Category Archives: Comics and Music

Music or Comics, or, Making a Joyful Noise

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from In the Night Alone, by Sean Michael Robinson

Suggested Background
Alphonse Mucha was a cartoonist.

Unnecessary Personal History, or, I Did That
I turned 33 last December. In the past fifteen years I’ve been employed as, among other things, a car washer, a janitor, a furniture pricer, an art model, a candy delivery man, an audio engineer, a high school art teacher, a graphic designer, an illustrator, a mercenary Christmas caroler, a writer, a cartoonist, a musician.

Comics and Music
It took years to develop the cartooning skills that I have, hours crammed in to a brutal teaching schedule, thousands of hours at the white drafting table while the world continued on outside. All that’s left now is a few scattered short stories and several hundred pages of a graphic novel in a box in a storage unit in Olympia, Washington. Oh, and the paid work, which came at the tail end of my interest in cartooning– 50 pages worth of deadline-motivated inking assistance on David Lasky and Frank Young’s Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song, and another 30 pages or so on their Oregon Trail book a year earlier. (I’m not counting plenty of paid illustration work—more on that below.)

from Discards. Sean Michael Robinson

from the unfinished Discards.

When I think back to those years, what I mainly remember is how little agency I felt in my own life at the time, how many decisions seemed like inevitabilities, the way that something had to be versus how I might want it to be. In that light it’s not hard to imagine the appeal of cartooning, of taking the imaginary and making it real on the page. There’s nothing you can’t control in that world that is nothing but promise before pencil hits paper, assuming the skills are in place. And even developing those skills necessary gave me back an illusion of control. The skills, the work, these were the things I could apply myself to. The people on the paper.

 

Punk or Liszt

It’s an accident of history and aesthetics that aligned indie comics and various punk rock or indie rock scenes. From a production standpoint, Jaime Hernandez has more in common with classical pianists than, say, a bass player in a hardcore band.

For a million-seller manga-ka, drawing comics might be more like being on a baseball team: for a cartoonist in the North American “commercial comics” scene, it’s more like pulling a sleigh with three other horses and knowing that any of you might beshot and eaten at any minute, and while the survival rates isn’t good, I’m sure the omnipresent threat of disaster lends things a certain excitement– but for the rest of us out there, making comics is a lonely, lonely process.

It seems crazy, in a way, working for 5 to 15 hours on a page that will probably be read by its audience in less than 5 seconds. By contrast, a classical pianist might put in 15 to 50 hours a week of practice, alone, as solitary as the cartoonist in question. And a tremendous amount of that practice might be devoted to just a few seconds of the piece, a single difficult run. But even if the pianist plays with no other musicians, when it’s time to perform, their audience is in the room with them, ready to receive their performance. A performance, then, is still partly exchange. The cartoonist, even if she’s fortunate enough to have found an audience, is denied even that. (Unless, of course, her friends are willing to be watched while they flip through her new effort.)

 

What Type of Nib? I’d Suggest the One Shaped Like a Guitar, or Maybe A Dulcimer

Seriously, kid. You’re telling me you have equal enthusiasm for music and for comics, have put some time into both and have found your interest aligns pretty well with your early aptitude? Well, I respectfully submit that you might be happier making a joyful noise with your fellow human beings than spending the next decade making tiny lines on paper to prepare yourself for better making tiny lines on paper.

What’s that? Money? Oh, don’t worry about that part—there’s no money in either. At least not directly. While there are still theoretically people making a living off of playing music, doing so under your own terms and without the supplementary work of teaching or wedding performance etc is about as likely as … well, as making a living as a cartoonist without doing the same.

Varied income sources for some of the best cartoonists of my acquaintance–

  1. freelance illustration for local weeklies, until they decided to stop paying
  2. posters for local bands, until they decided to stop paying (possibly because they’re not getting paid either)
  3. freelance illustration for various cell phone and video game companies, which mostly still pay
  4. freelance illustration for various ego maniacal individuals via craigslist
  5. selling original artwork for an entire book to a private collector prior to the book existing, in order to enable the book to be produced in the first place
  6. making pizza

Q. What do you call a drummer [cartoonist] who just broke up with his girlfriend?

 Poster for Landlord's Daughter and Pillow Army at the Blue Moon. Sean Michael Robinson

Making A Joyful Noise

I’m biased. I associate my years of dedicated cartooning with the most difficult and inward time of my life, and I associate making music with all of the things that have brought me joy—my closest friends, the love of my life, bringing happiness to other people, learning to be the kind of person who can open himself to others and not retreat in the face of sentiment.

And although there was a lot of upfront investment in the skills involved, over time I found that those skills could continue to develop in the presence of other human beings, that just playing music with other people made me better at playing music.

It’s not that I never had any dissatisfaction with playing music. I hated the bar scene. I hated being an alcohol salesman, a cigarette pimp. I hated the atmosphere, the cigarette hangover, the rock and roll hangover of the ringing ears and wheezy breathing, like I’d spent the night firing a gun and sucking on a tail pipe. I hated competing for attention, hated the soup of bands and bookers and cred payola, hated the omnipresence of the array of measuring sticks of cool. That was, after all, some of the appeal of comics for me in the first place– ten years ago, anyway, it seemed like there was virtually no competition, and so many hills to climb and plant your flag on.

