Newsarama’s own Chris Arrant chats with Kieron Gillen about their respective musical comics 1 Way Ticket and Phonogram over at the Chemistry Set, making for some very interesting conversation and lots of great soundbites, like this one from Gillen:
I think that’s an interesting way of looking at music - “the only artform that’s actually universally respected by youth-culture”. Which, of course, shows why it still manages an essential disreputability, which is one of the things that always attracts me to culture (Comics, Videogames, Pop Music - my essential troika). As you say, it’s a shared experience. Of course, one difference between Phonogram and 1 Way Ticket is that I’m concentrating a lot more about the /consumption/ of music. Since I’m taking that literal Music-Is-Magic approach, I knew the most obvious thing to do was basically turn rock musicians into these Godlike creatures, touching their majesty on the earth. Except, for me, that’s clearly bullshit. What’s interesting to me about pop music is an individual’s interaction with a work of art and what happens there - and it’s such an instinctive work of art, it’s questionable whether even a fraction of its creators even vaguely understood what they’ve done. (The one rule of music journalism: It’s a rare artist who’s even slightly as interesting as their work.)
And this one from Arrant:
On a great tangent, one thing I found particularly interesting that happens both in comics and music is how a majority of people’s music and comic tastes in their older years is latched into the music of their teenage years. As with comics where we see a majority of the audience still holding out for the superheroics of the comics of their younger days, in music a large percentage of the average consumer-base continues to follow the musical acts of their teenage years. While people might veer outside their particular genre choices for the biggest hits of the day, they still call the tastes of their teenage years as their evergreen stomping grounds.
It isn’t really so much of an interview as it is a dialogue between two guys passionate about comics & music. Interesting stuff; check it out.
