A Look Upon Good Books

Description on the back cover of the book:

From Brian Wood (Demo, DMZ, Northlanders) and Ryan Kelly (Lucifer, American Virgin, The new York Four) comes Local, a collection of twelve interconnected short stories, each featuring Megan McKeenan, a young woman who sets out from Portland, Oregon with nothing but a rucksack and a bad case of wanderlust.

These emotional vignettes each represent a year in the life of this young vagabond as she searches for a place to call home, both physically and spiritually. Set in twelve real life cities across North America, this painstakingly researched and meticulously illustrated volume collected for the first time the critically acclaimed series that writer Brian K. Vaughan (Lost, Runaways, Y:The Last Man) called “the sharpest slices of life the medium has ever seen.”

So here I am, sitting in Border’s, about to crack open Local. After merely flipping through the book, scanning the pages, I’m already set to recommend this. The art work is beautiful. The intimate detail included in each panel really sets the tone for what I expect to be a great bunch of stories.

I’m always intrigued by books that are written by authors of the opposite sex of the main character of the story. Maybe this is just me reading too much into it, but it’s a fact that while we’re all human, the male and female minds function differently and  interpret and cope with thoughts and emotions differently. So it just seems almost extraordinary when two males are able to write a story about a twenty-something year old female going through the up’s and down’s of life (several of which I feel aren’t the typical motions of life that we generally tend to go through). For example, the first chapter concerns Megan trying to fill a fraudulent prescription for her strung-out boyfriend. The boyfriend is depicted as being incredibly aggressive and irritable and Megan is clearly fed up with him and at a loss of what to do. What really blows my mind about all this is the fact that while yes, facing situations similar to this is something that people unfortunately go through pretty often, it’s not a milestone. Not every girl experiences being threatened by her druggy boyfriend to the point of breaking the law. So the fact that the two authors, who are both male, were able to put the main character in this situation and accurately depict what I’m going to call “female fear” just seems pretty incredible. Maybe I just don’t know enough about people and our minds yet. Maybe it’s not difficult at all for males and females to empathize with each other. Who knows? Not me.


I really wish they’d quit it with all the Death Cab for Cutie in this store. It’s driving me crazy.

Anyway.

I’m going to go ahead and say that so far, Chapter 2 is my favorite. Megan has an apartment in Minneapolis and has been letting this one stranger into her home when she’s not around. She leaves a key for him and he goes in to take pictures of himself with her Polaroid camera, scribbling cutsey notes on the backs of them. Megan responds in the same fashion, leaving pictures of herself stuck to the fridge. One of her co-workers points out to her that this is a pretty insane thing to be doing, but Megan refuses to see it as anything else but romantic. Is it crazy that if I was put in that situation, I’d probably do the same thing? You’ve got to admit, that is a pretty damn romantic thing to be doing. Eventually, they catch each other while she’s taking a sick day from work and the chapter ends with him sitting on her window pane while she takes one last picture of him. There’s something so wistful and fantastical about all this. It really makes you feel like everything in the world is OK if you can just let a stranger into your house with the hopes that the two of you will fall in love and ta da! He doesn’t kill you! If only life could be so nice. I also really appreciate that they don’t give any real back story to Megan’s relationship with this guy; it really leaves things open to interpretation and allows the mind to wander to a more positive place rather than instilling it with the depressing story of some psychopath who likes to break into young women’s apartments and screw around with their photographic equipment.

I think that’s going to be it for today. I’ve made it to Chapter 4, but it’s time I head out. I’ll be back here some time this weekend to continue and hopefully finish the book. Exciting times, my friends.

Until next time,

Amanda