Music is magic. The premise of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s comic Phonogram sounds simple. But over 10 years and three volumes, it’s proved an elegant, flexible, and amusing metaphor for fandom, and how it sweeps our lives up and carries them along. In Phonogram, fans aren’t just fans, they’re phonomancers—people whose obsession with music is so intense it works as a kind of magical power. Sickened by a scene you love getting picked over by retro vultures? In the world of Phonogram, you might go on a mystical journey to kill the music’s presiding spirit. Setting up a fanzine or club night? Phonogram characters form covens. And if you’ve ever longed to reinvent yourself through music and become something cooler, spare a thought for Phonogram’s Emily Aster. She was offered a Faustian pact by a being lurking behind the screen of '80s pop videos – half her personality for the chance to become the fabulous creature she always dreamed of. The Immaterial Girl, Phonogram’s third volume—returning this week through Image Comics following a half-decade hiatus—is the story of what happens when she regrets the deal.
If all this magical baggage is putting you off, it works better on the page than in summary. Phonogram tends to wear its fantastical elements lightly, letting the metaphor do its work in the background. The comic’s heart is slice-of-life stories about music fans and the arguments and passions which drive them. In 2006’s Rue Britannia, the creators’ breakthrough work, Gillen savagely worked through his feelings about Britpop and its heritage. And in 2010’s The Singles Club, a tightly plotted series retelling one club night from multiple angles, magic barely figured. It’s closer to the surface of The Immaterial Girl—McKelvie draws a splendid, creepy sequence with Emily sucked into a classic video. But the heart of the issue is people in their twenties, then their thirties, adoring music, and paying a price for it.
It’s easy to relate to. Gillen is a former music and games journalist, writing with an intimate knowledge of obsessive fandom, and the ways it can distort your personality and swallow your time. Obsessives like Phonogram’s cast aren’t always admirable, and the first issue made me laugh and squirm equally. It’s a beguiling, funny comic with bleakness round the edges. Phonogram, the writer explains in the comic’s editorial, is a story about aging. We may not all have sold our personalities, but there comes a point where the investments you made in music require serious evaluation.
Gillen and McKelvie have fans of their own these days—their other comic about pop culture and fantasy, The Wicked and the Divine, has been a deserved success, and the two creators are conscientious about using social media to keep in touch with fans, posting cosplay photos from conventions, openly discussing artistic choices, and reblogging fan art. "WicDiv"’s story of superstar gods focuses on performers and creators, but in a way, it’s Phonogram that ought to be more accessible. We’re all fans of something.
I talked to Kieron Gillen about the new series, the old series, videos, vinyl, and snobbery.
Pitchfork: What's the most common misunderstanding about Phonogram?
Kieron Gillen: It's elitist music snobbery when it's actually entirely egalitarian in its purpose. That's cultural. When you have characters talking about music in any way, especially about music someone doesn't know, some people presume it's about showing social capital and sneering at those who don't have it. That every single story is about the opposite of that doesn't matter to them. A synopsis of every story we do: someone gets over their own stupid ass.
I wish I could say I get used to that, but you don't. You just get used to sighing a lot.
There's a bunch of other smaller misconceptions which basically all branch off that one. Often we get the idea that the characters are wish-fulfillment fantasies, when they are cautionary tales. These people are mostly monsters. They're not who I want to be. They're people I'm afraid I was.
Pitchfork: Video is a crucial part of The Immaterial Girl, and we're in a moment now where pop video has become the primary vehicle for battles over what pop means and does—this year’s big Taylor Swift and Rihanna videos, for instance. How important is video in your pop fandom these days?
KG: On a personal level? Minimal. I turn up to the big fights, but I rarely do anything which would transfer into a Phonogram story. Late night chaining of videos and basically obsessing are rare for me, and often I've never even seen the videos of my favourite songs. That said, in terms of my own personal magic, video has probably rated lower than most music fans. I mean, it's there, but I've always had mixed feelings about the form. That's one reason why I wrote Immaterial Girl—writing things I know the answer to isn't exactly a good use of my time. Chewing over complicated feelings are what you can get a graphic novel out of. If I know how I feel, I'll give you a tweet.
Pitchfork: What's your earliest pop video memory?
KG: This appears to be going a bit WicDiv in the death-obsession, but it'd be the video for "Imagine", which I remember from it playing a lot when Lennon was assassinated. It was one of my first memories of my parents being sad. I watched and tried to make sense of it all.
Alternatively, it could have been Abba's "Super Trouper". Let's say "Super Trouper". It's slightly less maudlin as a first video memory, though I somehow mashed it up in my head with "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper", presuming Trooper was some manner of soldier.
Pitchfork: The covers are gorgeous—and pay homage to iconic '80s pop looks, if the first two are any guide.
KG: We're actually playing it a lot looser than we have previously. Rue Britannia's covers are pretty intricate deconstructions, designed to be pored over in detail. Singles Club covers have more text than some comics. This time, in a book about image, we thought it an interesting idea to just go with that. This is Jamie and Matt [Wilson, colorist] doing something beautiful—a homage, and often a darkening, but very much an iconic statement. We're still working on the last two, and aren't 100 percent sure which way we'll fall. I'm pretty sure issue six will be [Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel’s] "Don't Give Up". Issue five is open to various options we're considering—there's an awful idea of using [Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s] "Two Tribes", which could be a lot of fun. Issue four isn't actually even a music riff but... something else.
Pitchfork: You've talked about The Wicked and the Divine as your "classic album"—what's Phonogram mark 3?
