PrettyFakes

Local is a new indie comic series, written by Brian Wood with art by the great Ryan Kelly. I’ve been reading good things on the web about it from trusted sources like The Fourth Rail, and the premise sounded intriguing: 12 issues, each one set in a different U.S. city. Or, as Wood puts it in the author’s note in the first ish, “LOCAL, simply put, is a series of short stories about people and the places they live in. I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea of locations and hometown for awhile now [...]. Life operates very differently when you get out of major population centers, and some of the best films I’ve seen and books I’ve read take place in locations I never would have thought about otherwise.”

Now, that’s really all the hook I need. I’d been thinking about Sufjan Stevens’ 50 States Project in terms of some of the reading I’ve done on regionalism in American literature, and how (some critics argue) it tends to emerge in moments when the U.S. is at its most overtly imperial, attempting to remake the rest of the globe in its own image. Or in the images of its corporations. In those moments, there’s a heightened interest in those asepcts of U.S. culture that are illiquid, that resist being commodified, exported, exchanged, that offer a stable identity (or the illusion of such) in a time of change. After hearing about this series and thinking of it in connection with the massive popularity (among a certain demographic) of Stevens’ region-rock—which, you could argue, is an amplified, baroque expression of the regionalism of works like the Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee or All Hail West Texas or the Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday—I began to wonder if there was perhaps something going on here, in indie culture (whatever that is) if not in the U.S. generally, that might speak to this globalization/region dynamic.

The problem is, I didn’t much like Local.

Looking back over the notes I scribbled in preparation for this post, I almost decided just to abandon it. It started to seem like a waste of time, not to mention ungenerous to the talented and likely very decent creators invovled, to grouse about my disappointment with an indie comic that no one made me read, after all. So I hope no one will take this as a slash-and-burn sort of review. What I’m interested in, instead, is how, whatever the title’s other strengths might be, it fails to achieve the sort of effect that Wood himself claims he’s going for.

Each of the twelve issues follows the exploits of protagonist Megan McKeenan in a different location—#1 takes place in her hometown of Portland, OR, and #2 takes place in Minneapolis. You can decide for yourself Megan is really supposed to look that much like Kristy McNichol or if it’s just a coincidence. The problem for me is that there’s no real sense in each issue why this story is happening in this place. Any of them could have happened anywhere, or at least in any comparably sized city. There are presumably accurate establishing shots of record stores, pharmacies, restaurants, and so on that no doubt send a tingle of recognition up the spine of anyone who lived in Portland or Minneapolis, but otherwise there’s no sense of how the experience of living in either of these town might have shaped the stories that take place there. Why is this particular hipster record store more important any other? Why have the story take place in this apartment?

(Now that I’ve typed “take place” so many times, I’m beginning to see it as an expression of a requirement, not a description of setting: a story doesn’t “take place” somewhere; a story “takes place” in the same way a car takes gasoline. Of course, a moment’s thought reveals that’s not true at all, but it’s just the sort of thing you can say to students so they can discover how wrong it is on their own.)

And yeah yeah, I recognize that “place” or “sense of place” is an ideological construct and all that, but it’s not felt as an ideological construct, it’s not perceived that way. And that’s a lot of what’s missing here—there’s no sense of embodiment, of what it feels like to have skin and hair and lungs in one city as opposed to another, or of how a style of architecture or the quality of the roads and how well the public transportation works or how often the interstate is backed up or the distance between your work and your favorite bar might—must—affect your mind, must shape the sorts of aspirations you have and the possibilities you can imagine for yourself, not just for the coming day but for the coming decade. Or until you move.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to Wood, though. In his author’s note, the one I quoted from above, he also expresses a worry that too much focus on the quirks of the chosen locale will alienate those not familiar with that locale. Thus, he says, he will tell “universal” stories in these putatively unique settings. I think most people would agree, though, that that’s a tremendously wrongheaded distinction he’s making between the local and the universal. Just run your fingers along the shelves of any undergrad English major’s bookshelf for all the refutation of that idea you need: Joyce, Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Welty, et cetera.

So, in lieu of an in-depth exploration of the local scene, we have instead a couple of stories that come off to this reader as a bit gimmicky. In the first, Megan responds to her junkie boyfriend’s pleas to fill a forged prescription with several different scenarios (either imagined or running in parallel universes, Lola Rennt style, you take your pick.) In the second, Megan, um, exchanges annotated polaroids with a guy whom she repeatedly lets break into her house while she’s at work. It works better on the page than it does in that summary, but still: why Minneapolis? Why not Duluth or Boise? All “place” does in these stories is provide a bit of window-dressing, bait for readers in a city who might not otherwise pick up the series. And so, in this case, regionalism is in fact the most liquid, commodified, exchangeable aspect of the series.

On their own, these would be perfectly okay indie-comic coming of age stories. As part of a series with the stated aims of Local, they fall short.

I want to stress, too, that my main quibbles are with the story: Ryan Kelly turns in some fantastic art, and the whole product, the issue itself, is really a beautiful package, well designed and engaging. In fact, there are ways that “Local,” as a publishing venture, compensates for some of the failings of the main stories in each issue of Local the comic. For instance, there’s a great, scrappy, snarky text piece in issue 2 about Minneapolis history and culture, by “Kat Vapid,” and I wish the spirit of the piece could have been present in the story itself. I’m crazy about the back cover to issue 1, too, which features Megan looking back over her shoulder, away from the “camera,” at the Portland skyline. There’s also an official Local blog, in which readers are invited to send in pictures of distinctive aspects of their hometowns.

I don’t know that I’ve totally given up on the series, but honestly, I probably won’t pick up another ish unless it’s set somewhere I know well enough to pick out the details. I don’t think that’s how it was supposed to work, though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 9:14 am and is filed under Comixx, In the Nation, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.