Posted by ChrisArrant on Wednesday, June 13 2007 at 9:29 am
When I first started working on the music comic 1 Way Ticket, trying to find other comics that had a more-than-cursoy approach to music was a hard thing to do. But as luck would have it, Kieron Gillen had his own ideas on music in comics.
Kieron Gillen is the writer behind the recent Image series Phonogram with artist Jamie McKelvie. His austere debut into comics (if you forget some small UK anthology work), Gillen comes to comics from a healthy career in video game journalism. Phonogram is best described (by me) as an existential look at music and elaborating on it’s effect — for this, “music is magic”. With its feet firmly planted in 90s era britpop, Gillen & McKelvie’s series deals with the issues of music fandom and taking your own idols to task.
I’ve had the opportunity to interview Kieron on several occassions regarding Phonogram, and it was during that time that I struck up a friendship with Gillen over our shared journalism background and interest in music. As both our comics progressed, we started talking about the possibility of doing a back-and-forth discussion on “music in comics” and how it relates in our work. To cut to it, here it is:
Chris Arrant: Did the idea of depicting music in comics scare you off any when you were ramping up to do Phonogram with Jamie?
Kieron Gillen: Well, it filled me full of fear, which isn’t the same thing as scaring me off. I’m attracted to things that frighten me. Ask the internet’s Women with switchblades, who are perpetually annoyed by my idle e-mail passes (hotchickswithflicks.com, armed-ladies fans.) . In fact, that accurately presenting music in comics is actually impossible is one of the things that attracted me to Phonogram. Setting yourself an impossible task, and then frenetically trying to work out some way to achieve the bloody thing - or at least something in the vague vicinity of the bloody thing - is attractive to me. It makes sure that you’re not just going through the motions. I’d always rather be an interesting failure than anything middling. But that’s me being a pretentious goit rather than anything else, and - more importantly - I knew that to do the story I wanted to, it would be necessary to have a crack at it.
What about you? I mean, looking at Phonogram and 1 way ticket, it’s the differences between Kitten and Mr Warner’s style, and how that impacted on our creative decisions beforehand which seems the key thing. Did you know Daniel before, then concieved the story for him, or did you have the story idea, then found him? Because I don’t think I really start grappling with the issues of music presentation until I found McKelvie *really*. It was all abstract, and for something as immaterial as presenting music, you need to know what’s in your writers toolbox before you can start to be properly *afraid*.
I’m not sure that last sentence makes any sense. It’s gone 4am, so excuse me. I’ll send this, and hope you get it, and if not, I’m sure it’ll be a comedy segue for anyone reading this public conversation. Hello readers! And fuck you, Fourth Wall.
ARRANT: 1 Way Ticket was a story idea I’d been carrying around for about 8 years, albeit smaller and more just “moments” than a linear story at that point. I’ve been wanting to do it for years, but it wasn’t until 2005 that I figured out the story. Finding an appropriate artist who can do it was a challenge in itself – I was at the point where I thought I’d have to settle for second best or just put the story away when I came across Dan’s work on Livejournal. I quickly back-tracked and bought his SLG series Cocopiazo and was sold. But that was the easy part – trying to sweet talk an accomplished cartoonist to draw someone else’s story, someone he hasn’t even met, free and online? That was tough.
But with Dan onboard, he really showed me that it could be done, and done wonderfully. I look at pages 10-13 to be the highlight of the book so far.
But I’d been obsessing over the ability (or inability) to depict music and musical performances in comics for years. By the time I found Dan, I had boiled it down generally to Charles Schulz’ Schroeder in Peanuts, a handful of Paul Pope comics, Harold Sakuishi’s Beck and the glorious Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley. What about you – did your fascination with music & comics turn to you knee-deep in back issue bins and making infantile postings on the WEF about it like me?
GILLEN: I think “talking talented artists intodoing work for shits and giggles” is probably something that needs to be talked about. Though probably not here - it’s off topic - and ideally not in public. It’s the sort of secret knowledge writers should pass around in a private Cabal. After all, the more people who know it, the less powerful it will be.
Where was I? Oh yeah - trying to souce a visual vocabularly for music in comics… well, I was mainly leaning on stuff from /outside/ comics, I think. I mean, we use certain conventions to show music - sung voices are hand-lettered to try and convey something of their power and nature, rather than the rest of the computer lettering - but at least in RUE BRITANNIA I’m primarily lifting tricks from Music Criticism and trying to apply them to comics. In some ways, Music Criticism faces exactly the same problem with us. A song is a song. You can deconstruct it, sure… but what people are actually interested in is how it makes you feel. That emotional connection, locating the exact charge, the moment of transcendence, whatever. Of course, that’s an impossible task too, which leads to Music Criticism’s purple prose as they desperately chase after music with the full force of the English language. That it’s futile gives music journalism its beauty, and when it gets even slightly close it’s… well, it’s enormously powerful and - for a writer, anyway - satisfying.
