The Complete Phonogram

Fuck what it means, that much is obvious. The Complete Phonogram as an expensive hardcover shows the team’s enjoyed tremendous success due in some measure to Phonogram. The Singles Club lead to collaborations with Warren Ellis and Journey Into Mystery, which lead to Young Avengers, which lead to The Wicked & The Divine, which became Wic/Div and the rest is a cottage industry of cosplay, fan art and merchandise (which figuratively, and literally, keeps fans in line).

How does The Complete Phonogram make me feel?

Wistful. Happy. Tired. I carried that giant hardcover around all day April 21st and it nearly wrecked my back on its own.

I carried that hardcover around figuratively much, much longer.

I read Phonogram obsessively in my raw, unemployed years and didn’t know I was burning when I was at rest. A hardcover that collects all of the comic and b-sides looks better on the shelf and is easier to reference. I won’t miss Kieron’s essays or annotations, and if I do, I’ve got the singles and trades.

A book this heavy feels like Phonogram’s finally finished now. It’d been overtaken by Wic/Div, and for good reason, the team’s busy growing into this generation’s Sandman. Now Phonogram can rest, and maybe I can too. I’m in counseling and untangling the rat’s nest of cables that’s my brain and behavior.

Phonogram’s a document of years spent listening to bands and letting it change or mutate or infect you. Or something else, in my case. Music held me together when I couldn’t manage that myself.

Do I ever wonder how music changed me? Years at a time, brother.

Phonogram’s done, and everyone’s in a better place. In 2011, I hopped a flight to London to see the boys at Kapow, and Kieron was signing alongside legendary penciller John Romita Jr, whose line (and forty years in the industry) subsumed Kieron’s. Six years later, that’s not the case, and there's a dense hardcover to prove it.

And for that dense hardcover, and what it finishes, a celebration and a task: I must happily wave goodbye to a comic that changed me.

It’s now the morning of April 22nd. There’s a secret Wic/Div party tonight, which Hannah and I’ll show up for. Maybe I’ll let her put makeup on me. Maybe I’ll go a little glam. I’ll say goodbye to Phonogram on the Wic/Div dance floor, which feels like it’s exactly the way PG would want to go. I’m closer to living a peaceful life now than I was when I first read Rue Britannia. That peace is due, in some measure, to Phonogram.


Thanks, gents.

The Wicked & The Blissfucker

The time period is late 2010-mid 2011. I am running around Europe, but not nearly enough.

I have two things in my head, Phonogram and Trap Them. I am lost and confused and more or less alone. I go out to Thought Bubble in November 2010 to see the Phonogram team, and some Borges style magic happens. I return to England in April or May 2011,  to see them again at a London comic book convention called Kapow, but to do so, I must miss Trap Them when they come through Rome.

While in London, I have the new Trap Them record Darker Handcraft, and it keeps me settled and together while I navigate the hamster habitat of the Tube. My review of Darker Handcraft ends up being one of the reviews I'm proudest of ever. I got a gift of 10 pounds from Kieron Gillen in November, and felt obligated to pay him back, which was largely the reason I attended Kapow. When I wasn't with friends in London, I had Darker Handcraft and not much else. I found bookstores and waited.

I have to talk about both Blissfucker and The Wicked & The Divine at the same time before I will ever figure out what I think of either of them individually.

The time period is now mid-2014. I live in the United States, but not nearly enough.

 

I believed Blissfucker and The Wicked & The Divine came out the same week and wrote this hurriedly. A quick Google search tells me Blissfucker came out the week before, meaning I held off on Trap Them for Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie again. Blissfucker is more sludgy than Darker Handcraft, but turbocharged by Ryan McKenney's crusty/d-beat yawp. You will not mistake any part of Blissfucker for drone. The Wicked & The Divine is a more refined (and vulgar) version of that team's recent works.*

In The Wicked & The Divine, heads explode in a pop art fashion, in what I believe highlights the intrusion of visible, but not fully graspable magic into the story's real world. Producer Kurt Ballou understands Blissfucker is a guitar record and lavishes attention on Brian Izzi's instrument. Matthew Wilson's colors on The Wicked & The Divine are flawless. When called upon, they're not merely bright but vivid. I find The Wicked & The Divine's first issue cliffhanger to be underwhelming. A judge (less a character than a object against which Lucifer [nee Luci] can monologue) dies and it appears Lucifer did it. Lucifer claims innocence.
Blissfucker slows down and it works. Darker Handcraft was a record that went for the open, unguarded throat in the first quarter second of the first song. That sets a precedent that Blissfucker does not maintain. The first track, Salted Crypts, introduces itself with a dirge that is all menace. The Wicked & The Divine opens with a full page splash of a hand on a skull. The comic manages to go through a couple different fonts, each feeling correct and precisely placed, so I'm assuming that means letterer Clayton Cowles did his job well.

