Do we need to write about Phonogram any more on this site? Probably not. Should we let that stop us? Probably not. This meme is all about personal experiences, after all, and there are few comics that could define that phrase for me more than Phonogram has over the last few years. Both for its content and for its existence as an object, it’s an especially significant comic to me, and probably always will be; and undoubtedly, there are multiple ways in which it’s influenced and inspired me and my life.

First of all, devoid of any extraneous context, Phonogram is inspirational simply as a piece of art. It’s an expression of sensations and emotions that have never really been voiced in quite so specific a way before – its central metaphor, of music as a powerful magic, is so compelling that it really is staggering that it wasn’t hackneyed and well-trodden ground by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In its first series, it was simply nice to see somebody writing a comic in which the likes of Damon Albarn and Luke Haines could make appearances. I grew up with Britpop, but not in the sense of it being a “scene” that I was part of – I’d sit in my bedroom listening to my battered Parklife and Great Escape tapes over and over, or debate Jarvis’ lyrics with friends in school, or tune in eagerly to hear Lamacq play the first single off a new Blur album for the first time. As it was largely enjoyed alone, it was a special feeling to meet someone who felt the same way – even when that music was topping the charts and it seemed everyone felt the same way – and Rue Britannia reawakened that feeling. “These guys are on my wavelength,” I thought. “They’re writing a comic for me.” Even though they quite clearly weren’t.

But with The Singles Club, the sensation became more universal, Gillen and McKelvie putting into words and shapes and pictures the sort of things that music – in all its forms – and, hell, art in all its forms, makes every one of us feel at particular times. I never really spoke about it in detail at the time – even as I was writing far, far too many words about the issue – but when issue #2 came out, I was not long out of the breakup of a long relationship – and still in that phase where just about any record I’d listened to in the preceding year (although there were one or two particular ones that especially did it – ones that I really liked, too) would be entirely off-limits, as they couldn’t help but take me mentally back to the time and place I’d been in in the time leading up to said breakup. I never had a word or phrase for that feeling, though – until Gillen showed up with the concept of the “curse song”. Bang. It’s like one of those concepts the Germans always have snappy words for, and you wonder why we don’t have one ourselves – because it’s so universal. Everybody has them, and everybody will always continue to have them. And that’s why Phonogram, purely as a comic in and of itself, is inspirational – if that’s the right word – for its ability to beautifully and succinctly express the purest and most universal of human feelings.

But there’s more to it than that. I can’t ignore the significance of Phonogram the comic-as-object, either, for what it’s represented to me over the last few years. I’ve had the honour of knowing both Kieron and Jamie on a personal level for a while now, having first met them when Phonogram was an under-heralded indie comic, loved by everyone who read it but not read by anything like enough people. Of course, it was never read by anything like enough people in the end, but it will now forever represent the point at which two significant creators made their entry proper into the field. It’s been an absolute pleasure to see the pair’s individual rises through comics, to the point where Kieron is writing Uncanny X-Men and Jamie is being personally tapped by Brian Bendis to draw Ultimate Spider-Man – and none of it would have happened without Phonogram. It’s about the most inspirational industry story you can find – an object lesson in the fact that if you create something really fucking good, even if it doesn’t seem like a success at the time, even if you have all manner of struggles just to get by while you’re making the thing happen, talent will out and you can make something truly great of yourself.

And there’s a final meaning of “inspired”, to boot, although perhaps “influenced” would be the better term in this instance. As I’ve already said, I have these barmy notions towards being A Writer Of Some Kind myself, and I’d be lying if I said reading Phonogram hasn’t directly influenced my own work over recent years. This has, of course, most obviously manifested itself in getting the chance to write a direct Phonogram tribute story for the …vs the Fans fanzine – my own little attempt to take one of those universal feelings that music can engender and express it in a piece of sequential art. At the time I wrote it, I thought I was quite neatly taking Kieron’s core philosophy and applying it to an area (the feeling you get when DJing) he hadn’t covered yet; of course, it was only a short while afterwards that issue #4, in which he did it better, was published. Nevertheless, it was a chapter in my own growth and evolution as a writer, and I’m sure that going forward the series will have an influential and inspirational effect in other (less obviously rip-offy) ways as well.

So that’s just some of why I love Phonogram. Why I’ve been inspired to write almost ten thousand words about it on this here blog. Why I’ll always look at two people who in other ways I can consider social peers and friends with just that tiny bit of awe. Why I repeatedly buy copies of it for friends and families’ birthdays, and jabber on about why they have to read it. And why it’s a comic that I’ll never, ever forget.

Well, this makes us happy. At Friday night’s Eagle Awards, the UK comic industry’s premiere set of prizes, Alternate Cover Favourite Phonogram scooped not one, but two awards – Best Single Issue for The Singles Club #4, “Konichiwa Bitches”, and Best Newcomer Artist for Jamie McKelvie, who shall of course now forever be known as The Belle & Sebastian Circa 1999 Of Comics.

Some four years after the first issue of Rue Britannia hit the stands, it’s great to see the comic finally get some seriously deserved wider recognition – and while Kieron and Jamie themselves are hardly in need of attention at the moment (as the incoming writer of Uncanny X-Men and the artist of short stories in Invincible Iron Man and Ultimate Spider-Man respectively), perhaps these wins and the creators’ growing fame will lead to a few more people picking up copies of the trade than otherwise might have. It’ll never be The Biggest Thing In Comics that it so clearly deserves to be, but if a more people manage to read it as a result of this, then it’s only a good thing. Congratulations, chaps!