In other words, like music journalism, Phonogram primarily approaches music indirectly, trying to sneak up on it rather than attempting to actually signify it through synaesthsia like you’re doing.
Does that make any sense?
ARRANT: Definitely. Although I am a writer (isn’t everyone?), the directional origin I was coming from for 1 Way Ticket was the years spent playing in local bands in my teens and twenty-somethings. After years of playing piano and guitar in my room as a child, to be thrust into the world of garage band culture, getting to be on a first-name basis with the local music supply store clerk, and seeing the unique culture framework that surrounds the music experience, it left an indelible mark with me. I know every single one of the characters in 1 Way Ticket — I’ve met them, played with them, watched them play, and seen glimpses of them only to elaborate it fully in my mind. Music is unique in that it is the only ‘artform’ that is universally accepted, and in some ways idolized, by youth culture to a wide degree so it’s very universal. Everyone’s wanted to play in a band — some have — and everyone knows someone who has.
GILLEN: I think that’s an interesting way of looking at music - “the only artform that’s actually universally respected by youth-culture”. Which, of course, shows why it still manages an essential disreputability, which is one of the things that always attracts me to culture (Comics, Videogames, Pop Music - my essential troika). As you say, it’s a shared experience. Of course, one difference between Phonogram and 1 Way Ticket is that I’m concentrating a lot more about the /consumption/ of music. Since I’m taking that literal Music-Is-Magic approach, I knew the most obvious thing to do was basically turn rock musicians into these Godlike creatures, touching their majesty on the earth. Except, for me, that’s clearly bullshit. What’s interesting to me about pop music is an individual’s interaction with a work of art and what happens there - and it’s such an instinctive work of art, it’s questionable whether even a fraction of its creators even vaguely understood what they’ve done. (The one rule of music journalism: It’s a rare artist who’s even slightly as interesting as their work.)
Which reminds me - One problem with doing a work about such a youth-orientated cultural form we’ve bumped into is people presuming we’re trying to be too cool for school. You get any responses like that?
ARRANT: I haven’t received any responses from other people regarding, but my old built-in defensive writing mechanisms have steered me away from a couple things that could have been too disposed to youth audiences only. Even my first-hand knowledge on the intracies of the music scene is a bit dated, so for myself I have to carefully analyze it to make sure I’m speaking as broadly as possible, even though what I’m saying is still something I want to say.
I think the key is to find the timeless cultural experience in it all, and to present it in a way that most ages could read it even though the subject matter is a youth-oriented group. We were all young once, right?
On a great tangent, one thing I found particularly interesting that happens both in comics and music is how a majority of people’s music and comic tastes in their older years is latched into the music of their teenage years. As with comics where we see a majority of the audience still holding out for the superheroics of the comics of their younger days, in music a large percentage of the average consumer-base continues to follow the musical acts of their teenage years. While people might veer outside their particular genre choices for the biggest hits of the day, they still call the tastes of their teenage years as their evergreen stomping grounds.
GILLEN: God, there’s a lot of that in Phonogram. One things which pleased me - as it wasn’t something I was actively trying to write, as I think comics-as-commentary-on-comics-culture is so painfully overdone now - was how the whole defining yourself by your teenage loves is something that’s just as true in music and comic circles. Which is absolutely true - in fact, of all the pop art-forms, they’re the two which are most strongly polarised in that way. Films, TV, Games… you may have some of your tastes defined in terms of genre or whatever, but there’s always a constant consumption for new things which you may not always get in some people in Music or Comics.
I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s certainly a thing.
Something else you said makes me think, about trying to speak as broadly as possible which I want to touch on. As anyone who’s winced at the expanses of my glossaries will know, I took absolutely the opposite approach. Rather than making it timeless, I went hyper-specific, hoping that by talking about a specific incident people would recognise the truth *there* and be able to extrapolate it out themselves. And while, inevitably, there’s a considerable chunk of readers who were alienated by that, I think - for this comic anyway - it was the right approach not to take. Which isn’t to say that I may go the other way in another comic - part of me would love to build a fully functional music scene from scratch, as a kind of Fantasy Music Journalism. Though I figure that would be alienating in lots of other ways, especially as I’d inevitably take it far too seriously: the J.R. Tolkein of pseudo-pop. Man!
But the problem with my approach is that it gives Phonogram an essential transience. You can write about the universals for as long as you want to. If you’re writing specifics, then you have to understand why the blogkids are getting all het up over Los Campersinos! or whatever and then be able to write that without coming across as a faker. I’ve made a promise to myself that if it ever felt just wrong, I’d just stop Phonogram dead. It’s not the sort of comic than can be span out without that central sincerity. Which I’m fine with - I knew that was the deal coming in.
