I’ve been waiting to write about Phonogram. There are so many rock and roll comics to cover, so many different books with different approaches, and this one looms large. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s series is, in my mind, the…
Category: Comics
Pop Music Comics: Steeltown Rockers
Growing up in a dead-end town, practicing guitar in the basement. Hoping music could be the ticket to something better. Ambitions of stardom, rehearsing the songs, taking any gig that comes along, imagining away the harsh realities of everyday life.…
Pop Music Comics: The Maniaks
I’ve discussed many of the ways that comics and rock and roll have intersected over the years, but there’s one particular type I’ve forgotten to mention ’til now: The blatant cash-in. The Monkees were the hottest thing around in 1967,…
Gene Colan, 1926-2011
Gene Colan passed away a few days ago. I can’t possibly do justice to this man’s life and career in the space of a few lines of type. He was one of the finest artists ever to grace comic books. …
Pop Music Comics: Twenty-Seven, Li’l Depressed Boy
Image Comics has a well-earned reputation as a home for both mainstream superhero titles and artist-driven alternative works, and over the past decade have published some of the most exciting and enjoyable comics I’ve run across. Many of these have…
Pop Music Comics: Red Rocket 7
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…
Pop Music Comics: Saturday Morning
Pop music and comic books share many sensibilities and influences, and often cross over in unexpected and interesting ways. Comic artists illustrate album covers, bands utilize four-color imagery in videos and live shows, musicians try their hands at writing and…
Pop Music Comics: Sonic Disruptors
Comic Books and Rock & Roll have a complex and entangled relationship, full of shared influences, common history, and thematic cross-pollination. Both started as disposable forms delivered in small doses, became emblematic of youth culture and rebellion in the cold…
MoCCA Festival 2011
Springtime in NYC brings the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival: a two-day showcase for all the comic book medium has to offer, with a particular focus on independent publishers and creators. The 2011 fest took place on April…
Comics Through The Years: Angel And The Ape
In the late 50s, DC Comics editors Irwin Donenfeld and Julius Schwartz noted that sales went up every time an one of their comics featured an ape on the cover. Predictably, what followed was a flood of simian-centric issues. By…