KG: I'd like to say "Something on ZTT" ['80s UK artpop record label] but I don't think it's quite true. Maybe ZTT, half-born from post-punk? Phonogram, in all of its forms, leans post-punk. It is austere, rules-bound, and intense. In WicDiv, there's a freedom to play and build a new mythology. Phonogram, at its heart, is always criticism. It's structured like an argument. It has to be true, whatever that means. Phonogram is a very serious young man indeed, even when it's taking the piss, which is constantly and inappropriately.
Pitchfork: In the editorial after the main story you say Phonogram is a comic about aging. Can you expand on that a little?
KG: That snuck up on me when writing the outro. I've previously talked about Phonogram as being about a consumer of culture and WicDiv being about what it's like to transfer from being a fan to being a creator. And obviously, that's true. But when looking at it coldly, I couldn't help but see that Phonogram returns again to what time does to people. One of Singles Club's structural linchpins is two pairs of characters, two who are entering their twenties and two that are leaving it, and having a moment of connection—or not. Immaterial Girl... it's Emily turning 30 and looking back at that wasteland she wrought. She made a deal. Was it worth it?
I do wonder if it's an artifact of how long it took for Phonogram to come out. I knew the basics of Immaterial Girl in at least 2006, and probably earlier. That it took so much time to do, it means that more stories about the passing of time came out.
Pitchfork: What's it like revisiting characters on this kind of irregular basis?
KG: Genuinely strange and oddly familiar. They live with me anyway. I don't necessarily mean that in the terrible hippy way writers always go on about. Phonogram is the memory of a long period in my life through a surprisingly small filter. Those characters are basically the golem who accompanied me on that decade and a half.
A bigger shock was seeing more Phonogram pages come into existence. Every time Jamie mails me one I get a little sense of wrongness. We had a set canon of Phonogram for so long, each page feels like it's a relic—or a fake of some kind. I know all the Phonogram pages. What's this THING?
Jamie and Matt are doing astounding stuff. You look at all the books together, and you can see the journey there.
Pitchfork: It definitely looks like some of the cast are at the "it comes with a price" end of the magical bargain. How bad a habit is music fandom, in the long run?
KG: Heh. There's the rub, innit? Music will save your life, but may leave you with a life not worth saving. The characters Phonogram tends to follow are extreme cases. We made it pretty clear at the end of Singles Club that almost everyone uses music in a magical way. Phonomancers [characters who use music to revisit to a magical moment] just are obsessed with it. They're much more like addicts than anything else, and there's the impression they've given up a lot of other things for this all-consuming obsession. In Rue Britannia, there's definitely a theme of anhedonia—you don't really get a sense that David Kohl [the protagonist] and everyone are enjoying what they're doing. They just feel compelled to. The moments of transcendence of music only come right at the end.
Eventually you find yourself asking "Why?" and figuring it out. Why do you give so much to something that will never love you back? You have dozens of answers to that, depending your time and your place and everything else.
Pitchfork: Did you ever try and reinvent yourself through music? Did it work?
KG: Yes. It worked until it didn't. Write what you know and all that.
Pitchfork: Your other projects—Marvel’s Young Avengers and particularly WicDiv—must have given you a closer view on modern fandoms and how they work than most creators. Do you still meet people as passionately involved with music as your cast? How do you think music fits into the lives of their 2015 equivalents, if such people exist?
KG: This answer risks seguing into a Comment Is Free piece over at the Guardian, opining about the state of The Kidz On The Street. I am wary of such dangers.
I meet people who are as passionately (and, just as importantly for a Phonogram comparison, intelligently) involved with the objects of their obsession as I ever was (and more so). Yes, I didn't say music, because I suspect the music part is confusion. Phonogram is about music, but it is primarily about culture and how it shapes us. The Music is the example we used. In another universe, I did Phonogram about comics. There is love in the world and that is a good thing, or at least a thing.
Personally, I'm far less deeply involved in music fandom than I used to be. I have retired to the pavilion, and enjoy watching the game, sipping port and working on my gout. However, even as something as earthly as a comic creator, I've had enough people come up to me in tears to know that passionate involvement in art is there, if often expressed in different ways. And, implicit in Phonogram, every Phonomancer makes their own magic system. There is no rule book (or rather, there are rule books, but it's by you choosing to follow a rule book that it becomes your magic).
I would never try to write about those magic systems though. By implication of the above, Phonogram's music system is mine. It's both encouragement and permission to make others try and think about their own lives in similar ways.
Pitchfork: Is the vinyl revival the result of a phonomantic ritual?
KG: Maybe, actually. The reason why vinyl became so key to Phonogram's iconography is because of its iconography and semiotics. In a real way, it is easier to do magic with. That is at least part of the reason for the vinyl revival. Vinyl, by accumulating everything it has, is magic in a way which other vessels aren't.
Pitchfork: A lot of The Immaterial Girl’s first issue was set in the early 2000s, and draws on your own involvement in music criticism back then. Some of the fights in the comic—over how important the White Stripes were, or people getting angry about liking pop "ironically"—were very familar. Do you think the arguments we all had back then still matter?
KG: Phonogram's always ran off that internal tension—simultaneously believing that "This is the most important thing in the world" while knowing "It doesn't matter at all". Phonogram tries to very specifically capture a moment in time and hopes that what's interesting about that moment translates wider. Normally we're trying to choose specific examples that illustrate a wider point. Rue Britannia used Britpop, but it was about that first time you see the a scene which you were invested in get resold and reimagined, and how that feels (and how individuals dance with that) translates. Or, at least, it can.
I suspect it's less that the arguments mattered, but that we were having arguments mattered. I cherish those fights. I cherished having people I wanted to fight with and for.
Phonogram 3: The Immaterial Girl #1 is out today from Image Comics.