Phonographic

On this blog, I attempt to merge two of my most passionate interests: music and comics. Often, this “blending” occurs with huge, jagged edges. Not today.

In the first few pages of Phonogram we get references to The Buzzcocks, Le Tigre, and Kula Shaker, and explanation of “what early 90s riot-grrrl grew up into,” and the breakdown of our young male hipster’s wardrobe, down to his (non)ironic Superman T.

Writer Kieron Gillen is a fellow music journalist, although of the more professional and active sort. And like all good prosaic purveyors of pop, Gillen does more than tell the story and sell the scene, he turns it into poetry. Jamie McKelvie, who handled artistic duties on the competent-but-soulless mod love story Long Hot Summer (also from Image), provides the gray-scaled characters and settings with a sharp wit and unique personality.

But Phonogram is not just another static hipster foray into sequential storytelling. In the world of Phonogram, music is magic, and I don’t mean metaphorically. I don’t know all the details so far, but from what I can figure Gillen has crafted a reality in which phonomancer’s alter physics or the other sciences using pop music. In the tradition of Hellblazer, our protagonist/narrator David Kohl is one of the magicians, although apparently not a great one.

But you don’t have to take any of my word on any of this. You can hop on over to the site and read a ten-page preview. I promise you won’t be disappointed. If you are, then you just suck.