Caution: Sentiment Ahead

The Summer Januaries. Rachel Erin Sage and Sean Michael Ro

But two years ago I met her and it was a blur, a whirl-wind, if you prefer, and both are cliches but either describes the feeling perfectly, everything happening at once, no way to really sort through all of the rush other than staring at the calendar and dumbly repeating “we met each other WHEN?” She was a busker, a fiddle player and vocalist and crafter of the most delicate songs I had ever heard, and it seemed impossible that we would do anything other than dedicate ourselves to making things together, to each other.

And that’s what we’ve done since. We haven’t had a home since September of last year, but we’ve played for tens of thousands of people, mostly on the streets of Italy, with a winter of writing and pub gigs in Florida. It’s a nice life, although like everything else the writing is sometimes delayed by the rest, the pressure to perform as often as the opportunity presents itself, the chaos of travel and negotiation and occasional arguments in a language we understand only a little and speak even less.

But the songs continue to come, and the work continues to develop, at it’s own pace. No forcing, but still continuous effort, always more improvement, but this time, in tandem with another human being.

And, as always, other art forms beckon.

Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée

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Comics and music may relate in a few ways: musicians and their music may be cited in comics (as seen below); abstract forms and colors, organized in patterns in a comic, may be associated with music as Wassily Kandinsky theorized; comics artists themselves may be musicians (Fort Thunder) linking their two creative activities together like Geneviève Castrée.

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Gato Barbieri in Muñoz and Sampayo’s first album/graphic novel (seen on the background as Changuitos – boys – jujeños – from Jujuy), Perché lo fai, Alack Sinner? (why do you do it, Alack Sinner?) “Viet Blues” episode, Milano Libri, 1976. Famous Argentinian jazz musician Gato Barbieri is singing the lyrics of El arriero (the muleteer) by Atahualpa Yupanqui [“plights and cows follow the same pathway, plights are ours, cows are someone else’s.” By citing Barbieri citing Yupanqui Muñoz and Sampayo make a clear left-wing political statement. You can hear Barbieri playing and singing, here (5.20)].

Since her almost wordless beginnings in 2000 with Lait frappé (milk-shake – L’Oie de Cravan) and Die Fabrik (the factory – Reprodukt) that Geneviève Castrée showed little inclination towards the orthodox storytelling so prevalent in the comics industry. Her comics are dreamlike, mysterious, symbolic, barely narrative.

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Geneviève Castrée, Lait frappé, L’ Oie de Cravan, 2000.

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Geneviève Castrée, Die Fabrik, Reprodukt, May 2002.

After publishing her third book (Roulathèque Roulathèque Nicolore, L’Oie de Cravan, 2001), Geneviève Castrée published Pamplemoussi (grapefruit). Here’s what she has to say about it:

I wanted to make a book with a record for years. One day I was looking out the window of my studio and I decided to start writing songs for the stories. It took me a lot more time than I was used to and when it came out I went on tour for a few months. I never had enough copies and there are none left. It was published in 2004 by L’Oie de Cravan.

Pamplemoussi is a large square book (obviously, it has the form and size of the vinyl LP record that comes with it – or is it the other way around?). Just for a taste, and because that’s what I found on You Tube, here’s one of the songs:

Geneviève Castrée, “Chanson pour les guêpes,” Pamplemoussi, L’Oie de Cravan, 2004.

Geneviève’s drawing style could be part of a long tradition of children’s books illustration, but, if we read between the lines, her comics are about abusive relationships, depression, solipsism, etc… In other words, they’re not unlike all good children’s books, of course… In Lait frappé, for instance, a series of episodes with titles in Russian (god knows why!?) describe a journey from low self-esteem and self-hate to the desire of changing people (anonymous black cats) in order to suit them for our purposes (as seen in a dream in which Geneviève portrays herself as an evil sorceress transforming black cats into white milk in order to drink it) to a relationship with a self-defensive abusive cat (she tries to drink from a milk bottle with a broken neck that she finds on the street just to cut her lip). All this told in clever visual figures of speech in 27 pages only. No doubt about it: Lait frappé is a little comics masterpiece that deserves to be reprinted increasing its original print run of 350.

4

Geneviève Castrée, “The Fire In Mr. Pea,” Kramers Ergot # 4, Avodah Books, 2003.

5

Geneviève Castrée (signing as Geneviève Elverum – her husband’s last name), cover for Drawn & Quarterly Showcase # 3, July 2005. The cover alludes to “We’re Wolf,” another great improv about awkward relationships in a beautifully illustrated story inspired by Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet.

6

Geneviève Castrée, Susceptible, Drawn & Quarterly, 2012. Geneviève’s more recent book. [Maybe it will be the object of a future Stumbling, who knows?]

