I just wrapped up reading Phonogram: The Singles Club, a seven-issue miniseries by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. The Singles Club is the second volume to bare the Phonogram name. I haven't read the first.
By some stroke of blog-happenstance, right after I finished Phonogram, I decided to start to make my way though the 500-odd unread posts on my RSS reader to which I had yet to get. Well, I'm here to tell you, Brian over at Bubblegum Aesthetics is back in a big way with a wonderful post on the first, six-issue run of Phonogram:
Originally published by Image as a six-issue, black-and-white miniseries in 2006 (with a follow-up miniseries"sequel"--actually individual stories set in the same magical universe--released last year), Phonogram opens with quick glances at a set of signifiers--reflecting dark-rimmed glasses, just-so haircut, leather jacket, and the all-important lighter-'n'-cigarettes--whose fetish qualities are enhanced by their capture in individual, unconnected frames. This is our lovable anti-hero David Kohl (in his own self-description, "Toxic and male. Utterly noxious. Totally perfect") getting ready for the evening, and these early panels immediately keys into the ways pop music can both deconstruct our identities as commodified consumers (we are what we wear), and rarify those same impulses (we are, simultaneously & gloriously, both stand-out individual and blissed-out member of a community).
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There have been many times in this post when I've accidentally typed "writer" instead of "reader," and I think that's McKelvie and Gillen's great magic trick: in the more active use spaces of pop music, DJing, comics and blogging, the reader is invited to be both creator and receiver of meaning, to remix and simulate the groove of the song on the comic book page and in his head. As we read, our pleasure becomes blurred.
There's something banal, I suppose, for me to say that comics are, in some sense, emblematic of this generation. Comics break down the sticky artistic dichotomies between image and text, form and content, high and low art so efficiently; it's hard not to see comics as the easiest vehicle for the kind cultural themes we've created for ouselves.
The Vertigo "meta" lineup (viz., Air, Fables, House of Mystery, The Unwritten) has, perhaps more than any other group of contemporary comics, thrust the medium into the realm of artistic self-reflection. What makes Phonogram different is the way in which it gets to that place: pop music. (It's worth noting that Blue Monday and Scooter Girl took stabs at something like this, but with much less sophistication.)
For the record, Phonogram has a history on this blog. Said Marc a few months back:
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.
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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.
I'd go further: It's explores the ways in which we inhabit the "pop" forms in general; as Brian says, "In the more active use spaces of pop music, DJing, comics and blogging, the reader is invited to be both creator and receiver of meaning, to remix and simulate the groove of the song on the comic book page and in his head."
I might go even further, and point out that the act of writing about comics is a sort of engagement in the cultural processes with which Phonogram deals. I'll let Brian take us out (from his article in Wilder Voice a few years back):
And perhaps the ultimate coming together of comics, Truffautian manifestos, and technology is the Internet, where hundreds of comics blogs are re-imagining the rules of fandom, criticism and creativity for a post-Cold War age. In contrast to the detailed history of Hadju or the remembrance-bordering-on-hagiography of Evanier’s Kirby book, the comics blog surfs, providing a mix of snark, social commentary, short and long forms, and often dazzling plays with image/text mixing. Sturgeon’s Law states that “ninety percent of everything is crap,” and more than any other contemporary media, blogging seems to be perceived this way. I wouldn’t deny the odds (although I might lower them to, say, fifty percent), nor exclude blogs from them. But such complaints do feel like something of an arrière garde action, an attempt to defend old (and perhaps timeworn) discourses in the face of the new technology. Rather than dismiss it out-of-hand, it feels far more interesting to think about what possibilities it presents (just as Truffaut and Kirby’s challenges did so many years ago). Rather than comic book as criticism, we might begin to imagine the blog space as reversing that equation: in its third form of writing, imagery and video, it can become criticism as a comic book.
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