I didn't know what I was expecting with The Wicked & The Divine, but I ordered it sight unseen. Since then, I read too many interviews so I knew what was coming and that lessened the blow. By comparison, I'd heard three, maybe four songs from Blissfucker and I love it, especially the sludgy parts that aren't what the public thinks of when they think about Trap Them. Trap Them's discography is broader than most people realize (Dead Fathers Wading In The Bodygrounds prefigures the 7+ minute Savage Climbers, Bad Nones could be described as a palate cleanser made a full song, see Sordid Earnings) so Blissfucker doesn't entirely wreck the line of best fit. In short, they're still a Swedish thrash band before they are anything else.

But Blissfucker is new and it isn't what a lot of critics were expecting. A crusty/d-beat thrash metal band is not unknown to our ears and is easy to put in a neat little box. (The box is marked "fast drums, no solos, do not color outside the lines.") The Wicked & The Divine is new and it is, with scientific accuracy, what a lot of critics were expecting.

Mouthy dandies with superpowers? Check.
Who happen to be gods? Check.
Meta-commentary on creators and fans? Check.
It's probably about myth**, the importance of producing the largest volume of /your/ work before you die and a few really good costumes? Check, check and check.

Blissfucker is a new taste or at least a different taste from a group known for something else. The Wicked & The Divine is a superior edition of a taste I was expecting. A different review would say that it synthesizes the lessons from Kieron Gillen's more hype Marvel bibliography. But what I really mean is it's an easy jump from Young Avengers into The Wicked & The Divine.

A major piece of the first issue doesn't connect with me for ideological reasons. ("She's looking right at me! I swear, she's looking right at me!" v. "These are three chords, now form a band"***) It connected with a lot of other people, though. And those people love it. It hits their notes and not mine. I suspect that I'll like the comic when it gets more wicked and less divine.

At bottom: I didn't know what to expect with Blissfucker and I liked it. I knew what to expect from The Wicked & The Divine and I criticized it. They're both constructed meticulously. I'd recommend either to casual (and hardcore) fans of the metal genre or the medium of comics. For my part? I'll need to stop reading so many interviews.








One of the conceits of The Wicked & The Divine is that it is about gods that live for two years and then die, to be reincarnated every ninety or so. I'm of the opinion a character called Lucifer has a nefarious plan, so, I'm waiting for that other shoe to drop. While not on Blissfucker, Dead Fathers Wading In The Bodygrounds has a line that while it doesn't fit perfectly, fits just nicely enough: "We are the old graves, digging the new." For those people who actually want to listen to Savage Climbers (find it above) and then Dead Fathers... (find it below,) enjoy.

*And yes, I know the next problem is that Blissfucker arrives as a complete package whereas The Wicked & The Divine is one issue of something much, much larger. I'm aware.

**There is a thing here that I am asked to keep quiet about, but I think a friend of mine has the team figured out on a major thing in the comic. I'll copy paste it in when this friend gives the all clear.

*** Before we get to "there's more to music than things with guitars," pretend it reads "here's Fruity Loops and a YouTube tutorial, now write some songs."

Magic And Adventures (No, and Yes Respectively)

Wednesday, man. I nearly got into a fight and stabbed. There's more to the story, but none of it is quite so interesting or entirely mine to tell. Then, after not sleeping after that, I go to Dublin, have a pint of Guiness while my flight is delayed and head to Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, in New York City, where I currently am.

I don't have full control of my schedule. Or: I don't know what I'm doing or where I'll be for sure from day to day this weekend. You've heard of playing it by ear, yes? I'm actually doing that. There's something exciting about that feeling of improvising the schedule that makes a city seem more real and somehow also more magical.

I don't believe in magic.