Pamplemoussi explores the same themes already mentioned above, but the relations between the song lyrics, the (minimal) music, the incantatory tone and the symbolic drawings are even more allusive and elusive. There’s a song about feeling uncomfortable in one’s body (“Chanson pour la géante” – “Song for the girl giant” [sic]) and another one for vanquishing one’s fears (“Chanson pour les guêpes” – “Song for the wasps” – listen above) and yet another one about how limited we are in the little boxes of our minds; how we futilely dream of escaping (“Chanson pour la hase” – “Song for the hare”). Since solipsism is so important in Geneviève’s work, I’ll let you with the part of this last song’s lyrics in English (as translated in Pamplemoussi) which explains why there’s no escape. I’ll let you also with another song by Geneviève Castrée… just because I like it this time…

some animals dream/ of countries, of planets and stars/ of which they only know details;/ adopted and spied from conversations/ they were not part of/ it is to wonder/ if they know that in other countries/ people are just as mean/ on a different planet/ you suffocate/ and before reaching the stars/ you burn/

Woelv [Geneviève Castrée], “Gris”, from the album Gris, P. W. Elverum and Sun Ltd., 2006. 

Presence

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presence_0
 

“There was no working title for the album. The record-jacket designer said `When I think of the group, I always think of power and force. There’s a definite presence there.’ That was it. He wanted to call it `Obelisk’. To me, it was more important what was behind the obelisk. The cover is very tongue-in-cheek, to be quite honest. Sort of a joke on [the film] 2001. I think it’s quite amusing.”

-Jimmy Page

On the one hand, the black object there in the center of the bourgeois family may indicate Zeppelin’s power and force, as Jimmy Page suggests — the God’s uncanny presence. The happy family dinner, the smiles, the upper-crust yachts in the background; the black finger in the center, with its calibrated, meticulous wrongness, reveals the cheerful 50s nuclear family as paper-thin pasteboard. Zeppelin’s mere presence reveals and knocks apart their uncanny inanity.
 

led-zeppelin-presence-1976-inside-cover-51262

 
Robert Plant was in a car accident on the Greek island of Rhodes before the recording of Presence, and ended up in a not especially sanitary hospital. He recalled:

I was lying there in some pain trying to get cockroaches off the bed and the guy next to me, this drunken soldier, started singing “The Ocean” from Houses of the Holy.

Led Zeppelin was the Beyoncé of its day; ubiquitous and omnipresent. Page doesn’t sound quite like he’s reveling in that omniPresence, though. On the contrary, with the cockroaches and the pain, there’s something decidedly Gothic about this encounter with a drunk foreign ventriloquist doppelganger. A broken has chased him down across the globe in order to mirror, with pitiless vacuity, his broken self.

Isn’t there, then, also a kind of vulnerability, a diminutive interrogative, in the way the object twists itself around, bending its non-face, half coy, half nervous, to the giant mannequins who loom above it? The smiling, cheerful normality of the adults and the blank featurelessness of the children, all captured in high focus, suggest a certain feral threat — a hungry falseness. Perhaps that hungry falseness is ours, too, when the family is gone and we replace them around the Object.

Zeppelin may be that object itslef, but its objectness has passed out of Zeppelin’s control. It is now a public totem, doomed to ingratiate even at its most idiosyncratic, and individual — or, as Tom Frank would have, especially at its most idiosyncratic and individual. Like Plant regaled by his own tunes at the butt end of noplace, celebrity and self wait everywhere, mouths open. The Object is not crushing all around it. It is simply surrounded.
 
led-zeppelin-presence-3
 
Perhaps, though, Zeppelin isn’t the black Object — or at least, not just the black Object. After all, the images chosen for the album art — the cheerful, healthy couple at the pool; the immaculate golf green; the serious researchers investigating — all seem picked in no small part not just for their blandness, but for their bland non-blackness. The normality on offer, the default scrubbed cheer, is white — insistently so in the dress of the woman amidst the flowers, or the snowy peak of the final image.

The photographer, though, is not filming the snowy peak, but the black Object, just as the happy family is turning from their dull (Pat Boone?) records to the new twisted, exciting thing.

Again, that new twisted exciting thing could be Led Zeppelin itself. But the tableaux could also be seen as a kind of re-enactment, or parody, of Zeppelin’s own relationship to racial performance. Plant’s weirdly abstracted, soulless moans at the beginning of “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” as the sturm und drung flatten the gospel humility under towering psychedelic mannerisms, just as the miniaturized and humble object disappears into a warehouse of cerebral study in the upper left hand image. Plant’s eager I’m-James-Brown-no-really emoting on “For Your Life” seems to reach for swagger and cred in the same way that the baby reaches for the black object phallicly positioned between its legs in the upper right. And given the Elvis-shake on “Candy Store Rock,” the doctor there, carefully handling the Object’s tip, might be seen as representing an older generation of borrowers, passing on the appropriation to the curious but willing infant acolytes.

From this perspective, it’s not the Object which is uncanny, nor the aggressively smiling giants looking down on the Object, but rather the juxtaposition of the two. The weird funk funeral march of “Achilles Last Stand,” with its drifting hippie lyrics and Plant howling like a ghost being scraped across steel girders, is a kind of photonegative of that smiling couple looking at the thing; satyrs running through the iron city, rather than warbots dancing in a midnight glade. Zep’s distance from its sources is figured in the images, and perhaps in the music, not as authenticity but as wrongness. The black Object haunts the mountain and the white mountain haunts the Object, in the iterated symbiosis of the dead.
 

led_zeppelin_presence_inside_the_object

 
Comics generally represent motion through repetition; the same body or figure is drawn in one space and then another to show the passage of time. Music, on the other hand, seems to fill space; it’s everywhere and nowhere. Its repetitions through time are both insistently present and invisible.

