“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”
–Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled “A Man out of Time Beats the Clock.” Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983)
But despite Elvis’ words, it seems that writing about music is something that’s proving more and more popular in comics recently.And time and time again, the writers and artists involved manage to disprove Elvis’ words and show that making comics about music can be something quite wonderful.
There was the Belle And Sebastian graphic novel; Put The Book Back On The Shelf a couple of years ago and then it seems the floodgates for comics about music and how important it is have well and truly opened. There’s the Tori Amos hardback Comic Book Tattoo and the new collection This Is A Souvenir: The Songs of Spearmint and Shirley Lee. Then there’s the new series of Phonogram by Gillen and McKelvie which takes the essential joy and magic of music and what it can do to you and turns it into a wonderful comic about magic and music and what it can do to you.
And now there’s another couple of major music related comics things happening. First up is a great blog called 69 Love Songs dedicated to illustrating all 69 of the Magnetic Field’s 69 Love Songs. So far we have contributions from a host of our favourite UK comics folks and it’s promising to build up into a great collection. It was Julia Scheele‘s idea and she has this to say about it:
“We are a loose collection of mostly London-based comic-artists, illustrators and writers, who have grown up listening to the Magnetic Fields and got together over a mutual love of the songs. One day, on Twitter, a couple of us decided that illustrating – or writing a comic – or a short story – inspired by all 69 songs was a worthwhile and exciting pursuit!”
(Yeah!, Oh Yeah! by Scott Jason Smith from the 69 Love Songs blog, click on the pic for a full version.)
No doubt we’ll be revisiting 69 Love Songs as it develops, since it looks rather good and potentially will really grow into a cracking project.
The next book in this vein is the recently announced Side B: The Music Lover’s Comic Anthology. This book from Poseur Ink follows on from Side A (naturally) published in 2007. It’s come to my attention as John Cei Douglas, whose Buffalo Roots was much enjoyed here, has sent us his two pager to have a look at before the book gets a release in June. Poseur describe it as:
Over 200 pages of lost lovers, rocking out, spirit guides, ghosts, and dinosaurs – it’s like an action adventure comic for the music lover in all of us.
(Side B: The Music Lover’s Anthology, cover image by Lucy Knisley.)
From the preview images on the site I can see that the book looks like a good ‘un, full of artists impressions of their favourite music. John’s picked Scott Walker’s The Me I Never Knew to illustrate his story of “The Moth I Never Knew”. As a girl makes her way home from a festival; tired and unwashed after a weekend disconnected from normal life, she happens upon a dying moth, just as the gentle, overblown melody of Scott Walker kicks in over the headphones. It’s a gentle, melancholic sort of tale for that gentle, melancholic mood of a post festival comedown done in John’s delicate style that I enjoyed so much in Buffalo Roots.
(The opening panels of “The Moth I never Knew” by John Cei Douglas in the forthcoming anthology Side B. See the whole page at the preview.)
It shouldn’t be a big surprise that music and comics go hand in hand. Music and most things go hand in hand for me and many others who simply couldn’t imagine what they’d do without access to music for at least part of the day. That magical moment when a tune catches in your head, transports you away from the moment and into someplace better. Music is a near magical thing that inspires us and often defines us. And like anything that affects us this much, the desire to make art about our music is a strong urge which, when handled as well as these examples, goes a long way to disproving that old quote that opened this article.
Sun, Apr 26, 2009
Comics and cartoons