A Phonogram fanzine asked the question: When did I know music was magic? It's not. Or, it is, or can be. It is what you make it. Which is one of the actually deep things I've ever read and then repeated. It's music. It's just that. Phonogram made me do it, but Phonogram doesn't blind me. We call it magic because we don't have the backbone to admit it and do it ourselves more often. We mistake transportation mixed with inspiration for magic.

I'm reading Kraken now, which is festooned with actual, for real magic. (For the record: I haven't used the word festooned in a long time. Good word.) It is a book which could not exist without magic. Phonogram's is only gilded by it. The people's lives are kissed by magic but not consumed by it. Phonogram adds color.

But. Phonogram's magic is something that colors or enlivens, once you already know an area. There's a song, by Crime In Stereo called Barfight on Bedford Avenue. Having now seen Bedford, I now understand better the tenor of the song, having seen this place. It's about fake friends and superficial bullshit and having now stepped foot in that place, the song gains weight and specificity.

And that's magic. Well, sort of. It makes life interesting and more colorful. But that's not magic. That's doing things and existing and saying yes to things and not no. I don't view that as magical. But there's something new and exciting about saying yes to things. So much so that I'm staying somewhere else tonight and I'm willing to be uncomfortable to do it. Man: What am I doing?

I know what I'm doing: Adventures. I just don't have to believe they're magical.




Of course, I can't find Barfight on Bedford Ave, so here, have, a live version of Not Dead, which has some appropriate lyrics for the magical adventure: "It's in the west. The pacific sun descends. It's in your best friend's basement. It's in your head."

Cut Short And Used Up.

I wrote elsewhere that the world will kick my teeth in. Coming back from the adventure this weekend, I can testify to the veracity of that statement.

Or in other words: Yes, the world can so easily crush me, without even realizing it. This was reinforced by the last sentence in the first paragraph I read of 2666, after spending a page talking about the police detectives trying to connect the dots on a brutal, vicious rape (a topic as light as a 30 meters of concrete), there's this: The semen samples sent to Hermosillo were lost, whether on the way there or the way back it wasn't clear.

It ends there and it's nearly impossible for me to keep reading. After a weekend of incredible highs and crypt level lows, most occurring in my mind, reading that matter of fact final sentence deflated me. After all the hard work of the detectives and the incredible (but sadly commonplace) pain of the rape, the piece that would help bring the rapist to justice was lost due to carelessness, neglect or not trying. All that effort expended and...it's simply not around any more.

Frustrating describes, but doesn't encapsulate it. There's bits of rage and exhaustion after having read it, that whatever else I do, no, this is what the world is like and no amount of expensive vacations to indulge me is going to change it. The joy, the happiness, the leftover buzz or high from the achievement the adventure was short circuited and burnt out.

Cut short and used up? Yeah. That's how it felt.





Today I was listening to NaNaNaNa by My Chemical Romance, which in the context I heard it this weekend was suitably eardrum rattling and epic but after this, feels like the song is hollow and armored in tin.

More On the Title

Subsidized Sincerity is a title that, hopefully, expresses unease and acknowledges the negotiation and fudging of truth in life, specifically, my own. I mean, that fucking Monetize button. I think it's laughing at me.

It's a title, that I hope, stirs the pot enough to get whiffs of half-truths, lies that are accurate and humorless laughter. I feel comfortable with those behaviors. Maybe it's what I've been reading for the last 10 or so years. Those books are based on compromise, being trapped and forced to make a decision that isn't satisfying but permissible.

Not satisfying but permissible. Wow.

It's about being tainted but still trying to do something. Damnit, something. That actions, even if they are checkered, suspect or not entirely pure still have some kind of value. Doing good when everything's cool and you have superpowers is easy. Doing good when you can taste the blood and vomit mixing between your teeth, the bed is empty and your job drains every milliliter of your energy is much harder and worth so much more.

That's why I chose Subsidized Sincerity.

Oh. I go to Rome (as in Italy) for three months. I leave in three hours. I think the third post will be in Rome, as many of the coming posts will be.

This post's song is by the Long Blondes, as a tip of the hat to a couple of my friends and to the Phonogram comic series generally. It's one of the few Long Blondes songs that I enjoy because it's fun and not depressing. That's all I'll say. See you in dreams.