The Object seems to ambivalently take part in both these structures. It could be seen as moving from location to location; starting the week with dinner at the yacht club and finishing up in a schoolroom. Or it could be seen as inhabiting all paces simultaneously; a broadcast received at once by the poolside, the bank vault, and the golf course. Or perhaps it could be seen as inverting both these options. Maybe it’s the Object that sits in one place, while the smiling people and their hollow world flicker and hum around it.

The image above is the only one where there are two objects, or an object and its image. The teacher seems to be trying to hear or see the boy’s mind; the drawing on the wall could be his thought bubble, or hers. In either case,or neither, it’s someone’s duplicated representation of a thing which is not a thing, sort of like a comic about music.

Phonogram 2: The Breakfast Club

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A return to the world of Kieron McGillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram: Rue Britania, which I reviewed previously here.

TO RECAP: When we last met our hero, he was a judgmental dickhead (and indie music snob) – the kind of asshole who thinks he knows more than you, on the one hand, and may be ultimately out to sleep with you, on the other. Perhaps there were glimmers of a kinder, less arrogant jerk buried deep within, but they were overshadowed by the self-involved nature of the narrative: Rue Britania chronicled one man’s odyssey to salvage the worthwhile parts of a youthful passion for music from the cynicism that develops after heartbreak; and to recover personal meaning from an opportunistic media narrative. By the end of the story, we’d learned that 1) bands that present themselves as the “saviours” of British guitar pop are the worst, especially if they believe it themselves; 2) most music “journalism” is hype after the fact and shockingly unconcerned with facts; but then again 3) your personal reality is, at base, probably not more real anyone else’s. This isn’t a “personal taste is subjective therefore all bands are equally worthy of fans’ love” argument, but an “everyone is entitled to feel passionately about the things they feel passionate about and to develop as fans and human beings in their own time” argument.

phono2-01
Not the narrator of Rue Britannia, but I think we all know a guy like this. Don’t be this guy! He is wrong about the Pipettes, by the way.

Fast forward to the Singles Club, and some of those glimmerings of decency and tolerance have blossomed. This “sequel” to Rue Britannia is less self-involved by design: there are six chapters following six different characters over the course of one night; and not one of those characters is the author. It’s more explicitly feminist than Rue Britania, too, because the first character we are introduced to –- our guide — is a perfectly nice, if somewhat naïve, young girl who loves to dance. And she, too, is a Phonomancer: a passionate fan of music able to magically channel that passion in a way that enhances her personal powers.

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“Etc”

This happens to be the comics and music roundtable at HU: not just the music roundtable, and not just the comics roundtable. So I can proudly report that Phonomancer isn’t a story that happens to be about music and happens to be in the form of a comic, but is a series that draws from the energies of both. In the first volume, we spent a lot of time with a character whose “type” we recognize from both music and comics: the music snob type, always willing to tell you (or just privately think) why and how you are wrong; and the semi-autobiographical indie-comic-narrator type, out to involve the reader in his personal internal journey. The art, in black and white, with cleanly-drawn and laid-out panels ala Chris Ware or Harvey Pekar, and lots of space given over to text detailing the author’s thoughts on everything from Manic Street Preachers to NME, fits in with the style of semi-autobiographical indie comics, too.

At the same time, Kieron McGillen is now writing, and Jamie McKelvie is now illustrating, for superhero comics. And some of the more action-oriented aesthetics of superhero comics have been present from the beginning, too: from the centrality of (not well defined) superpowers to the narrative; to the narrator’s final not-so-climatic final showdown with the zombie ghost of Britannia, Avatar of British Guitar Pop; to the paneling, which breaks out of the equally-sized-boxes mold of indie comics to hew closer to the dynamic style of manga, with frequent splash pages, pages laid out with an eye toward the overall balance of blacks and whites, and flow designed to draw the eye onward from panel to panel.

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Cinematic pacing also very manga-like

The Singles Club moves further toward superhero comics with the addition of VIVID! FULL! COLOR! And also by going into more detail on Phonomancers powers, which were underexplored in the previous volume.

phono2-07
This splash page is, like, totally superhero-ish

Like superpowers, Phonomancer powers are presumably unique to individuals. However, since we mostly only dealt with the author and his powers in the first volume, it wasn’t too clear what the range these music-related superpowers might be. The narrator’s power was very intellectual: he dissected pop songs in arcane rituals in order understand their totemic powers. Although there were other Phonomancers in the picture – like his friend Emily, who also appears in this volume – they were off to the side, sidelined to the narrator’s quest.

Here, too, the powers are off to the side: the comic follows an “off” day, or what Phonomancers do for fun when they’re not actively practicing magic (naturally, music is still involved). Even with that, though, there’s still more about magic powers than before. There’s the girl we met already, who uses her love of music to enhance her charisma when she dances; and her friend, who uses psychological insight gleaned from well-written songs to cloak her own personality and tear others down. And there’s the weird guy who channels obsessive creativity into a homebrew music zine:

phono2-11
“Mr. Logos” is, definitely, a super-villain name (not a super-hero name)

Are these characters music fan archetypes – like a music fan version of The Breakfast Club? Maybe, but those archetypes exist because they’re (often) true. In any case, what was true of the The Breakfast Club is also true of this comic: the pleasure comes from seeing all of these different types of music fan gathered together in one place and interacting with each other, rather than cordoned off into their own separate spheres of music appreciation. In this case, they haven’t been forced together by chance (assigned detention, trapped in a cabin during a snowstorm): instead, they mostly know each other, and have willingly come together at an indie dance club night.

