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One Model Nation: Comics, Music, & POP

Comics and music: is there a more unlikely pair? Unless you’re synesthetic, there’s minimal visual quality to music (feel free to argue otherwise because I’d love to hear it) and sound is only conveyed in comics through the visual — word balloons, sound effects, and other elements.

Still, the two persistently mingle. Alan Moore puts entire musical sequences into his comics (see: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910) and has worked with David J of Love and Rockets (the band, not the comic). Matt Fraction provided an entire playlist in the pages of Casanova #14. Brian Lee O’Malley releases music as Kupek. Paul Pope is a DJ. Joe Casey, Grant Morrison, and Mike Allred have all been in bands. Neil Gaiman, best pals with Tori Amos, is currently dating Amanda Palmer.

The other direction is a bit less inspiring. While you have Tyrese and Pete Wentz attempting to cash in on themselves by putting their names on comics, you have a few bright spots to make up for it like Booster Gold superfan Eddie Argos, of Art Brut, singing about his love for DC Comics while Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance writes wonderful books like The Umbrella Academy and gets to collaborate with serious talent like Gabriel Bá and Becky Cloonan.

Now we can add Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Dandy Warhols frontman, to the latter list. Writing as C. Albritton Taylor, he’s collaborated with Street Angel creator Jim Rugg to create the graphic novel One Model Nation for Image Comics — a vision of 1977 Berlin and the influential/fictional German art noise band One Model Nation, who invented electronica and led a revolution (both musical and otherwise) only to mysteriously vanish a year later.

Rebellious, politicized youth? Fashionable, arty noise rock? Fictional bands? Smashing the system? It’s like they made this comic for me.

The preview pages we were sent are rendered in oppressive purple tones with red tints taking over panels in the major moments: a One Model Nation performance, a series of gunshots. Jim Rugg’s art is appropriately reminiscent of POP comics master Mike Allred, who serves as editor of the book and whose Red Rocket 7 was THE rock ‘n’ roll comic book of the 1990s.

As a writer, Taylor shows what could potentially be a good handle on the form, knowing when to let the characters talk and when to let the images speak for themselves for a few exciting wordless sequences. I wish there were some “musician turned writer” pitfalls to reference like how novelists writing comics sometimes choke the images to death with needless words or how screenwriters turned comic writers produce glorified storyboards. Only when the complete graphic novel is released October 28^th, 2009, will we find out if Taylor’s a decent writer.

One might think that comics are a poor medium for stories about music, but they have a surprising benefit:

You can’t hear the music.

Allow me to clarify. If One Model Nation were a movie, someone would have had to compose all the music and it would have to be good enough to convince the viewer that the band is as good as the story purports. This can totally backfire if the songs suck.

With a comic, all you have to do is convince the reader that One Model Nation is a brilliant band via art and fan reaction. We can imagine the music for ourselves. Scott Pilgrim is ALL about music, and nobody has heard what The Clash at Demonhead or Sex Bob-omb sound like. When the film comes out, you can bet that the music will be a point of contention for many fans.

Right now I’m listening to the first album by the Japanese art-rock band Zazen Boys and so One Model Nation sounds a bit like that if you threw in a primitive version of the machinery-evoking guitars of Franz Ferdinand’s singles and some heavy Kraftwerk-like proto-electronica (yeah, I had to go there). How do they sing? I bet it’s a bit like a less depressing Ian Curtis in German. To someone else they might sound like early Talking Heads as performed by robots.

Why is there such a link between comics and music? Aside from the deranged and creepy, everybody likes music. Many of us listen to it while we work. Perhaps it’s because comics and music court different senses and comics have the same relationship with cinema that the United States has with England (a quick rundown: two nations separated by a common language, bitter rivalry, stay out of our conventions, Hollywood you’ve ruined yet another great comic book, comics are more than just glorified film pitches).

Maybe it’s because comics and music are POP. As a lover of film I know that cinema can be POP but comics and music take less time to make and are so much more of what good POP is: it’s borderline disposable but necessary, irresistible and very much in the now. When made by smart, original people, it’s important and divine. I’m hoping One Model Nation is POP.

The synthesis of music and comics: is there anything more POP?