Magic You Can Sing-An Interview with the PHONOGRAM Team
Music, when it comes down to it, is magic. Nothing else can control so many people so quickly, nothing else can trigger such an instant emotional response and nothing else can mean so many different things to so many different people. It’s an incredibly powerful, passionate, fascinating force that has been largely absent from comics.
Kieron Gillen and James Mckelvie are planning on changing that.
In PHONOGRAM, a six-issue mini-series starting this month from Image, music IS magic. An untamable wild force that tears through the world and is about to make the main character’s life very interesting. I talked to writer Kieron Gillen about music, comics, the inspiration behind the series and what the ideal PHONOGRAM soundtrack is.
Fractal Matter: What’s the first single you ever bought?
Kieron Gillen: Belinda Carlisle’s “Leave a Light On For Me”.
Er. I could make up something more credible if you wanted, but it’d be
a terrible lie.
FM: What’s the first gig you ever went to?
KG: First gig I’ll count as one was Therapy? at the Wolvehampton Civic the day Troublegum came out.
Relatively late, I think, for a first gig. Blame coming from Stafford, which also explains why something like their “Nowhere” appealed so much: alienation, drunkenness, masturbation and a sense of hysterical, gleeful escape just beyond your fingertips. but fundamentally, out of reach.
FM: Were you worried about entering a field that (Very loosely) has been Vertigo’s playground for so long?
KG: We like to think of ourselves as upbeat young urchins creeping beneath the fence and scrumping apples from old man Vertigo’s orchard, before taking them back to our patented vice to turn it into 45% scrumpy. You know - the sort that dissolves your eyeballs and leaves you drunk for the rest of your life. That is, about a day of liver-melting pain.
More seriously, no. We’re worried about matching up to individual
stories, but actually taking on Vertigo on their home territory didn’t bother us
at all. And it’s worth noting that in terms of approach, there’s no way DC
would have let someone get away with a lot of stuff in Phonogram.
FM: Did the story change as the work progressed?
KG: Yes. It became a story, for one instead of a collection of vaguely considered half-ideas. Basically, since Phonogram kind of developed over 4 years, a lot of change was natural. Especially because it’s a book that is meant as commentary on a lot of real world things, as specific things in the real world change, so does the comment we wished to make.
FM: How did working with music change your approach to the writing and art?
KG: Music and Comics are as far apart as two art forms can be. Put simply, there’s no sound in comics. However, in a more metaphysical wanky way, I like to think there’s some connection between each having specific and non-specific emotional resonances. Specific ones are things which move you for an identifiable reason - in music, it’s a lyric. Unspecific ones are things which move you for no identifiable reason - in music, that’s a chord progression or drum-beat or whatever. In comics, the former is mostly words and the latter is mostly in the art. Which is the pseudy reason behind why McKelvie’s crediting as Music and I’m credited as Lyrics on the title reason. We also did it as we thought it was funny.
Music’s a great muse for comics, really. Since it’s an impossible problem to convert, you’re left with a lot of room to improvise and try and invent novel solutions. I’d recommend it to anyone.
FM: Did you develop any specific techniques to portray the music in the series?
KG: A few, but many of them are improvised on a page by page basis. Portraying the invisible is, of course, pretty much impossible, so we tend to concentrate on the effect music would have on a person. Showing how it feels to dance to something is easier than just portraying the sound waves. We don’t really do much for the impressionistic approach to depicting music, partially because with McKelvie’s pop-art syle it doesn’t particularly gel.
There’s other standard conventions though, like any human voice which is singing being hand-lettered as opposed to the computer lettering of normal speech.
FM: Did you have specific pieces of music in mind for the story or did they present themselves as it moved along?
KG: Very much the former, but with a splash of the latter. Part of the research for Phonogram: Rue Britannia was actually just loading my Ipod with every track I could find from 94-96 and listening to it. Didn’t matter whether it was good or bad, just everything possible to try and allow me to draw lines between various aspects. It also made me realise that my hatred of Kula Shaker - which had kind of become a joke since I hadn’t heard them for years - still actually burnt as bright as ever.
I knew certain songs were going to be of key import, but more popped up. In fact, is we ever get a chance to do more Phonogram, there’s whole episodes I want to do based around a single song’s structure, momentum and meaning. I’ve been eyeing the Pippette’s “Pull Shapes” and TV On The Radio’s “Wolf Like Me” with possessive thoughts on my mind.
FM: Similarly, is there a PHONOGRAM soundtrack?
KG: One of our secret dark fantasies would be to do a special edition of the Phonogram trade which came with its own soundtrack CD. Licensing would be f**king insane, but it’d be a fun exercise. At least until McKelvie and I came to blows over which Manics’ track to include, anyway. However, I’m a little obsessive-compulsive with my script writing, noting down what I was listening to as I wrote each page. Partially for quasi-magical reasons, in case I want to try and recreate a mood, but mostly to entertain my collaborators. I’ve included these in the back-matter for each issue of Phonogram. They would, effectively, act as a soundtrack.
On a similar topic, I’m actually talking to a DJ mate of mine about doing a Phonogram club night in Bristol or Bath, which would be extremely funny.
FM: Do specific pieces of music relate to specific characters?
KG: God, yes. Characters in Phonogram are the sort of people who’ll use pop-records as surrogate personalities, so there’s bits in all of them which are trying to mirror the mood and message of specific bits of music. For example, Kohl’s opening walk across town to Ladyfest in the first issue is essentially the opening half of the Afghan Whig’s “Gentlemen”. The first page transition is basically the immaculate hardness of title track’s drums emerging from the glowering fog of the opening “If I were Going”. As Dulli drawls “Now.”, Kohl heads off with his head full of guitars and pain and betrayal.
