Getting What You Wish For
Howdya like that for gratitude? I
complain
about having to wait an extra month to read
Demo #6,
Larry Young hears my plight and
graciously
sends me a copy, and then I never write about it. Really, it
just goes to show how easily I get distracted. I meant to write
about the issue much earlier--I even took notes on my immediate
reactions as I read the story through the first time (notes I can no
longer find, natch, and the only thing I recall from memory was that
the opening page reminded me of
Alec Stevens)--but
I got caught up in reading everyone else's thoughts on the story and
surrounding topics, and then lost my motivation to jot down my own
thoughts.
So what
are my thoughts on "What You Wish For"? Well, one
of the nice things about coming into the conversation so late in the
game is that I can simply piggyback off what others have already said,
taking a little from Column A, a little from Column B. Several
people have complained about the gap between events in the framing
sequence and Ken's past, wondering how Ken got from point A (child with
supernatural powers and repressed anger) to point B (seemingly
well-adjusted adult groom). That didn't bother me much. For
one thing (as I think others noted) we have no guarantees that Ken
really
is well-adjusted as a grown-up. Presumably he
could snap again at any moment, especially if something were to happen
to his lovely bride or his beloved dog (again). And I didn't have
a problem with
Ken's
supposed passivity, or his lashing out, or his "getting away with
it." (I mean, other than the sense that I'd have a problem with
these events were they to happen in real life.) As
Sean
Collins remarked, "a one-two punch of institutional racism and
animal abuse" seems like an understandable motivation for mass murder,
even if it's still not excusable.
The part I
did have a problem with was the scene where Ken
suddenly reined in his end-of-the-world, dogs-and-cats-living-together
wrath with a meek "OK." I'm not sure why, but that scene made me
laugh (in much the same way that most of
The Day After Tomorrow
made me laugh), which I doubt was the intent of Wood or Cloonan.
I think it was the abrupt shift in tone. Or perhaps it was the
feeling I got that Ken so looked up to this nameless Asian (?)
gardener, simply because they physically resembled each other in some
way, that Ken would have done anything the gardener demanded.
"Hey, kid, what can you do about raising my wife from the dead?
No, wait--scratch that. Bring me the animated remains of...
Linda
Lin Dai!"
Another part that bugged me was that Ken somehow got his dog
back. It's bad enough that this simply happens with no
explanation or internal logic (if Ken's powers allow him not only to
reanimate the dead but also to bring them back to life, why doesn't he
resurrect all the people he's just killed?), but it also undermines the
very lesson Ken's supposedly learned. At the end Ken implies that
the sight of his dog keeps him from going over the edge again because
there's a constant reminder of what happened "staring [him] right in
the face." Actually, isn't what's staring him right in the face a
reminder that he gets what he wants when he loses his temper?
In general, I didn't really feel frightened or unnerved or even grabbed
by this story. (I blame Junji Ito for spoiling all other horror
comics for me.) Plus, the art seemed more uneven than in previous
issues. Check out the dad on page...wait, that's right--there are
no
page numbers. Well, that's OK because the dad looks off in
pretty much every scene in which he appears. (On a positive note,
I agree with
Sean
Collins that Cloonan makes Ken's bride both attractive and
authentic: "the protagonist's bonnie new bride, for example, is
refreshingly human and real, a woman you could quite conceivably fall
in love with as opposed to the usual Brechtian device connoting
'PRETTINESS.'")
As for the debate about what's missing from the story (and the series
overall), I'm still not sure I understand
Johnny
B's specific complaint (the complaint that launched a thousand blog
entries). Perhaps, as he suggests, part of it is due to being
conditioned by years of reading mainstream superhero comics to expect
some grand scheme (retroactively inserted by John Byrne, no less) that
will tie everything together. Would he (and by "he" I mean anyone
who feels this way about
Demo) have the same expectation
if he were reading a collection/series/anthology of short stories about
everyday non-super-powered individuals? Would he dismiss
stand-alone short stories
by the same author as "
trivial
and inconsequential somehow" if they didn't all hang together?
And on that note, we now return you to your
regularly-scheduled
discussion
of
Demo
#7 (which will take place on this blog approximately one to
two weeks after everyone else has started analyzing
Demo #8).
