Airports and airplanes are extreme manifestations of a placeless McWorld, and Jihad is a backward-looking form of resistance to that placelessness, but we need not be limited by those choices.

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We believe that a map—a symbol—is something we dream up to represent a real place, real people, real things. That’s not true. The maps, the symbols, are dreaming us.
—Amelia Earhart, in air #6

As the world has become effectively smaller, the apparent differences between individual places have also diminished, reducing the variety of cultural landscapes and human experience to interchangeable tract houses, big box stores, and chain restaurants. This is what political scientist Benjamin Barber calls “McWorld”.

Opposing that tendency is “Jihad”, or, the militant and exclusivist assertion of local difference against the homogenizing consumerism of McWorld. For Barber, the (post)modern world is shaped by the tension between these forces, which are nonetheless paradoxically linked, both politically and in practice (think ethnic separatist suicide bombers whose last meals might include Coca Cola and KFC, or someone who attends a Wal-Mart protest while drinking Starbucks).

G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker locate the opening narrative for their new Vertigo series, air, in these tensions between the apparent homogeneity of the “global village” and human desires for a world richer in meaning.

air is about Blythe, an acrophobic flight attendant. As the series begins, she finds herself entangled in the rivalry between the Etesian Front, whose self-proclaimed mission is to take “the skies back from terror”, and Zayn, a man of indeterminate nationality with whom Blythe becomes romantically involved. The initial story arc ends with the heroine beginning to discover the power of her own mind to remake the world.

In the first two issues, the events in air are largely set in airports and airplanes. So, while the book is peppered with references to many different places, what the reader mostly sees are landscapes like this:

Ahbay Khosla at The Savage Critics describes these scenes this way in