Demo: The Collected Edition - Softcover

Brian Wood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932051422 ISBN 13: 9781932051421

Publisher: AiT/PlanetLar, 2005

Synopsis

Twelve stories of conflicted teens grappling with love, loss, and the joy of finding your own way in life. The Eisner-nominated and critically-acclaimed series of self-contained short stories by writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan is finally collected together into this complete, bookshelf format volume.

About this title

About the Author

Multiple Eisner Award-nominee Brian Wood released his first series, Channel Zero, to considerable critical acclaim in 1997 and has gone on to create hard-hitting original series such as DMZ, Northlanders, The Couriers, and The Massive. Adding to that body of work, he's also written some of the biggest titles in pop culture, with work on Star Wars, Conan The Barbarian, Lord Of The Rings and The X-Men. The author lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.. The author lives in Brooklyn, NY.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* After only a few glances, you grok why indie-comics mavens rave about the 12-issue comic Demo. Cloonan's artwork progresses from strength to strength, beginning as an Americanized take on grunge manga (big eyes, blank faces, bristling or moppy or no hair, lots of little-line detail) in stark black and white, proceeding through reduced lineation and varying amounts of shading to selectively mounting wholly drawn figures on manipulated photo imagery in the last three stories. Also employing a huge range of angles-of-vision and perspective points, it looks like a billion bucks. The story lines aren't bad, either. They're about late-teens-to-early-thirties crises of separation from home, lover, or way of life. Early on, protagonists have scary psychokinetic powers, such as killing with a spoken word or concentrated rage and shape-shifting according to others' expectations. Writer Wood soon modified and eventually dropped that conceit. The hapless young father in the story excerpted for the inaugural Year's Best Graphic Novels, Comics & Manga (2006) is just a never-miss rifle shot, and the three twentysomethings in the especially effective "Midnight to Six" are unusual only in having stuck to "The Slacker Pledge" they signed in eighth grade. Lacking recurring characters, Demo altogether is less reminiscent of other comics series than of a thematic rather than continuous-narrative novel, such as John Horne Burns' The Gallery (1947). High praise, maybe, but deserving. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: AiT/PlanetLar
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1932051422
• ISBN 13: 9781932051421
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328
• Illustrator: Becky Cloonan