Last time I promised a sociological explanation of music board ILX (ilxor.com). I don’t think I can really do that, but I can say that “different types of music fans bond over shared love of music, overlooking differences in style and opinion” is a basic premise of the site. Loving music as a whole more than you love any single band is a sort of defining feature of ILX, and it’s also a defining feature of this comic. At the club, everyone has different sensibilities and baggage – some relate to music in a more intellectual way and others in a more intuitive way – but they are all united by their passionate love of music, which, the comic implies, makes them more similar than different.

Another defining feature of ILX, meanwhile, is that even frequently maligned genres like chart pop and chart RnB (beloved by “nonserious” music fans like women and gay men) also have their share of supporters. It’s a male-dominated space, like most online bulletin boards – or actually most online spaces where contributors exchange strongly worded opinions on topics not solely of interest to women – but it’s a male space well-schooled in the politics of marginalization and oppression, and trained away from knee-jerk put downs. And that political focus shows up in The Singles Club too, coded into the rules of the club night:

1. No Boy Singers, 2. You Must Dance, 3. ??? ?????? ("No Magic")
The first rule of Fight Club, etc. Hover for alt-text if text is too small to read.

In previous entries to the roundtable, several authors brought up questions about how music can be visually depicted in comics. Well, for one, you can show the effects of music on bodies, as in the splash page above. And, for two, you can make sure enough of your references are to well-known songs by well-known artists. Compared to the indie namedropping of Rue Britania, the music in The Singles Club is a lot more mainstream… and even if there are a few artists you’ve never heard of, the authors helpfully publish a playlist at the back of the volume so you go can follow along. Some amount of accessibility is a virtue at club night, after all, as demonstrated by this scene:

phono2-06
Always have a secret weapon

While the previous comic explored the music snob/intelligent person’s sense of exclusion even from supposed “mass events” like summer music festivals, the ideological drive of The Singles Club is toward inclusiveness. Otherwise “normal” women who just happen to really really love music are included, but also other marginalized groups like the psychologically damaged and the just plain weird. Even pop music – music for the masses – can be a place for the excluded to find each other, the comic says: it’s the depth of their commitment to music that identifies them to each other, not their tribal affiliation to a particular band or genre. In fact, music is so much the domain of the weird that it’s the more “normal” people who find themselves left out:

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Lloyd should be proud of himself for delivering that zinger at such an appropriate moment

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Another guy I haven’t talked about much: more “chewed up” than “left out”

Speaking of tribal affiliation, though – and here I go with the sociopolitical examination of ILX, after all – in a capitalist landscape where the relationship between an artist capable of inspiring deep passion and his/her fans is, not just monetized, but aggressively monetized – thanks to a combination of declining disposable income and increased competition for the limited pool of obsessive-fan-types who will actually spend money on music – does it make sense to replace a deep love of one group with a kind of grazing behavior appreciative of many? When you learn to value songs for what you can get out of them, without allowing yourself to be too deeply drawn into a single artistic vision – if you can even find an artist with an encompassing vision, in these days of quick media exposure – you learn to fulfill your role as a consumer and, thereby, enter the capitalist landscape of music groups as commodities. Once there, you are in accordance with the realities of your environment, and friction between yourself and your environment disappears… no?

Perhaps this is a logical move for fans of music who have to live with the logic of capitalism, in other words? In an artist-fan relationship based around idolization, the artist holds the power (but only as long as they continue to play the role allowed to them by their fans: leadership is a two-way street). In an object-consumer relationship, on the other hand, the consumer occupies a position of power over the object of consumption. From a song, we can take certain ritualistic elements – a baseline, an attitude, a well-written line – while discarding the parts we don’t care for… and in that way, avoid being hurt by them. Perhaps?

On the one hand, pop music isn’t immerse yourself in your bedroom music, or even immerse yourself with fans of the same group at intimate club shows music. It is immerse yourself in beats in a collective setting music. Wide knowledge is better than deep knowledge for this purpose. But on the other hand, you could argue that deep knowledge is a prerequisite to understanding the power music can have at its most potent. Perhaps you have to be a passionate dedicated fan before you can be a passionate casual fan? Anyway, I’m just talking out loud, here.

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Wide-ranging consumption is the path forward out of obsession, as demonstrated by the narrator of the previous volume of Phonogram

Passion isn’t just about knowledge, either. Half the characters are still the intellectualizing sort, but who gets the last laugh at the end?

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The non-Phonomancer, that’s who

It’s okay to think these things through, but we shouldn’t forget the functions they serve, the comic suggests. The purpose of a dance night is to drink, dance, and maybe end up in bed with a stranger by the end of the night. And that’s true, even when the dance night is as explicitly intellectual and political as the one in this comic. Pop music can be smart as well as catchy; intellectual types have emotional needs too. But just because the pleasures are simple doesn’t mean they can’t also be deep; and vice versa. See also Poptimism, a London club night.

