“We often say Phonogram is music criticism,” says Kieron Gillen, shaking off jetlag, having just flown back from San Diego Comic Convention. “It does come from the same part of me that was a critic.” Phonogram is a comic series that imagines a world in which the magic of music is a literal power, controlled by “phonomancers”: pop priests who turn songs into sacred rituals. It’s written by Gillen, a former games and music journalist (who happily admits that “a lot of the stories are really arguments”) and drawn by Jamie McKelvie, an artist who captures pop epiphanies in clean, gorgeous lines. His work can also be seen on Glaswegian synthpop act Chvrches’ tour posters.
The pair met in 2003 at a convention where Gillen was selling his first photocopied comics. The first Phonogram series, Rue Britannia, came out three years later. It stars David Kohl, a thinly disguised portrait of Gillen, and follows his quest to extricate himself from the demons of Britpop. The follow-up series, Singles Club, came out between 2008 and 2010, and tracks seven characters through one night at a club in Bristol. Its meticulous plotting derives from McKelvie having pages pinned up across his bedroom walls. “It just got too oppressive,” he says. “After a few months, I had to tear them all down.”
Phonogram is full of references to please music anoraks, such as Luke Haines’s appearance as a Dantean hell-guide and a furious rant about 00s retro-twee girl-band the Pipettes. But it is also avowedly anti-elitist. “By the end of Rue Britannia,” says Gillen, “Kohl’s moment, when he actually saves himself, comes when he meets a Libertines fan. He’s like, ‘You have terrible taste, but that’s fine. This is important to you, roll with it.’”
Outside of the Phonogram world, Gillen and McKelvie have been working on Marvel’s Young Avengers, which chronicles the trials of growing up as a superhero, but they’ve also been producing Phonogram’s sister series, The Wicked & The Divine, which imagines a pantheon of popstars (often resembling real-life artists, such as Rihanna, Bowie, Prince and Florence Welch), granted godlike powers – but only two years to live. The series, known as WicDiv to its devotees, recently sported a grisly hell-vision of a cover, all bleeding eyes and animal skulls, illustrated by the Canadian electro star Grimes. It’s in the process of being made into a TV series by Universal.
Now, though, the pair are returning to the cult title that made their name. Phonogram series three, The Immaterial Girl, will overtly link phonomancery to Gillen’s music-critic past. It takes up the story of Emily Aster, a razor-tongued phonomancer who becomes a bulletproof version of herself by trading half her personality in a Faustian pact involving A-ha’s Take On Me video. Another image shows her in the creepy choir from Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, and the first issue switches between precise depictions of the 2001 electroclash mini-era and Emily’s 80s childhood fling with satellite television. “It’s the golden era of MTV,” says McKelvie. “I think the transitional stages in culture are the most interesting ones, when we go from one paradigm to another.”
Next year will mark Phonogram’s 10th anniversary. The gaps between series, and sometimes issues, may have pained its readers, but nowhere near as much as the series has sometimes pained its creators, with McKelvie having to exist in London on £100 an issue. Then, during Rue Britannia, Kieron split up with his then-girlfriend. Jamie broke up with his during the making of Singles Club. “Phonogram’s always been full of disaster,” says Gillen, “so we’re almost intimidated to put it out, because our lives are OK at the moment. The last thing we need is everything exploding.”
Perhaps the only thing that will blow up this time is Phonogram’s popularity. It seems hard to imagine that the larger audience in love with WicDiv’s witty and high-drama take on fandom, or the smart dialogue of Young Avengers, wouldn’t love Phonogram. Grimes is sold, for one. “She’d never heard A-ha’s Take On Me until Phonogram,” says Gillen. “And she was tweeting about it, saying, ‘This is a great tune!’ We thought, ‘Wow, we’ve introduced Grimes to Take On Me! That’s some heavy shit.”
• Plan B, the first issue of Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl, is out on 12 August. Issue 13 of The Wicked & The Divine is available now.
