After having finally discovered Brian Wood's Local (a perennial favourite of fellow NTS writer James) by virtue of my LCS actually having all its first few issues in, and having enjoyed it immensely, I did the usual thing I do when I discover something a little while after everyone else - went back and read some reviews of it.

In the case of comics, that doesn't leave you very many decent places to turn to. It's certainly not worth going anywhere near the reviews that Ain't It Cool offers, while the quality of Silver Bullet's reviews are frustratingly inconsistent. Paul O'Brien is probably the best comics reviewer on the 'net, but he rarely focuses on anything other than X-Men books (which he's perfectly entitled to do - it is an X-Men site, after all). So that really only leaves The Fourth Rail, which has taken a battering in recent months due to a lengthy hiatus and, finally, the departure of one of its two reviewers. It's still worth reading on a weekly basis, but it feels a lot more lightweight than it used to.

Anyway, I went back and read the review of Local #1 that the site had up, and was surprised to read the following :

The scenario doesn't end well... time and time again, as the young woman continues to replay events, tweaking them each time to achieve a different result. But even her abilities can't turn a bad situation into a good one.

Abilities? What? Megan has superpowers now?

And still he goes on :

One could interpret the repetition of events as the main character playing possible scenarios through her mind before finally taking action, but given that Demo was a series about special people in mundane or unfortunate circumstances, I expect the same holds true here. Wisely, Wood doesn't play up the superhuman/supernatural elements in the story, but instead focuses on the reality of an ugly situation from different perspectives.

Okay, seriously. Did I completely miss something, here? Given that Local is a series of vignettes about local, small-town life, set very firmly in the "real" world, just how exactly do you draw the interpretation that Megan has the ability to shift reality and replay the same situation? Surely it's patently obvious from the very first instant that the story "winds back" that what's happening is that Megan is playing possible scenarios. What Wood is doing is employing a very old narrative trick (come on, films have done it for donkey's years) of making you think that what you're seeing is actually happening, before revealing that it's not.

I suppose it's possible to forgive MacPherson the oversight when you consider that, as the first issue of the title, it's harder to make assumptions about what the series is going to be all about. But on the other hand, I felt Local set out its stall as the type of story it was going to tell pretty much right from page one. It strikes me that being unable to cope with the clever narrative device - describing it instead as "a Groundhog Day-like hell" - is a surprisingly (given the reviewer's past form) narrow way of looking at it. It's also a very "comic book" way of looking at it - "Hey, if a situation reads slightly abnormally, it must involve weird sci-fi or fantasy elements, right?"

I don't know. Or is it just me? Am I the only person that didn't interpret that issue literally?