In summary: if you recognize the character archetypes, that’s good. If you like the songs, that’s good. If you enjoy the characters as people, without recognizing them as archetypes, that’s good. If you enjoy interlocking narratives, that’s good. If you agree with the politics of the author… well, you probably didn’t need to read this comic, but probably did and enjoyed it anyway.

To summarize the summary: it’s all good.

Gene Simmons and KISS: Channeling One’s Inner Superhero

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In 1958, an estranged Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor named Flóra “Florence” Klein brought her eight-year-old son, Chaim Witz, to New York City from Israel to seek out a new and better life. Chaim Witz’s name was soon Americanized to Gene Klein, and would eventually become the infinitely more famous double-alter ego Gene Simmons.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

After a year in an Orthodox Jewish school, the young Klein made his transition to America complete by entering the New York City public school system. Unable to speak or write English at first, Klein quickly turned to the new and fascinating world of American popular culture to learn his adopted language. While other kids were outside playing baseball or kick-the-can, Klein immersed himself in almost all of the mass entertainment arts: movies, television, science fiction, cartoons, pulps, and especially comic books. Reflecting later about those early years, he said once he saw Superman and Batman, “he was hooked.”

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Then, in 1964, at the age of 14, he saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and a new world opened up for him: pop music. As he said decades later in his book Kiss and Make-Up, “My first thoughts about pop music were born that night, and they were simple thoughts: If I go and start a band, maybe the girls will scream for me.”

Klein’s first band was Lynx, announced incorrectly as The Missing Links – the name which ended up sticking – and it consisted of Klein, Danny Haber and Seth Dogramajian. Like Klein, both band-mates were obsessed with comic books. Klein elaborated about their four-color passion: “Seth and I used to publish amateur fanzines about comic books and science fiction. We would write articles, review movies, and talk about characters from television shows. His fanzine was called Exile; mine was called Cosmos. But after the Beatles, it became clear to us that, as much as we loved science fiction, it wasn’t going to get us where we wanted to go with the girls.”
 

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But even as Klein began actively forging ahead on his nascent music career, his entrance into the world of science fiction, comic book, and film fandom exploded.

To say that Klein was an active fan of the popular arts would be a gross understatement. He not only read and collected comic books, monster magazines, film magazines, pulps and related science fiction and fantasy books; he also published his own fanzines and contributed material to scores – perhaps even hundreds – of other fan publications.

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From 1965 to 1970 – through the remainder of high school and beyond – Klein’s fanzine-related output was prodigious. Here’s just a partial list of fanzines with which he had involvement: Adventure, Arioch, Asmodeus, Asterisk, Beabohema, Bombshell, Chamber of Horrors, Cooper’s Hero Hobby, Cosign, Cosmos, Cosmostiletto, Crabapple Gazette, Critique, Double: Bill, Dynatron, Ecco, Exile, Famous Fiends of Filmdom, Fantasy Crossroads, Fantasy Film Journal, Fantasy News, Faun, Giallar, Gore Creatures, Harpies, Id, Iscariot, Mantis, Martian Journal (MJ), Men of Mystery, Monstrosities, One Step Beyond, Orpheus,  OSFan, Osfic, Proper Boskonian, Pulp Era, Quark, Ragnarok, Ray Gun, Sanctum, Satyr, Sci-Fi Showcase, Screen Monsters, Sirruish, Solarite, Space and Time, Spectre, Splash Page, Starling, Super Spy, Terror, Tinderbox, Trumpet, Web Spinner, Weirdom, and Wonderment.

Klein’s contributions were as varied as his popular culture interests. He drew artwork; wrote opinion columns; reviewed films, TV shows, comic books, pulps, books, fanzines and newspaper comic strips; and wrote countless letters of comment.

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His signature writing style could be summed up in one word: blunt. Klein rarely pulled his punches. If he thought a fan publication had bad art or a poorly written article, he would not hesitate to say so. Despite this, many editors apparently didn’t mind the abuse, because his letters kept on getting published. So did his sometimes acerbic articles.

For example, in the fanzine Web Spinner #2, published in August 1965, Klein summarily raked Marvel editor Stan “The Man” Lee over the coals in an essay titled “The M.M.M.S.? You Can Keep It!” Klein felt that the $1 membership fee Lee was charging for the new club was exorbitant for what members received in return: a record, a certificate, some Thing stickers, and a coming events news sheet. Klein then went on to discuss some of Marvel’s other merchandising products being concurrently advertised, such as $1 Marvel stationery pads and $1.50 t-shirts. And while he admitted they were nice to look at, he complained, “who has so many dollars to contribute to Lee’s ever-growing pockets?”

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However, just about 10 years later, there would be some industrial-strength irony in those words when Klein, as Gene Simmons, would help mastermind a long-running and innovative KISS merchandising machine that would eventually generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue – a marketing juggernaut that made Lee’s modest mid-1960s operation look positively quaint by comparison.

Klein’s soon-to-be-considerable entrepreneurial skills started in those halcyon fan days when he started buying and selling comics to finance his hobbies and fledgling music career. He utilized the same mimeograph he used to publish his fanzines to print up flyers and other ads offering to buy old comics for a dollar a pound. He’d then sift through the stacks of purchased comics, re-selling the most collectible ones to other fans at a tremendous mark-up.

