February/March 2024 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley

Hello, everyone! We had a lot of fun this month as we shared stories from college and/or what we were up to in the early 2000’s. One of our members had the pleasure of attending the Angoulême Comics Festival and shared some cool stories, including running into the writer of next month’s selection, Jim Terry!

It was a pretty light discussion this month as there wasn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said about a book that’s been famous for decades. (Scott’s a creep! His friends are cool! Both of those statements are oversimplifications!) As was mentioned in last month’s discussion, Heartstopper has become the gold standard for romance comics for our group, but we talked more about shonen manga. Scott Pilgrim also inspired a heavy amount of nostalgia for the time it was written and/or what we were up to when we were Scott’s age. The book is very much a time capsule for when certain bands were popular, certain music genres were on the rise, and Amazon was a little-known website that only employed one delivery person for all of Ontario (according to the world of Scott Pilgrim). A few people continued reading the series and one person had read it previously, so we got to compare those experiences. Our resident retailer said this title is a pretty consistent best seller and praised it as one of the few examples of depicting music in comics well (more on that below). Our next meeting will be Wednesday, March 20 to discuss Come Home, Indio.

What We're Reading

March 20 - Come Home, Indio by Jim Terry

April 17 - The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

May 15 - Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

June 19 - Bitter Root, Volume 1: Family Business by David F. Walker and Sanford Greene

July 17 - It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood

August 21 - The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

Next month’s selection is not available on hoopla, so make sure to secure a physical copy from the Chicago Public Library if you’re an official member of the Comics Book Club. (My copy is waiting for me at my local branch.) If anyone needs help getting a copy, let me know!

The results are in from our latest survey! We planned through the end of summer and will revisit it in the future. Superman Smashes the Klan handily won the Special Superman Survey. Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth was the only book to get a 100% positive response, but “we definitely don’t want to read that during the colder months,” as somebody put it.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I’ve made a lot of progress in smaller things while in between bigger releases. The SMASH Quarterly Anthology, Volume 1 from Foreign Press Comics is in pre-launch. I’ll have a four-page comic in Volume 2 with art by David Escobar and letters by Buddy Beaudoin. The better Volume 1 does, the better Volume 2’s chances will be, so please give it a follow!

In the meantime, I’ve written two one-page comics that got posted to The Comic Jam! I was introduced to this group by Benjamin Melton, the colorist for my first-ever completed comic, “Dead Dreams.” Every week, they post a challenge in a Discord server to complete a one-page comic around a particular theme. I’ve submitted a few scripts, but, as is so often the case with comics, there are more writers than artists. I hadn’t been able to get a script drawn or lettered, but now I’ve got two to share! Woohoo!

The theme posted on February 20 was “Kaiju.” You can read my comic, “Science Vs Magic,” here (it’s the sixth one down) with art by KVGir and letters by Luke W. Henderson. I’ve reproduced the opening below, but please click through to read the whole thing. I was really impressed with KVGir’s kaiju and how Luke interpreted my script! You’re going to want to see what they came up with. :)

Art by KVGir, letters by Luke W. Henderson.

The theme for February 27 was “Medieval Sci-Fi.” My submission for this one was “The Castle Is an Island” (the fourth one down here). It was more of a proof of concept for an idea I’ve been retooling for a while than a complete narrative. If anyone wants to help develop it, hit me up! Lol The art is by Ryan “Dougal” Devine with letters by Kevin D. Lintz. Please check out the whole thing, they did a great job hinting at several stories I hope to tell someday.

I’ll be recording an episode for the Comic Chat Authority podcast soon! Make sure to subscribe to their channel and click the bell for notifications to learn when the episode goes live.

About What We’ve Read

We read the colorized version of Scott Pilgrim due to general availability (at least, that was the plan; some people read it in the original black and white and I couldn’t blame them). Back in 2015, creator Bryan Lee O’Malley walked through the entire series with Oliver Sava at the AV Club to mark its publication. (Spoilers!)

We talked briefly about the adaptations of Scott Pilgrim, including the new anime series on Netflix. It goes in a very different direction, which pleased the person who had read the series before and intrigued the people who hadn’t. Creator Bryan Lee O’Malley discussed this direction and the reasons for it with the CBC back in November. (Spoilers! Again.)

In honor of Scott Pilgrim’s 20th anniversary, publisher Oni Press is releasing a special deluxe box set in August that includes new artwork and remastered colors. It looks pretty comprehensive!

Finally, because I’m kinda rushed this month, here’s the song from indie Canadian band Plumtree that inspired the name of the main character.

If you’re looking for the NEWS section, come back here in two weeks.

Some Thoughts on Music in Comics

Music is my one great artistic blind spot. As much as I can talk about comics, literature, or film, I am incapable of meaningfully contributing to a conversation about music. I get anxious when people start talking about bands they like. I would rather talk about sculpting. Despite this, I am fascinated with how music is depicted in comics.

Visual representations of sound can be seen in some of the earliest comics with sound effects or wavy lines. Add a couple of notes and clefs to those wavy lines, and everybody knows that represents music, even if they can’t read the notes (or aren’t supposed to). But how to innovate this depiction instead of relying on methods that are nearly a hundred years old?

My first experience with any type of experimentation in this regard was probably V for Vendetta’s “The Vicious Cabaret” chapter. I’d never seen sheet music reproduced in a comic before. And the lyrics served as the dialogue! I had no idea if this sounded any good, but I was entranced.

Art by David Lloyd, lyrics by Alan Moore, music notation by David J. Haskins

The above example was used, along with Scott Pilgrim and Bang Tango, by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou to discuss musical notation in comics. You can read his article for Comics Alliance’s Music Week here or watch his Strip Panel Naked video on the topic below. He does a better job breaking this down than I could.

Another example is Blue in Green by writer Ram V and artist Anand RK, with colors by John Pearson and letters by Aditya Bidikar. It’s an underrated horror comic about a jazz musician that subtly incorporates musical beats and notation into the page layouts and design. Perhaps my favorite depiction of music in comics eschews any and all of the usual iconography and communicates entirely through one of the most underrated aspect of comics. In The Wicked + The Divine, colorist Matthew Wilson used the wavelengths of the colors on the electromagnetic spectrum to convey the beat of the music in a nightclub. I thought that was downright brilliant (no pun intended).

From The Wicked + The Divine #8. Art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matt Wilson.

The Wicked + The Divine was also one of the first series I knew of to curate a song playlist for fans to enjoy based on the issue they’d be reading. This only makes sense for a comic about pop stars, but some artists and creators have gone further by composing music to accompany their work, such as Tyler Crook with Harrow County or Bad Ink Studios for their series Interdimensional.

The advent of webcomics has also provided more opportunities to incorporate music into comics. Two of my favorite series on Webtoon, The Shadow Prophet and Everything Is Fine!, couldn’t be more different in tone and style but both have the occasional instrumental piece to play over certain panels during the vertical scrolling experience. The Shadow Prophet even has some of its music serve as a plot point about the main character’s spotty memory.

The creator of Crystal City Killers, a delightful comic about a high school band in England, has even written and produced songs that are referenced in the comic as having been created by the titular band. I’ll leave you with their remastered single “National Anthem” below. Enjoy!

I hope I didn’t lose the thread too much this month. I feel like I ended on a very different place from where I began. Lol Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Do you have a favorite comic about music or that incorporates music somehow? What sort of music do you enjoy? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you later this month for Come Home, Indio by Jim Terry!