Whit Taylor's Dead Air #1-2

Over on Patreon, Whit Taylor has been serializing her new long-form project, entitled Dead Air. It's the sort of slice-of-life comic that was common in the 90s but has largely fallen out of fashion. It's set at a college in 2002 and follows a frosh named Noe (loosely based on Taylor) who decides to become a DJ at the college radio station. If you're at all familiar with that particular social ecosystem on a college campus, it's a scene that's at once broad-reaching and brimming with potential but also incredibly insular. Taylor mines the particularities of this scene with an incredibly fine sense of detail that creates a rich, albeit wacky, world-building setting. 

One problem with slice-of-life fiction is that it can be meandering and episodic. While the plot is certainly episodic, Taylor smartly establishes key aspects of Noe's character and introduces the key secondary character (a fellow frosh named Nate) within the first three pages of the story. Noe dreams of being a connector, of having something to say and finding a way to say it. Dead Air is a sort of spiritual successor to Taylor's older quasi-autobiographical series Madtown High, another story with a large ensemble cast that celebrates a certain cultural era from the point of view of a protagonist who is an outsider in many ways. 

What Taylor does best here is conjure up a huge cast of outsized personalities with an established pecking order, and slowly reveal details on the nature of their interactions through the eyes of Noe. The first issue goes into a deep dive as to why alternative music is so important to her. It allowed her to express her angst and manage her loneliness and alienation. Taylor once edited an anthology called Sub-Cultures, and she locks into this particular sub-culture in the way that it creates a certain camaraderie even when some of her fellow DJs are insufferable and awful. There is a magic and power to music that Taylor also taps into, as the band she gets free tickets to see creates an experience where Noe says "And just like that, I was transfixed." She wants to be a DJ and become part of the subculture, but she never forgets what music does for her. 

The second issue delves into the specifics of what a DJ does and how they do it, and because the radio station has certain commercial obligations, it is considerably less fun than Noe had hoped. Taylor also established a plot element (each prospective DJ has to make their own ad feature in order to pass their probationary period) and deepened the relationship/friendship between Noe and Nate. The fact that Nate has a girlfriend throws a bit of a roadblock, even if their relationship had been platonic up until that point. That's where the second issue ends, as the narrative starts to build and other key characters are introduced. There is a looseness to the proceedings that's a great deal of fun, as the best slice-of-life stories tend to lend themselves an informal hang-out feel. Taylor focuses on character dynamics and bodies relating in space, which only serves to reinforce this balance of pleasant relationships and witty interactions with the overarching theme of wanting to find a place to belong.