DMZ. Local. and now Supermarket. Brian Wood is offering up some of the best work of his career as a comics writer, and he's turning heads without the benefit of storytelling within the confines of the industry's most popular genre. Wood explores some of his favorite themes and character types in this debut issue, and as I began reading, I figured Wood was just offering more of his usual disenfranchised-youth fare. And that was fine with me; I like Wood's young, cynical characters. But the book takes an unusual turn about halfway through the script, and it really made me sit up and take notice. Wood plays around with his audience's expectations to catch them off-guard, and it adds to the reading experience.
Pella has everything a typical teenager could want. She lives with her parents in a New York suburb reserved only for the wealthy. She has money. She has privilege. She doesn't need to work, but she maintains a job at a local convenience store where she entertains herself by looking down on the rich clientele and fleecing them whenever she can. Pella hates what society has become, but she's about to learn some harsh lessons about the darker side of life in the big city. A horrific tragedy at home forces Pella to run to the radically different world of Manhattan, where her credit cards are useless and her rebellious nature pales in comparison to how people live on the mean streets.
Kristian's artwork is a great match for Wood's youthful yet dark storytelling. I see a variety of influences in his work, from Jim (Stupid Comics) Mahfood to manga to Ted (Courtney Crumrin) Naifeh. The artist captures the main character's attitude quite well, and for the first half of this comic book, it's all about her attitude. Her shows her fear and vulnerability on her face in the latter part of the book just as adeptly. The color scheme is slightly surreal but not so much so as to distance the setting and characters from the reader's own experience.
I think what I like most about the Pella character is that her cynicism is balanced by her own greed and desire for self-indulgence, and she's fully aware of her own hypocrisy. Pella is not defined by her idealism alone, and that makes her much easier to accept and believe as a character. Her attitude and philosophy make it easy to accept her narration, which offers key exposition about the social backdrop that's so important to this story.
The story shifts midstream from being an embittered social commentary to a tense crime drama, and the change in course is sudden and surprising. And that's what I like about it. At first, I worried the dramatic change in tone and subject matter was too much, seeming almost random and rendering the earlier part of the issue moot. But as it progressed, it was clear that Pella's thoughts and preconceptions about society before would play a significant role in her flight. In other words, even though the tone and elements of the story changed significantly, Wood still explores some of the same sociological ideas. 8/10
