Air vol. 1: Letters From Lost Countries
“Air” is a series that starts off with a woman and a man falling from the sky into the sea. It doesn’t get less weird from there as we’re properly introduced to the woman, Blythe, an acrophobic flight attendant, as she gets sucked into a conspiracy to change the world. Threatened by a vigilante group looking to police the skyways using a fleet of hijacked planes. Receiving letters from countries that don’t exist anymore, and then actually going to said countries. Encountering a feathered serpent in dreams. Finding out the company she works for is trying to capitalize on ancient Aztec technology as a new power source. These are all things that happen to Blythe over the course of this volume and connecting them all is the man, Zayn. She may be doing this because he comes off as the love of her life, but it sure looks like he could be stringing her along just as well.
“Air” is also a series that was originally published by DC’s Vertigo imprint in the aughts and ran for 24 issues. It may have been the first ongoing series that G. Willow Wilson wrote, but there’s a reason that she’s best known today as the creator of “Ms. Marvel.” She throws a lot of stuff at the reader over the course of the five issues collected here and it all manages to be interesting without being engrossing. It’s a case of the story presented being competently told and without the spark to tie all of its big ideas together and really make them feel accessible and exciting.
Even so, you have to respect Wilson’s ambition in all the big ideas she chucks into this series and things do start coming together at the end of the volume when the big picture (finally) comes into view. Artist M.K. Perker also does a good job conveying all of the realism and fantasy that the story calls for; though, his style is very much what I’d consider “House Vertigo.” Which means that it offers clean storytelling, some appreciable detail, and not a whole lot of flash. I was never bored while reading through “Letters From Lost Countries,” yet I could never get away from thinking that, “Yeah, I can see why this never took off *rimshot* at Vertigo.” I’m still interested in seeing what Wilson and Perker have in store for the next volume, though it’s definitely a measured kind of curiosity.