuality? For instance, if a rustic is erased from a map by being reapportioned in new, post-colonial borders, maybe that precise nation and its folks turn into really faraway from the world, too.
It takes a bit earlier than this collection begins to actually take form, and for some time I used to be disoriented making an attempt to get into the story. Air begins as one story a couple of flight attendant who meet-cutes a good-looking Arab man who may additionally be a terrorist. Then it’s a narrative about that flight attendant assembly some secret society of post-9/11 white nationalist creeps and being on the run. However then these tales intertwine together with dream sequences that appear to even be actuality.
Blythe has her personal “lady figuring issues out” storyline right here, a pert blonde lady backed by her very-2000s various sidekicks in an emo homosexual man and an older Indian lady. Does it assist that issues veer off additional into the absurdism of Pynchon and DeLillo?
By the point you get to difficulty No. 4, the items all begin floating collectively as extra fantasy components come to the fore. It’s a credit score to Wilson’s storytelling that it does cohere, and rapidly, for a heady journey into the which means of, properly, which means when somebody can journey the world with a thought.
And it’s an enormous tip of the cap to artist M.Okay. Perker, who legibly walks the reader via the whole lot that (really and metaphorically) occurs in a means that feels grounded and vigorous.
That is exactly the sort of story that you just’d count on to have seen in DC’s Vertigo heyday underneath legendary editor Karen Berger, who edited this e-book underneath her personal imprint at Darkish Horse Comics.(Editor’s observe: It was. Vertigo initially revealed Air from 2008-2010.)
Loads of bizarre, a little bit attractive, a bit violent, all in a college-level framework of deconstructionist realpolitik.
Grade: B
