She Could Fly vol. 3: Fight or Flight

When creators Christopher Cantwell and Martin Morazzo left Luna Brewster post-surgery at the end of vol. 2, it felt like it could work as an ending for the series.  The assumption being that her mental issues would get better as she recovered and was surrounded by family.  We find out that was not the case at the start of vol. 3.  Even if Luna’s obsessive-compulsive disorder was successfully dealt with, she’s now struggling with Dysexecutive Syndrome, which causes her to lose track of time and place and mix up the identification of things.  Suspecting that this was due to her surgery, she’s moved out of her now-divorced parents’ place and is living on her own working in a popcorn store.  Luna still dreams of flying, though.  Vividly so.  To the point where people start falling to their death in the city in impossible ways, she wonders if she might be the one responsible.

“She Could Fly” has always struggled to maintain a workable balance between quirkiness and grounded human drama.  While I can’t say that this volume is quirk-free, Cantwell and Morazzo have decidedly embraced the latter by telling the story entirely from Luna’s perspective.  From the very first page we see the giraffe, elephant, and zebra on her pizza as she does and are as confused as she is when she winds up on a bridge and doesn’t know why.  This locked-in perspective does take some getting used to as Luna’s mind is not a pleasant place to be and it can feel almost suffocating to see things entirely from her perspective when the series has had a more expansive focus across its cast in the past.

The creators’ choice does turn out to be a rewarding one if you stick with it.  Aside from providing an empathetic look into the mind of someone struggling with mental illness, turning Luna into an unreliable narrator of her own story adds a welcome level of uncertainty to the proceedings.  While it might be easy to write of some of her hallucinations, you’re never quite sure of what’s going on until more people start interacting with her.  This exclusive focus on Luna means that some developments and reveals about other members of the cast aren’t as developed as they should be.  Still, for a finale that bets it all on investing the reader in its protagonist’s struggles, Cantwell and Morazzo have delivered a very satisfying one.