God, “Gentlemen” is a f**king album.
FM: What single piece of music sums up PHONOGRAM for you?
KG: For this six issue-mini - and we’d love to do more - the song which strikes the most similar notes is Pulp’s “Glory Days” from This Is Hardcore. That they manage to do what is going to take us six issues in five minutes is just a testament to the wonder that is Jarvis Cocker.
FM: What single piece of music sums up your working relationship?
KG: French Disko by Stereolab (”Even though the world is essentially an absurd place to be living in, it doesn’t call for further withdrawal. I say there are still things worth fighting for”).
FM: How much of the world of PHONOGRAM do you have planned out?
KG: Well… The world as involved directly into this first mini-series is completely planned out, including the stuff that doesn’t actually turn up but is more of the larger world-building frame-work. The Adversary is referenced vaguely, for example. The Goddess is the feminine principle – and you may imply that there’s other God-like beings of similar standing, which I have pretty well worked out.
However, Phonogram’s world is a big place. There’s places where I want to build. There has to be, to attempt to try and explain my feelings on music. My feelings and ideas about music change. If the structure was too rigid, it wouldn’t work. It needs to have a degree of give to it. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean that I can just constantly rewrite the rules, but that the framework is designed to be able to have alternate takes on magic slotted in. Schools of phonomancery, if you will. Kohl meets people who have different interests and talents than him along the way. There’s always room for more there.
FM: There’s a definitively English ‘voice’ to the book. Was this a conscious choice, especially in regard to the music used, or was it simply a byproduct of how you work?
KG: A conscious choice, really (There’s not many things in Phonogram which weren’t overtly thought out. We worry too much). Even in the sort of storytelling techniques we’re using in the comics, we’re gravitating to a lot of the comics by British creators. 93 saw the first twitches of Britpop… but it also started Vertigo, which relied on British talent heavily. There’s certainly some common storytelling techniques from Early Vertigo which we’re dusting off and trying to find a fresh way of using.
In terms of the cultural references… well, we’re big believers in that the specific lies the universal. Going for something which we know absolutely to be true allows people to recognise their own lives in it, even if the details vary.
FM: We’ve talked about your musical influences on the book. How about your comic ones? Which books most informed your work on PHONOGRAM?
KG: Well, there’s obviously a chunk of Hellblazer in there (Equal parts Delano and Ennis, I’d guess). I didn’t really realise how much the Invisibles got into it until I re-read it recently, but I suspect that’s mainly indirect. That Morrison’s hyper-sigil warped my mind, and left its mark as much as – say – Burroughs left a mark on him. Which is fine. People begat people begat people. On a similar Morrison tip, Kill Your Boyfriend was probably the ultimate Britpop comic and we use some similar narrator-approaches. While we’re talking Vertigo, you can see traces of Sandman and Skreemer – the latter in the use of flashbacks, I suspect. I have crazy love for Milligan. Eddie Campbell’s Alec books helped with the idea of romanticising your environment, as well as the steady-angles on all too many panel progressions (Which I probably originally got from Moore). And hell – since we’re basically listing a load of British bearded/bald guys, let’s name-check Transmetropolitan, in terms of integrating a character who’s essentially a journalist (Kohl isn’t, but thinks in pure musica journalism) into a comics setting. The bits where Kohl steps back and just analyses are very Transmetropolitan, but normally with a different idea in mind.
Oh – and in terms of the occasional splashes of formalist experimentation, I was inspired by Merlin (www.e-merl.com). Pretty much everything he does reminds me that comics is a big space, and it’s worth seeing what’s out there.
FM: What steps have you taken to get the book noticed by readers and carried by stores?
KG: A lot of the usual things – we set up websites, linked to our already existent web-homes, made the presence known on the various boards we hung around on, did interviews, made sure extensive preview material was online in advance of the book and so on. Probably the smartest thing we did was the B-side postcards. One-page mini-narratives introducing the comic, perfect for passing out. In a nod to our fanzine roots, we enlisted a worldwide web of volunteer helpers to bring it to their local shops. We got on the street ourselves too. I spent the entirety of the Bristol 2006 convention standing outside the one entrance and handing out postcards to all and sundry.
At least it kept me away from the bar.
Until the evening.
FM: How important do you think the creative team is to the promotion of a book now?
KG: Well, this is the only book I’ve done, so I’m making it up as I go along. I figure enormously important. Most companies can only do so much. I’ve done a lot but can thinking of other things I could and probably should have done. As a new creator, who no-one knows, you can’t just expect people to order your books because they exist. You have to sing and dance a little. And this is why I’m awake at 2:45 answering your questions when I have to be up in five hours or so.
FM: You get the green light for PHONOGRAM the tv series. Who plays the main characters and why?
KG: Mr Blobby could play David Kohl if someone was willing to pay us enough money to buy the rights. Phonogram’s a comic and the comic’s all we’re really interested in. The only person playing David Kohl is the ink McKelvie puts on the page.
Man, that’s a puritanical answer. Don’t mind me. It’s the nearly-3.a.m.-speaking.
Alasdair started writing when he was nine, powered by a hefty diet of '80s cartoons, Doctor Who and Icepops. He's quite tired by this stage but has written a lot of things for a lot of people, including Fortean Times, Neo and Surreal.