Earlier this week Dark Horse Comics launched a new collected version of Air, the creator-owned sequence by G. Willow Wilson and M.Okay. Perker. The first quantity of the new collections comes from the Karen Berger-curated Berger Book imprint at Dark Horse, and incorporates a new cowl by Perker and a new afterword by Wilson. Today The Beat is happy to current an unique take a look at Wilson’s afterword, in addition to at course of art work by Perker for the guide’s new cowl. Check that out beneath, and look for Air Volume 1 in shops now.
By G. Willow Wilson
In the fourteen years since AIR was first launched, some issues have modified on this planet of air journey, and a few have remained precisely the identical. We are nonetheless inexplicably taking off our sneakers at safety checkpoints. It remains to be probably the most politicized type of mass transit, although for totally different causes. And whereas a lot of the magic is gone, changed by a grim slog crushed into ever-shrinking seats accompanied by nonexistent food and drinks, the pandemic taught us that there’s nonetheless sufficient nostalgia for flight that persons are prepared to board a aircraft merely to circle within the air for half an hour and land once more. Suspended between earth and sky, between time zones, one thing uncanny occurs to the way in which we understand the world.
AIR takes this uncanny in-betweenness and extrapolates it into one thing fairly actually magical. What if we might journey not simply by house, however by metaphor? What if there have been locations to which we might escape that aren’t tethered to geography? The result’s a surreal tumble by fantasy, legend and conspiracy idea. There’s a love story, and a narrative about loss, and about navigating a world that’s now not recognizable–one thing we ourselves battle with as our personal world careens right into a future that feels more and more unsure.
It’s all the time attention-grabbing to revisit one’s personal work from many years previous. It’s a tangible snapshot of who you had been in that second: what you had been eager about, what you had been preoccupied with, what you nervous about. I hope that AIR shall be as significant to readers at this time because it was to MK and myself after we first set out on this journey. So sit again, chill out, take pleasure in a snack–we nonetheless serve complimentary meals on this flight–and prepare for takeoff.
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