As the 1960s came to a close, Klein went off to college and his music career began growing. Something had to give, so Klein’s fan activities began tapering off. But even as late as 1969, Klein and his band-mates were still doing a significant amount of work for fanzines. For example, in the fifth issue of Gordon Linzner’s science fiction fanzine Space and Time, published in the spring of 1969, three of the four contributors providing artwork for the issue were current or former members of a Klein band: Klein, Dogramajian and Steve Coronel.

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But, the die was cast, and Klein’s music career soon displaced most of his former fannish activities. In the Dec. 14, 2005 edition of the fanzine Vegas Fandom Weekly, science fiction fan and editor Arnie Katz looked back on Klein’s departure from fandom, circa 1969. “He was originally in horror/SF movie fandom and was only beginning to understand the “faster track” of SF fanzine fandom when his life got very busy,” Katz said. “Bill Kunkel and I (who barely knew each other at the time) both corresponded with Gene and, I think, saw him as a promising young fan. He came along at about the same time, and from the same “other fandom” source, as John D. Berry. John grew into a very fine fan while Gene’s fan career ended due to his musical success.”

Today, several different fandoms claim Klein as one of their own, and they are all technically correct. Klein was, in fan parlance, a “cross-over fan” – i.e., he had a foot in multiple fandoms. But back in those pre-Internet days, unless a fan made his multiple allegiances a point of contention in his letters and essays, few of his peers would have even been aware of them.

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There were no overt indications during this period that anything like KISS was in Klein’s future. He and his band-mates rotated in and out of various band iterations as they struggled to find the right mix of musicians and the right sound. However, there is a tantalizing clue in the form of an obscure 1969 fanzine drawing by Klein that could indicate he was dreaming of something bigger four years before KISS was born. The drawing was published on Page 36 of the fanzine Starling #13 as a spot illustration, and it depicts what appears to be a prototype design for the eye makeup Klein (as Simmons) would later wear as his KISS character, The Demon.

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In 1970, Klein and band-mate Stanley Eisen formed the band Wicked Lester, which was the precursor to KISS. After two years of struggling unsuccessfully to build the type of band they envisioned, and despite a recording contract with Epic Records, for various reasons the two felt shackled by the arrangement and walked away. This gave them the freedom they needed to start fresh and build a new band from the ground up.

They moved to New York City, found a drummer named Peter Criss (Criscuola), and a lead guitarist named Ace (Paul) Frehley. Around the same time, Gene Klein changed his name to Gene Simmons, Stanley Eisen changed his name to Paul Stanley, and the early versions of their trademark makeup and costumes began to take shape. Stanley coined the name KISS, and although they probably had no inkling of it at the time, the band was ready to make history.

Simmons recalled in KISS and Make-Up how his Demon character persona originally developed. “Later on in our career, when we went to Japan, the reporters there wondered if our makeup was indebted to the Japanese kabuki style. Actually mine was taken from the Bat Wings of Black Bolt, a character in the Marvel comics The Inhumans. The boots were vaguely Japanese, though – taken from Gorgo or Godzilla – and the rest of the getup was borrowed from Batman and Phantom of the Opera, from all the comic books and science fiction and fantasy that I had read and loved since I was a child.”

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Simmons also attributed his trademark Demon hand gesture, consisting of the index finger and pinky finger extended, to comic book artist Steve Ditko’s two trademark characters: Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. The former would position his hand that way to shoot webbing from his web-shooter, and the latter would use a similar gesture to conjure up magical spells.

In many ways, Simmons was channeling his inner superhero when he designed his on-stage persona. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jack Kirby’s comic book character named the Demon debuted on newsstands just six months before the birth of KISS. As Simmons points out, his own character was an amalgam of many comic book and popular culture influences. Likewise, adopting stage names at the very moment their KISS characters were born was another nod to the superhero’s penchant for having an alter ego. Later, Simmons would even take hiding his alter ego to the next level by covering up the bottom of his face whenever his make-up was off and cameras were around. (KISS bandmate Paul Stanley demonstrates the technique in the picture below.)

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The band’s first performance took place at the Popcorn Club, in the New York City borough of Queens, on January 30, 1973. There were three people in the audience, and KISS performed sans make-up. By March, however, the band had started developing its iconic look and four signature characters: The Demon, Starchild, Catman and Spaceman.

According to the 2012 (revised) edition of The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal, although KISS eventually became one of the most popular bands of the 1970s, they struggled initially to get noticed. KISS released three albums prior to Alive! but the sales were weak. At the same time, their live concert performances were regularly selling out. So the decision was made to release a double album made up entirely of live KISS concert performances. Live albums were still unusual during that era, so it was a bold move – and a highly successful one. Alive! apparently captured the energy and spectacle of KISS’ concerts, making the band members superstars overnight.

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KISS had a huge influence on almost every heavy metal band that followed – whether the later bands realized it or not. This “ghost” influence is similar to the influence comic book artist Jack “King” Kirby had on his peers and subsequent generations of comic book artists.

As mentioned earlier, KISS was the first rock band to extensively market and brand itself through merchandising. In the mid-1970s, KISS albums came with an order form insert offering membership into “The KISS Army” for $5, and a host of other KISS merchandise for sale. Suddenly, according to The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal, KISS products were everywhere. “This may not seem like a big deal today, but at the time it was highly unusual for a band to market itself this aggressively as a commodity.”

