Rock and roll often borrows from the wondrous milieu of comic books, adopting costumes, characters, names, and incidental iconography… Album covers, lyrical content, concert posters, concert staging, and even artists’ identities themselves are filtered through four-color prisms, building the mythology of rock star and creating grand spectacle. And at the same time as rock has looked to comics as a muse, the reverse is true: the impulse flows both ways, comics drawing on the innate power of music for content and inspiration. The two forms have common history, but there’s more than that tying them together — a sense of limitless invention, a lack of strict formalist structures, a kinship of two media where the only boundaries are those of imagination.
The story of rock and roll is complex and convoluted, a tapestry of colorful characters and absurd plot twists. In Red Rocket 7, Mike Allred weaves the facts of rock’s emergence into a chronicle of intergalactic intrigue and flying saucers, a pulp fantasy mixing two larger-than-life artforms.
The book is named for the lead character: Red Rocket 7, a talented musician and an alien clone who (with his identical clone brothers) has been stuck on earth since the 1950s. Red 7 seeks his fortune and ends up falling into the music biz, gigging alongside Little Richard, meeting Elvis, playing with The Beatles in Hamburg, subtly influencing events as he appears through the ages. The plot is a whirl of historic imagery and raygun battles — Allred’s clean inkwork and snappy dialogue propelling the story forward, flashing us through transistor radios and Vietnam and guitars and bug-eyed monsters. Famous images appear throughout, subtly altered to make room for the eponymous protagonist: photographs converted to penlines, meticulously reinterpreting pop history. The fantastical elements of spacemen and far-away worlds and the documentary details combine to great effect, each facet echoing themes from the other, shining lights on the dreams of 20th century youth culture. It’s a complex jigsaw puzzle of reality and fiction, an artistic tour-de-force, and a heartfelt love letter to pop music— one-stop shopping for all your sci-fi espionage rock & roll desires.
Red Rocket 7 was originally published in seven issues from Dark Horse comics. It is currently in print in collected form from Image Comics. Mike Allred also recorded an album and directed a film to tie in with the comic series, and more info about those projects (and all things Allred) is available at his website.
All articles in the Pop Music Comics series can be found here.
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