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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Demo: The Collection
I’m hesitant to even mention the “superpowers” because of the stigma that word so often brings with it. It’s not about fighting crime or beating up the villain. The kids here don’t do any of those things. The superpowers are just extraordinary problems taken to fairly logical conclusions.
In the second story, “Lucy”, a young girl finds herself terrified to speak because her words can cause irreparable damage to those around her. Instead her anger just builds up inside her until she says something she regrets. A thinly veiled morality tale for certain, but that doesn’t make it any less moving or important. And not every story has some hidden agenda behind it, either. Many of them are very straightforward and still a few are the types of stories that linger in your mind, begging for further thought.
Wood captures teen culture as accurately as any writer out there, though his dialogue can occasionally seem too snappy. The plots work well as stand-alones -- he manages to make them intriguing and leave you with a sense of longing, all the while wrapping up each story nicely. That Becky Cloonan is able to make each story feel stylistically different is a huge testament to her skills as an artist. It’s easy to look at the art and tell that it was all done by the same person, but once you begin reading the stories little nuances of different genres begin to pop up. The flexible nature of her art is in some cases as interesting as the stories themselves.
The only drawback of this collected edition is the desire to keep reading after each story has ended. Every one of them is so good that I found it hard to put the book down, but by continuing to breeze through them I didn’t allow the story to really sink in. They weren’t meant to be read as a whole, and for that reason only I wish I’d bought this book in its regular monthly form. If you can refrain from devouring the book without stopping to consider each story, or if you can commit to re-reading each as a separate entry, then this is a book that cannot be passed up.
With Demo, Wood and Cloonan have created stories about characters with whom anyone can identify. They’re not the type of people you want to be -- they’re who you are. The slacker, the lovelorn, the desperate, the distant, the hopeful; they’re people coming to terms with what is inside them. I don’t think there’s any better definition of teenagers than that and no better book about their plight than Demo.
-- Logan Polk
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There is no easy way to summarize what Demo is or what it’s about. The simplest definition is that it’s a collection of twelve stand-alone stories, but that tells you nothing of its content. To say that it’s about people with superpowers would tell you nothing about its emotional depths. And to say that it’s a story about humanity would give you no insight into how truly fantastic it is.