Wednesday 12 February 2014

So I Read Air

A 250 word (or less) review of Air the complete series
By G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker; Vertigo Comics



Air travel is inherently interesting. It's this mind-boggling realization of an impossible primordial dream. It's Applied Science and bleeding-edge engineering. It's a surreal process that encapsulates people in one place and then deposits them somewhere completely new. It's the promise of the future and the romance of the past. It's completely unnatural and absolutely terrifying. Air is a comic about air travel in all of its literal, cultural, and metaphorical dimensions. In Air, Blythe, a flight attendant for a new kind of airline, is dragged into a shadowy war between the vigilante Etesian Front and a mysterious terrorism suspect. A secret war that will decide the future of flight, delve into the history of air travel, reveal hidden countries, and teach Blythe about the secret power within herself. Air is one crazy and surreal comic book. A lot of the themes Air explores swing pretty far into the metaphorical and, as a result, the book spends a fair amount of time navigating through some pretty non-Euclidean geometries. Fortunately, Air tackles its more fantastical elements with a dream logic infused conviction that really sells its most fantastic elements. It’s a beautiful kind of crazy. My only real complaint about Air is that, due to capricious publishing, the comic ends pretty abruptly with a lot of untapped potential left unrealized. I mean, it reaches a satisfying conclusion, but I feel like Air had still had more to say. But better to have flown for a moment than to have never tried. So try Air.

Word count: 250

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