Somehow, I missed issue four of She Could Fly: The Lost Pilot when it came out, so I recently sat down and re-read issue three, then four, and finally issue five. My heart is filled to the brim, and my brain is bouncing around.
This is such a beautiful, heartbreaking series about madness and wanting to escape from it. It’s something that, at different times in our lives, we all want to escape from: that overwhelming sense of losing who you are to the greater cosmos.
Christopher Cantwell and Martín Morazzo have broken me. I have dealt with depression but not nearly on the same level as our hero, Luna, who feels the only way to break out of where she is in life is to fly. To use a jetpack to escape. To leave it all behind.
It’s difficult to put into words at first everything that I’m feeling, because once you wake up from it, once you find yourself feeling normal again, it’s difficult to feel that it’s still you, especially when you’ve carried it around with you for so long. There’s a moment in one of Terry Gilliam’s more infamous films that I have carried with me, where after a young girl has lived within a world of insanity for an entire movie. The first time that she runs into someone outside of that bubble, you get to see her for who she really is: a lost, sad little girl.
You can argue all day what is and isn’t fantasy in this series, but Luna and anyone dealing with mental illness may feel just as lost and just as lonely; they may be walking a figurative tight rope that seems to go on forever, and, sometimes, you do just want to fly. You want to seek out hope wherever you can find it, and there is an obsessive compulsion to doing so that, in its intensity, can scare people sometimes.
I never watched Cantwell’s Halt and Catch Fire, but now I want to, and I want to read his next series coming out next month.
Sincere kudos to artists Morazzo and Miroslav Mrva for bringing us into the mind of Luna: that reckless, dangerous, and beautiful imagination; those enthralling psychoses coming to life on the page. They’re startling and breathtaking.
It’s not very often that a gem of a creation comes along like this that captures a state of mind so perfectly, that makes you feel what it’s like to want and need a moment of sanity.
If you’ve never watched the Evangelion series, or if you have and you want something that resonates in similar ways, check out She Could Fly. If you love the hypnotic, symbolic, cinematic qualities of Alejandro Jodorowsky, you need to give this a try. Like some of those examples which are some of my favorite creators and creations, She Could Fly has left me staggered.
Creative Team: Christopher Cantwell (writer), Martín Morazzo (artist), Clem Robbins (letters), Miroslav Mrva (colors), Karen Berger (editor), Rachel Roberts (associate editors), Mike Richardson (publisher), Adam Pruett (digital art technician)
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
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