Vertigo may have been returning to its old favourite themes of late, but they haven't given up on being the HBO of comics just yet.  Their latest new series is G Willow Wilson and MK Perker's Air, a curious piece about a stewardess getting drawn into a world of vaguely surreal conspiracy.

I'm told this series started off as a graphic novel before being converted into an ongoing series.  (Which might explain the cover quote by Neil Gaiman, who claims to have read the first six issues.)  It's certainly an unusual premise for an ongoing.  Blythe, a stewardess for Clearfleet Air, finds herself crossing paths repeatedly with the same ethnically indeterminate passenger, who keeps changing his identity and purported nationality.  Meanwhile, she's also approached by a bunch of oddball in-air vigilantes, with some rather unusual ideas about what constitutes safe flying.

The plot fairly races by, and - aside from one awkward segue to a flashback - the story bounces along with unusual speed.  I'm not altogether sure what to make of it, at least just yet.  It's notionally realistic, but at the same time, completely divorced from reality.  Wilson describes it as "the ordinary unreal" in her introductory essay, which is as good a description as any.  Artist MK Perker follows that line, rendering everything as a superficially banal dreamworld.

It's the sort of story where most of the characters aren't people at all, so much as personifications of fears about security.  Blythe herself, in uniform throughout, seems to embody the traditional perception of air travel as a closed system somehow separate from the real world.  The other characters seem to be mainly influenced by the paranoia over security which still doesn't seem to have subsided after 9/11 - although the story isn't interested in the nuts and bolts of terrorism, so much as the way it's intruded into what was formerly a psychological bubble. 

All this makes it a story of ideas rather than of recognisable human beings, plugging downright weird characters into a seemingly conventional thriller story, to unusual effect.  Provisionally, I rather liked it, but it's the sort of series where after a single issue, you could very easily be missing the point, or equally reading in something that isn't actually there.  Still, it's got my attention for now. 

Rating: B+

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