Local - Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly

A few years back, I stopped reading comics.  I’m not sure why, exactly.  For a while, I kept buying them, thinking that I would get back in the habit sooner or later, but those weekly trips to the comic store turned into monthly trips turned into quarterly trips, until one day, when I went in, they said they assumed I wasn’t coming back and had emptied out my pull list.  Anyway, one of the books I was reading at the time was Local, by writer Brian Wood and artist Ryan Kelly.  The last issue I read was probably #5, which was cover dated April of 2006.  The harcover collection came out in September of 2008 from the good folks at Oni Press, and I got it this past Christmas.

Local is “a collection of twelve interconnected short stories.”  The tie that binds them together is Megan McKeenan, who starts as a teenaged girl and ages approximately one year with each issue.  She is adrift through life, looking for a place where she belongs.  Each issue, or chapter in the hardcover, occurs in a different locale, moving from Portland to Minneapolis to Chicago to Toronto to New York and, finally, to Burlington, Vermont, where a 30-year old Megan makes peace with who she is.

It was nice to read a comic again after all this time.  While I doubt that I will be hitting the comic store weekly again, there are some other books that I had not finished that I would like to revisit.  A few of them I have been getting for birthdays and Christmases and have just been waiting for the stories to complete.  Others, I may have to seek out.