We need more comics like PHONOGRAM or CASANOVA. We need more comics that hold up under scrutiny, but still get in your blood and make it fucking move.
I read Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB #5 a couple weeks ago, and, as usual, it made me incredibly depressed that more comics weren’t this good. The seven-issue series takes place entirely on the same night and in the same club, with each issue a discrete story showing a different character’s perspective on the events.
Each issue also focuses on the individual character’s relationships with music, and this one featured a character who would quote Long Blondes lyrics ad nauseum. What, don’t know who the Long Blondes are? Yeah, neither did I until this issue. Luckily, Gillen packs each issue with a ton of extra content, including a glossary of all the musical references the characters make over the course of each issue.
“My life is neither as good or bad as a Long Blondes song, but I have the sense and understanding that perhaps... Well, perhaps one day it may be,” says Laura Heaven, the fifth issue’s protagonist. And that’s precisely the point of PHONOGRAM: It explores the ways in which music shapes our lives, the ways in which we live inside music, process it, and parse that out in our everyday interactions.
“The second thing this issue is about is art as a proxy or prop for personality,” writes Gillen in his end-of-issue essay
The idea of art as a gateway. By becoming the record or comic or whatever, you become closer to something else ... . [Then] there’s people who take it further. You end up with people like Laura, who have the quotation marks closing in on them like a bad supervillain death trap. It’s a transitional state, which is about trying to create the new you by imitation of what’s most desirable to you. You pretend to be it and eventually you come out the other side as some kind of alloy. You internalize it. You metabolize it.
PHONOGRAM, for its part, has fundamentally changed the way I experience music. Lately, I’ve begun looking at it in different ways, taking it apart by new methods, devouring everything I can. Which, y’know, leads to me writing a ton of notes for a screenplay under the influence of the Long Blondes’s “You Could Have Both” or emailing barely-coherent odes on the wondrous nature of Lady Gaga to a friend of mine whose name rhymes with Shmariel Shmnutson.
The layered structure of THE SINGLES CLUB has also made for a narrative that is far more emotionally messy than anything I’ve read in recent years. It’s about people clashing together, sometimes at the most awkward and inopportune moments, and the result of those collisions. There aren’t any bad guys in the series, but there are people acting like cocks. However, Gillen presents them in such a well-rounded manner, that we come to understand their actions better. He doesn’t let any of his characters off the hook, mind you, but at the same time he offers up some type of justification or explanation for their actions, and shows that if Penny B. had just walked up to Marc five minutes before or after, maybe he wouldn’t have been such a dick and shattered her world.
And in Laura Heaven, Gillen gives us a character who finds herself perpetually jealous of her best friend, constantly plotting to both help her while hoping she’ll fail and Laura can pick up the pieces, the type of toxic friendship you don’t often see in comics or film or anything because it’s just so damn uncomfortable and complicated, and complicated really doesn’t make for good drama. Well, unless you’re Diablo Cody, then you can spin it into movie gold, as seen in Jennifer’s Body. (Yes, I did fucking love that movie, anyone who didn’t is ignorant, so says I.) [Sadly, Marc, it is not the case that so say we all. I mean, "movie gold?" Really?]
Of course, now my listening experience with the Long Blondes is inextricably linked to this funny book. Certain lyrics bring particular panels to mind, while at the same time, I can re-read the issue now knowing the songs Laura references and parse out all new meanings to what’s going on. These new meanings in turn cause different readings of the songs, and…well, you can see where this is going. And this is precisely what I mean by experiential literature. Which isn’t to say that experiential literature necessitates references to texts outside itself, but it’s certainly one way of achieving the effect. The comic shapes the way I read the lyrics, the lyrics shape the way I read the comic, and the way I read the comic shapes the way I see the world and my own interactions with it, which in turn shape the way I read the lyrics.
Or something.
All right, that’s enough for now. This column was way over due. Sorry, John. But for now, I’m going to leave you with some music. Enjoy. “Once and Never Again.” A song about a woman comforting a younger girl whose boyfriend has treated her like shit. And by the end of the song, you figure out that the reason she’s comforting the girl is because she wants in her pants. That’s the Long Blondes for ya.
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