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OverviewWednesday March 08th 2006, 6:29 amFiled under: Phonogram: Rue BritanniaPhonogram’s a little tricky to describe, at least honestly. It’s very easy to describe dishonestly: we just say it’s whatever you’re interested in buying and take your money, like the time McKelvie and I loudly extolled its similarlity to Hellboy to a queue of people waiting to get a Mike Mignola sketch.But it’s not like Hellboy. It’s like Phonogram.Okay – let’s do my wonky take on inverse Pyramid style.Phonogram is an Image comic book by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. The first mini-series, Rue Britannia, appeared in 2006, was collected in 2007 and people liked us enough to do a sequel. And assuming we don’t screw it up entirely and/or the whole industry crashes, some more after that.Writer Warren Ellis described it as “One of the few truly essential comics of 2006. Read this or lose”. Songewriter Luke Haines said it “reads like old-school journalism, redolent of the time when there were only four music papers, and the only lists were on the back pages and were called The Charts”. And I was going to choose a random line from one of the (surprisingly few) negative reviews – the one which is somewhat semen obsessed is our fave – but I decided it’d come across as bitter, so I won’t.What’s Phonogram about then?If we’re forced into describing it in a sentence, we tend to say “Hellblazer meets High Fidelity”, which seems to do the trick, though our original description as “Hellblazer meets Blue Monday” was really nearer the mark. The problem with that it made us have to explain we were talking about the joy of Chyna Clugston’s comic book and not the joy of the New Order Record.In other words, it’s a modern dark-fantasy comic, focused around a spiteful social-group of pop-obsessives.It’s big idea?“Music is Magic.You know this already. You’ve known this from the first time a record sent a divine shiver down your spine or when a band changed the way you dressed forever. How does something that’s just noises arranged in sequence do that? No-one knows. It’s just… magic.Everyone knows that. It’s just that some realise that it’s more than metaphor.“The people in question are the Phonomancers, these urban-pop-obssessive magicians who channel and exploit this magic to achieve their desires. The DJ parasitizing from his retro-club’s crowd to achieve immortality. The girl rewriting her personality with a mix-tape. The boy selling out what a Goddess trapped in plastic told him to get an easy lay. And so on, through memory kingdoms, Faustian pop-pacts and a general avalanche of concepts.Pop music is magic: PhonogramThat’s all the text. The subtext of Phonogram is that it’s all real. The magic isn’t just posture, but an expression of my theories of how Pop music works. The metaphysics of its world are what I believe. Another standard way of me describing Phonogram is “Imagine Promethea if Moore cared more about the yeah-yeah-yeahs in Martha Reeves and the Vandella’s “Heatwave” than the deified sock-puppet he keeps in the bathroom”. It’s true . It’s music-journalism by other means, with its elements constructed not just because they look good or seem cool to us – which they do – but because they describe what music does to people.It’s this which makes the whole thing the hardest thing I’ve ever written. If I was just doing it as entertainment, easy. If I was just doing it as theory, likewise. But it’s both, and has to be both or it’s worthless. To express the magic of music, it has to be magic in and of itself – and that means the emotional connection of art. While people who like a dark-fantasy story will enjoy even if they don’t empathise or understand the buried elements, those who’ll love it are those who once put on a record and found themselves altered, forever.And that’s what Phonogram is. It’s my love letter to music. It’s an honest letter – I’ve been shacked up with her for long enough to know that she’s a bitch with a cruel tongue and will happily destroy people on a whim – but it’s still hopelessly in love with her. Songs have made me kinder, crueller, smarter, dumber, funnier, happier, sadder, better and worse, and Phonogram is me and McKelvie telling you all about it.Or that’s the idea anyway.It’s a comic that we care about a bit too much. You may be able to tell.
I used to like kieron gillen when he was at pc gamer uk. Then the internet happened and I learnt he wrote comic strips. Now I don't know what to think. spoiler (click to show/hide)so is this phonogram any good?[close]
I loved Phonogram despite its pedigree. It was an important lesson in separating creator and creation.
