Clearasil nation: The San Francisco Bay Guardian takes a look at "teen angst" comics, including Zero Girl, Black Hole, Blankets and Demo:

"Characters in DEMO are endowed with superhuman strengths of one sort or another, but they are resistant to the notion of the superheroic gesture. These people are not in the denial stage of a story arc that will end in their saving the world. They're just trying to live their weird lives in the world as we know it, the world as it is. If their struggles can be deemed heroic, it's mostly a testament to how difficult it is to be odd in a normal place.

"Superpowers, not recognized as such, are really just enormous problems. And taken literally, DEMO's supernatural aspects somehow become starker and harder to bear. Marie's mother force-feeds her a cocktail of medications designed to shove her back toward the center of the bell curve (a detail reminiscent of the health care industry's addiction to mood stabilizers for children). Elsewhere, a young girl's speech has a terrible power over other people's, leaving her afraid to articulate anything and totally alone. A young man's superhuman strength leads him toward the thug life of a small-town criminal and the depressing knowledge that his friends are using him. None of these themes are solely the property of youth, of course. But an out-of-proportion sense of the effect your actions have on those around you is a regular event of childhood, while messages such as 'conform at any cost' tend to be sharply felt a few years down the road."