Comics Cotillion: air #7

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March hasn’t even passed, but I’m already comfortable in predicting that the seventh installment of air, “The Picture of Zayn Al Harrani” will make many year-end lists as one of the best single issues of 2009. G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker have delivered a fantastical, lyrical story that answers a lot of questions about Blythe’s mysterious love interest, Zayn.

The story picks up from last issue’s cliffhanger: Blythe has somehow been transported through time and space into the body of a young boy, the 10-year-old Zayn; meanwhile her compatriots aboard the mysterious flying machine are in danger of crashing into the ocean without Blythe’s hyperpract powers to fuel the engine. “The Picture of Zayn Al Harrani” spins out both these threads in an elegant fashion, weaving a tale that is equal parts moving and suspenseful. 

Spoilers, as always, after the jump:

The issue opens with a prose piece, in which G. Willow Wilson writes as herself, narrating an encounter she had with Blythe in the Amsterdam airport. The story walks a thin-line between a heady and seductive magical realism and excessive cuteness, but mostly stays on the right side of that boundary: it’s fun to entertain the notion that Wilson is not only the author of but also a participant in air’s fantasy.  That Wilson can simultaneously be inside and outside of that fantasy mirrors Blythe’s condition throughout the story: she’s inside and outside Zayn – “Am I a pilot here? Or a passenger?” Blythe asks herself at the story's beginning.

That question informs the rest of “The Picture of Zayn Al Harrani.” As we watch Blythe/Zayn evolve from a confused ten year old to a rebellious prep-school student to a would-be terrorist and finally to the international man of mystery we met in the first issue, we can never quite be sure who’s in the cockpit. When the 10-year-old asks his baba, “If I go to America … and stay there for years and years, where will I be from?”, Blythe remarks, “I fell in love with a stranger. Now he has a childhood, a family, a country. And as soon as I found out what they are, he begins to DOUBT them.” Is she merely an observer or is her arrival in his brain the catalyst for the alienation that drives Zayn throughout his life?

There’s a flipside to that question: when Blythe fell suddenly and deeply in love with Zayn back in issue #1, did she fall so quickly because some part of her knew/knows/will know Zayn better than anyone else could possibly know him on account of the sojourn she’d had taken/eventually would take in his mind? I had originally written off her sudden passion for Zayn as a concession to the pulpy stories that air uses as a vehicle for its more complex ideas, but now I’m not so sure. Blythe and Zayn’s encounter at a party, years before the events of the first issue, suggests a deeper connection between the two. Even without their mind-meld, Blythe appears to have played a major role in making Zayn the man who he becomes, steering him away from the jihad and towards whatever precisely it is he does today.

Whether or not Blythe's arrival in Zayn's body plays a causal role in his alienation, Zayn's transition from childhood to adolescence to frustrated adulthood is portrayed by Wilson and Perker with great sensitivity. His inability to find a place in either culture that shaped him is genuinely moving, and all of people from whom he feels alienated -- his family, his highschool girlfriend, his teacher at the madrassa -- are robust, multi-dimensional characters with whom the reader can empathize. That Wilson can seamlessly combine Zayn's story with the high-concept fantasy of air's pulpier parts is a testament to her abilities as a writer.

“The Picture of Zayn Al Harrani” is, at its heart, a love story. Blythe’s ride in Zayn’s body nicely literalizes the idea that love is knowing someone else as well as you know yourself.  Of course, Blythe and we readers still don’t know Zayn perfectly. Her trip ends before we can find out what his role in air’s overarching plot is, but that doesn’t stop air #7 from being a thoroughly satisfying comic.

Air #7. Writer: G. Willow Wilson; Artist & Cover: M.K Perker; Colorist: Chris Chuckry; Letterer: Jared K Fletcher; Publisher: Vertigo Comics.

Stray notes and questions:
-The feathered serpent cannot be confined by panels. Is this as a representation of hyperpraxis in which the panel represents a conventional way of ordering the page (like a map is a conventional way of ordering the world) and the serpent, as a symbol, isn't bound by that conventional order? As Blythe can move in ways that maps claim are impossible, can the serpent move in ways contrary to the dictates of the panels?

-Zayn’s teacher at the Madrassa and his recruiter for “the international crisis” have remarkably similar character designs, only differing in the color of their clothes. Are they reflections of each other?

 -Do Zayn’s many passports and identities in past issues suggest that he’s still wrestling with the question that worried him at age 10, “where will I be from?”