That said, there was one quote I noticed in an interview which made me smile: Craig Finn from the Hold Steady saying that he feels that he understands being seventeen a hell of a lot better as a thirty-five year old guy than he did when he was seventeen. Obviously, he was talking about the /emotions/ of being seventeen rather than the culture, but that’s probably the more important bit. That’s all surface stuff, and the scary life-transforming intensity of someone crushing on the Long Blondes is the same universal as me with Kenickie. I know what that feels. I can write that. Or that’s the plan, anyway. Ask me after Phonogam 2, y’know.
God, I’ve gone on a bit there. We probably better start wrapping this up now, but one final similarlity I wanted to run past you: of all media - possible exception for Poetry, which isn’t really a pop medium anymore - comics and music are the ones most suited to be consumed repeatedly. There’s masses of differences in why - and music is ultimately much more repeatedly consumeable than comics, not being primarily a narrative form - but one they share is the ability to explicitly layer information inside a small area. Sure, you can do subtext and imagery and whatever in anything else… but in comics, due to being able to consume a single “story” faster than a film or novel, you can make many more passes and - if someone’s buried something there - unearth more of it.
(Moore said a load about this in his essay on writing comics which Avatar reprinted, I believe, though he was coming it from a Why Comics Is Better Than Film For This Sort Of Thing Angle).
Er… that’s not really a question. But it sounds clever. Fairly clever. Oh, it’s late. Thought?
ARRANT: Well, I may be off the mark but I think that the potential depth for multiple consumption that works in both music and comics is in part due to the ease at which someone can casually read/listen to it, but later come back with a more focused attention and pick out more subtle or over-arcing elements that defied the original casual “tasting”, as it were. While this doesn’t mean all comics and music output has something worth going through it multiple times to pick out the individual facets,
Music probably holds this more than comics, but comics is extremely potent because of it’s art meets text format – for “art” and “text” individually, as well as the unique synergy that it can attain. While that synergy is only usually accomplished by a solo cartoonist or an extremely potent writer/artist team, when it’s happening you can definitely feel the collaborative nature enhancing and adding depth to the work.
I think that the pedestrian accessibility of each medium (music and comics are probably some of the first mediums kids are exposed to) combined with the ability to add some depth to it that only comes to light after multiple “tastings” makes it quite remarkable.
GILLEN: Yeah, exactly. In short: Comics and music - fucking awesome.
I mean… there’s actually a reason, bar tongue-in-cheek pretension, McKelvie and I refer to ourselves as music and lyrics on the intro to each strip. In my kind of metaphysics of comics (metaphysics meaning, as always, “something someone’s made up which makes them feel a bit better and allows them to approach the universe in a way which they want to”) is that what the two sub-diciplines do in comics. The pictures are the equivalent of music - that is, the generalised emotional resonance. Music makes you feel without any necessary reason - one chord makes you feel sad, the other happy and so on. Lyrics work like actual speech or captions in comics - turning those generalised emotions into something specific, and feeding off the power of being juxtaposed with them. Lyrics aren’t really poetry - the most powerful lyrics are primarily those which work because how they fit into the greater piece of the song, and say everything through that. For me, comics dance of word and pictures works in a similar way.
Yeah, I know - particularly full of shit, but it makes me feel better. I suppose my real point is that, generally speaking, its that drawing tangential ideas from another medium - especially one which is as divorced in many terms from comics as music is - leads to inspiration and direction. At least for me.
ARRANT: Yes, it works in a similar way of songwriter and performer in music. 1 Way Ticket has been very collaborative for me – more so than any of the other comics I’ve done. The story ideas come from me, but I temper them with my analysis of Dan’s work and what I think he does best. I talk with him about my ideas and get his input, then do a script. That script is then elaborated and illustrated on by Dan . I encourage him to take liberties with the script if he has better ideas, and so far his deviations have been great and made me look like a great writer. So yes, I can see the duality of roles but for me and Dan it’s more of a jam band who get together to get it on tape. If we did the same comic a different day, it would turn out different. Is that good or not? I don’t know.
GILLEN: Precicely. And, for my purposes, it’s always worth remembering that when you’re going crazy with your metaphors - as I have here - that mediums are big places. Some bands work on a really anal dictator process. Others jam stuff up. It’s worth looking for inspiration in your working relationships all along the axis. At the very least, you keep things interesting by challenging yourself.
That sounds like a place to end. And, to close, whatcha listening to right now? “Until I believe in my Soul”, by Dexy’s Midnight Runners (Projected Passion Revue version) is currently filling the early morning my end.
ARRANT: And now for something completely different, I’ve got a custom mix of Jack Nitzsche songs—”Lonely Surfer” right now – he did a lot of soundtrack work in the 70s, including One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. He has a kind of swagger that I can’t seem to find anywhere else.
GILLEN: Hurrah for music!
I’ve done that before. I’m going to stop.
Category: 1 Way Ticket