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To his credit, even as KISS was rocketing to fame, Simmons never forgot his fannish roots, and still kept in touch with some of his long-time fanzine buddies. For example, in 1976, after the KISS World Tour, Simmons wrote a letter of comment that was published in issue #25 of Gore Creatures, a fanzine he had submitted contributions to during the late 1960s while he was still in high school.

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The band’s popularity soon opened doors with the very comic book industry Simmons and his early band-mates had adored. “From the beginning I had been heavily indebted to comic books, and in 1978 (sic) we made good on that relationship by getting a comic book of our own,” Simmons said. “First a Marvel artist (sic) named Steve Gerber who was a big fan put us in the last two issues of Howard the Duck. We were demons who possessed Howard. Marvel noticed that those two Howard the Duck issues soared in sales even though we weren’t on the cover. So they approached us about a KISS comic book.”

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The very first KISS comic book Marvel published was Marvel Comics Super Special #1, a magazine-sized comic published in September 1977. The rollout of the magazine received national coverage because of a brilliant marketing idea: At Marvel’s printing plant in Buffalo, N.Y., KISS, in full make-up and costume, and in front of the cameras and a notary republic (and Stan Lee, of course), had blood drawn from each band member, after which it was mixed in with the printers ink used for the magazine’s print run. According to Simmons, the issue “became Marvel’s biggest-selling comic book.”

A follow-up magazine-sized comic, Marvel Comics Super Special #5, was published a year later in Dec. 1978. Marvel also published the trade paperback KISS Klassics in 1995, and KISSnation Magazine in 1996.

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Since then, KISS has had many other licensed comic books published by a variety of comic book companies. For example, Image published 31 issues of Todd McFarlane’s KISS: Psycho Circus from 1997-2000, followed by four trade paperbacks and five spin-off magazines. Dark Horse was next, publishing a 13-issue series KISS in 2002. Platinum Studios published KISS 4K in 2007, and even Archie Comics got in the act in 2011 when it published, Archie Meets KISS. Most recently, IDW has had a licensing agreement to publish KISS comics, releasing KISS, KISS Greatest Hits, KISS Kompendium, and KISS. And the KISS comic book ties keep on coming…

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Like millions of immigrants before him, Simmons came to the United States with nothing but a dream. And whether one likes the music of KISS or not, no one can deny that Simmons took some of his wildest fantasies and turned them into reality – and built a world-wide army of ardent fans in the process.

 

The Freewheelin’ Daredevil

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The Comics and Music roundtable index is here.
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In his notes on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Born Again, Brian Cronin writes:

“And it all ends with a likely Bob Dylan reference, so how much better can you get?”

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Cronin is of course donning the cap of coyness here. The final page of Born Again isn’t a “likely” Dylan reference, it’s a bare faced homage to the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—the ultimate evocation of tenderness for a certain generation of record collectors; the knight in lusterless armor finally getting his girl.

Karen Page’s one time junkie whore has kicked her addiction and is now in the arms of her destined love or as Wikipedia helpfully tells us:

Critic Janet Maslin summed up the iconic impact of the cover as “a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging”.

Of this description I have my doubts. Perhaps the word “reinspired” would work better here. It seems to me that women have been depicted (by men) clinging to men long before Dylan and his photographer got their hands on this quintessential moment.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” seems overly sentimental musically but correct lyrically for much of this comic, the song apparently written by Dylan when Rotolo left him to study in Italy. The album cover captures that point in time when she had returned safe to his arms in a trench coat and two sweaters, the fire escapes and tenements like a pastoral landscape in the background.

Born Again may be seen as an apocalyptic text divining this fleeting state of heaven…

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…a paradisaical condition always on the edge of disaster; a state of perfect goodness where stories are perpetuated when no more need be told—a testament to the prescience of Miller and Mazzucchelli. The comics boom of the late 80s, that period which ushered in Miller’s Daredevil, was followed inevitably by bust and then capitulation; the present day sales figures befitting nothing less than high end toilet paper. The superhero form now even rejected by that one time font of spandex adulation, the Eisners (though this last rejection is most likely an aberration born of the judges doing the nominations.)

But such an interpretation would be to mistake apocalypse (a revelation of god’s divine will) for prophecy. The two may be intermingled but should be seen as distinct.

Suze Rotolo wasn’t a junkie who needed saving, that part is clear.  No, that junkie whore was the America of sex and drugs, that 60s VW van of lust and freedom gone mad.

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The new Jerusalem is one where strength and patriotism has triumphed over the nuclear threat; the hard rain has ceased to fall. The world is in the process of being reconstructed just as the sign (a tribute to Mazzucchelli’s own partner, Richmond Lewis) on the right hand side of the comics page indicates. Nuke (as coarse a symbol as any) has been defeated by that bastion of American patriotism, Captain America—all this as illusory as the life and death of a secondary character in a second tier superhero title; everything as ephemeral as Matt Murdock and Bob Dylan’s happiness.

Karen Page—manipulated to the end by her gods—”died” in 1998. Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer in 2011. That evocation of joy, as transient as a fading photograph,  now extinguished; that VW van of protest now disappeared, replaced by the dumpster truck of progress, capitalism, and acquiescence.

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