This is a book of episodic (not linked, but not disparate) short stories with visual accompaniment. The family stuff isn't as unbearable as these things usually are, although of course it's still bad. I highly recommend everybody grab the hardcover collected edition for like 20 bucks. It's absolutely worth doing.

Six years ago this would have been 4—possibly 5—stars.

I really like a lot of the ideas in these stories, which are snapshots of a woman's life throughout her twenties, and the art and packaging are fantastic, but for the most part I just didn't care about the characters, so I had a hard time caring about the outcome of all the really overblown drama. It felt like I was stuck in the head of an annoying, overdramatic teenager.

I fell fast and hard for Local, a graphic novel by Brian Wood with art by Ryan Kelly. From about the fourth page on I would read each panel and sigh dreamily, caressing every page before I turned it over to read the next.

I like to think I would have loved Local the same even if it didn’t have one chapter set in Minneapolis at Oarfolkjokeopus. The world will never know if that is true. I am sure people from Richmond, Portland, Halifax, Chicago, Tempe and Austin probably feel the same way.

Local is a big, beautiful graphic novel an anthology of the twelve comic books that follow Megan McKeenan as she travels throughout the US and Canada. The series started in Portland when Megan is a seventeen-year-old runaway and each chapter finds her in a new place and a year older.

Read the rest of the review on MN Reads.

This is one of the only graphic novels I've read that is actually a "novel" and not a memoir. It's essentially a collection of short stories that follows Megan McKeenan as she drifts from one location to another, each story representing a different place and a different year of Megan's life. While Megan's restlessness and some of the poor decisions she made could get on my nerves, they also made her incredibly real. I related to her sense of not being rooted anywhere, although 10 locations in 10 years would be a little much for me.

I LOVED the artwork in this graphic novel, definitely my favorite graphic novel artwork to date. It's realistic, but also exceedingly detailed. This is a graphic novel in top form, where you can spend a long time poring over the pictures and absorbing the story through them before moving on to the next page. (I admit that, even with graphic novels, I'm still essentially a "reader" who tends to practically skip over the images). But you won't want to skip over a single image in this baby.

I used to love the TV show ALF. So when it first showed up on Hulu over a decade ago, I blogged about how I was going to marathon the first season over the course of a weekend, and write about it. After two episodes, I had to turn it off. Sometimes it's better to have nostalgia for something you once loved than to go back and see how flawed it is, and how you no longer appreciate that form of art.

The fear of nostalgia over quality is why I haven't reread Local since 2009. I was having a rough year. I had a terrible breakup and was starting to hate a job I had once loved. So one weekend, I took some hallucinogens and read Brian Wood's Local, and LOVED it. Not in the "Oh, man, I was so Fucked Up, and I loved this thing, but now I don't remember anything about it." way, but in the "I just had a real intimate connection with this story and this art, and I vividly remember it, and would like to preserve those pleasant and vivid memories" sort of way.

Since then, it's sat on my bookshelf. I've recommended it to people who have also loved it, I redated and rebroke up with the terrible ex, I took a different job in the same industry and don't hate it. So it was time. It was time to reexperience Local. This time, sober.

I love it just as much.

It's a connection of short stories that doesn't follow the traditional narrative chain of "introduce character, introduce trauma, show them making terrible decisions, do or don't redeem them". Instead, the protagonist comes off as possibly identifiable but fairly shitty for the thrust of the book, and then you are presented with a story that may or may not change how you view the character. And there's good reasoning behind the way the story is told. It's not told out-of-order for the sake of being 90s Pulp Fictiony. Instead, it feels like you're meeting a person, making an acquaintanceship or friendship (depending how you feel about her) with someone, and then, after they experience a change in their life, they explain why they are the way they are. It's very satisfying as a reader.

[a:Ryan Kelly|180971|Ryan Kelly|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s art is the True Star of this book, though. Even without the hallucinogens. It's just black and white inks, but the detail and the panel layouts make it feel almost 3-dimensional, like you could pick a Polaroid up off the protagonist's floor.

I would recommend this to pretty much anyone. It remains one of my all time favorite collections.

I can't believe I read this all in a day. Okay, I can. Twelve short "stories" of sorts are connected by a single young woman who moves around from place to place, burning bridges. Megan isn't the nicest girl, but I saw bits of myself in her. Her closure is a little cheesy, but it is oddly reassuring to the female twenty-something.

A remarkable experiment in the comic book form. Twelve short stories linked together by a common character. Ultimately this collected volume is about that character, a young woman named Megan, who can't seem to stay in one place for too long. Writer Brian Wood's original vision was to make each story into a tribute to its setting (Each installment takes place in a different North American city). But instead we see snapshots of a woman's life as she grows from an 18-year-old runaway to a 30-year-old woman who is finally ready to settle down.

"Local" is a stark contrast from Wood's other notable works, "DMZ" and "Northlanders," which are gritty, violent and testosterone-driven books dominated by male characters immersed in brutal warfare. "Local" is about a girl growing into a woman. Amazing work.

Local takes the format and tone of [a:Brian Wood|20493|Brian Wood|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1189017871p2/20493.jpg]'s [b:Demo|235648|Demo The Collected Edition|Brian Wood|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172978621s/235648.jpg|228247] and adds two competing elements: the decade-plus maturation of a confused girl and the culture of twelve mostly-young-adult-friendly towns. At the outset, the places are the driving force in the story, but by the end, it's all about the girl, Meg. That switch, and the balancing act between the two themes, is frustrating. Some towns you see a lot of, and get a feel for, but others, like Portland, Halifax or Austin, are story-driven, and could happen almost anywhere. There's too much universality to Meg's story for the places to matter. Plus, by the end of the book, when she starts to figure things out, it's almost cruel for her wanderlust to kick in.
Despite all the criticism, I really liked the book. It lacks the verve and creativity of Demo, but Meg's plight is engaging and personally resonant. I wish Wood and Ryan Kelly could redo the beginning of the book to better reflect where the collection ends up. The New York, Chicago, Norman, and Austin issues are just wonderful, impactful character stories. Even the less connected stories, like the Missoula diner scene, work stand-alone. This is a good collection, even if it doesn't quite reach up to Demo or the glowing quotes on the backcover.