Local

Hearkening back to the early movies of Alison Anders and Wong Kar-Wai, the cinematic graphic novel Local takes a page from experimental film narratives of the mid-1990s, where one story gives way to the next, playing on an ambiguous sense of time while anchored firmly by place. Maneuvering rhythmically across country, author Brian Wood (DMZ, Northlanders) ambitiously chooses 12 American cities and builds characters and stories around them: a man desperate to redeem himself in Missoula, a romance in flux in Chicago. These intimate snapshots of people are all too familiar, those quotidian wanderers in vulnerable situations we see every day, whom we’d rather not know about, but cannot take our eyes off of.

Wood’s characters suffer abandonment, indifference and a litany of abuses before emerging torn and damaged to carry on the next leg of their lives. Often touted for his ability to portray the female voice with disarming clarity, Wood ingeniously sifts through the grit of the ugliest human emotions and depicts relationships that rustle them to the surface. Local’s vignettes are buoyed by inker Ryan Kelly’s sense of movement and thick painterly lines.

The raw, emotional threads exposed throughout the book don’t tie together neatly, and the jumbled internal monologue at the conclusion feels uneven and awkward. A few of the cities play too much of a supporting role, just falling short of fulfilling their potential as key players in the life of the narrative. But at its heart, Local is a story of wandering, and the small joys and abject sorrows that we encounter when we’re lost.

—Kai-Ming Cha