We comics types often plan far, far ahead of time. Those plans don't always come out the way we intended, but honestly. We have foresight. Sometimes.
Anyway, as an indication, I've cut and pasted Kieron Gillen's latest blog post, in which he lays out the project I am working on next, after Suburban Glamour. This one's called Phonogram, and it's something special. We're still in the early stages, but we know where we want to take it.
I'll hand you over to the writer, now. Take it away, Gillen...Okay. This one's been squatting in my hindbrain for so long that I've accumulated a good few dozen ways to introduce people to it. Ask me about it and you'll probably notices a half-second freeze as my brain searches through the various options to decide which is best
in this situation.
And now when it comes to actually introducing it in a public "I can properly talk about this now" kind of way, it's even more so. So much to say, so little space to say it in.
Let's try my own wonky take on pyramid style, eh?
Jamie "Long Hot Summer/Suburban Glamour" McKelvie and I are doing a six part mini-series for
Image comics, coming out in 2006. It's called PHONOGRAM: RUE BRITANNIA. It looks like this:
Admire the carefully wrought architectural image of Jamie and the overwrought words of yours truly.
Phonogram is my first real comic and an awkward little fuck of a book to describe. Essentially, in high-concept speak which doesn't really get most of its point,
it's "Hellblazer meets
Blue Monday". That is, a modern dark-fantasy comic, focused around a spiteful social-group of pop-obsessives.
As high-concepts go, it covers an acceptable fraction, but misses a lot. Phonogram is, to be immodest for a second, nothing if not idea-dense. It's Jamie and me over-reaching terribly, which as far as we're concerned is the only way to do this. Most comics by new creators are failures. At the absolute worst, even if McKelvie fails to get the postured pop-stylings and I fail to make the ideas cohere into narrative, it'll be an
interesting failure. That'll do for us.
Conversely,
if it all works...
Put it like this. Walking home from the station yesterday, I was suddenly crippled with anxiety when a speeding car swerved slightly towards the pavement. Normally, I'm at peace with dying. Life's been interesting. Sure, there's been stuff I'll like to do, but if this thirty years is all I'm going to get, I'm fine. However last night, it was different as big letters loomed up inside my head "I can't die: I HAVE TO FINISH PHONOGRAM". Thanks to this, I'm living in fear.
Okay – let's quote from the overview section of my pitch:
"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.
This six issue series is subtitled "Rue Britannia". While it stands alone, I'd like to return to the world and cast if it's vaguely successful. The plot centres around one David Kohl (that's him in the panel) trying to keep hold of his memories and identity as reality is rewritten by an opposing phonomancer cabal. Cue misadventures as he rushes from contact to contact, trying find a solution before being drawn to a final, desperate encounter beneath Primrose Hill.
It gets messy.
Pop music is magic: Phonogram
That'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
this is 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.
Enough hyperbole.
For now, anyway – at least seven months until release means you can expect a lot more in this timbre, about various aspects. Next "thing" to expect to see if one of the B-side pieces. Little one-page narrative pieces which introduce one of the cast in a tiny narrative vignette inspired by a pop song. Written most of them already, and they should hopefully showcase the variety of tones in Phonogram.
I'm terribly excited by this and more than a little scared. You may be able to tell.