I’m not a huge fan of contemporary comic covers (in the US industry, at least). Even since I started reading comics around 15 years ago, this potentially deep and nuanced aspect has been incrementally streamlined to the point where covers are now so generic, you could swap them between issues and no-one would notice. It’s almost as if being gripped in an orthodoxy that hasn’t really been challenged in any noticeable way since the 60s wasn’t enough of a bind for them – but that’s a rant for another time. Instead, let’s concentrate on the subject at hand: one of my favourite covers, the one found on issue 1 of Jamie McKelvie’s authorial debut, Suburban Glamour.

McKelvie’s covers first caught my attention when the previews for Phonogram #1 were released in 2006. I was sold on the series from the moment I read the first page (the 4th panel, in fact) but without its cover [visible here] I might not have even clicked through to the interior preview in the first place. When I see a comic referencing Elastica and the Manic Street Preachers on its cover, you’d better believe I want to see what’s inside it.

As much as I loved Phonogram‘s album-parody covers, it’s fair to say that they weren’t that different, conceptually, from any other books on the shelf. Even the concept of parody/tribute covers on comics is a well-worn one. For that reason, I was doubly blown away a year later when Suburban Glamour #1 hit the shelves looking like it did. Like something from the future, not the past.

See, the average comic cover is a mix of familiar elements – generic action shots or character poses, all dipped in a digital oil-slick of colour with barcodes and a logo slapped on top like censoring. They mostly look a complete mess. This was anything but. With a restrained, pastel-based pallette, a logo apparently integrated into the cover design from the start, liberal use of negative space and – shock! – design features that had no relation to the story. It even dared to be pink. Pink! In an industry as male-dominated as comics. That actually qualifies as a substantial risk (indeed, when Phonogram 2 #1 did a similar thing, I actually saw people saying they hadn’t bought it because of the cover.)

Suburban Glamour #1′s cover truly felt as though it had been built from scratch, guided by modern design conventions rather than industry tradition. If a book ever wanted to prove that it was different from its contemporaries, that was the way to do it. Even if I hadn’t already been looking forward to the series, there’s no question that I would have picked up a book with that cover to look inside – and to a certain extent, curiosity is probably the one thing a cover needs to inspire in its audience. It’s just a shame so few of them manage to do so.

Well, this looks like a corker. The devastatingly talented Brazilian twin brothers who confusingly have different surnames and are either jointly or separately responsible for drawing Casanova, Umbrella Academy and Daytripper, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, are going to be appearing at the Southbank Centre in London on 5th July, as part of the Brazilian Words at London Literature Festival, (which is itself “part of Festival Brazil sponsored by HSBC”, apparently). Presumably, they’re going to be doing that thing that creative pros often do at such events, i.e. sitting on a stage chatting about their careers before answering a few questions from the audience. Most interestingly, the host-slash-compere for this event is none other than… Jamie McKelvie. No, really, that Jamie McKelvie. Tickets are £12.50, and I imagine it’s something that will be very worth attending.

And if you’re still not reading Daytripper yet, you bloody should be.

Yes, we’ve talked about Phonogram a LOT on this site. And we’re not finished, either – we’ve still got this trade to review (you may be pleased to hear, though, that I’ve said more than my fair share about the series, and it’ll instead be James doing the honours) shortly. But in the meantime, we just wanted to make readers aware that it’s now available in all good comic shops and online book ordering establishments. It looks like this:

… and we know we’ve said it over and over and over again, but if you didn’t catch the singles, then if you have any sort of taste in comics you need to make damned well sure you get your hands on this. It’s missing the backup strips, which is a shame, but it does contain lots of lovely DVD extra-style “making of” material instead (and a typically excellent Gillen glossary). And if you happen to live in London, and are able to swing by Gosh!, you could even get your hands on a copy containing a rather lovely signed bookplate.

No excuses, now.

Note: Phonogram: The Singles Club #7 is released on Wednesday 10th February.

And so it ends. Perhaps the comic to which we’ve afforded the most reverence during this site’s life, Phonogram: The Singles Club has left an indelible mark upon those of us who’ve read it; and now it disappears into the night, leaving the question of whether or not it will actually return one day firmly unanswered. And it does so with an issue that has looked all along – at least, since we discovered that Kid-With-Knife was to be its lead character – to be more of a coda than a final issue proper. We’ve already had all sorts of conclusions – narrative, chronological, thematic, emotional – dotted throughout the series’ run – what more could KWK have to offer?

Well, as it happens, that assumption is only partially correct. For while in terms of the story there is indeed little to add (apart from a brief twist that I still can’t decide whether to label “surprising” or “obvious” – though it does simply make me say “Aw, poor Lloyd”), what Gillen’s gone and done with his final issue is to provide an effective thematic skewering of the twelve issues that have gone before. Up to this point, Phonogram has largely shown its phonomancers as active practitioners – people who set out to take the metaphorical power that music has over humanity and turn it into a more literal manifestation of “magic” (this assumes you’re going by the literal, and not metaphorical, reading of the series as a whole, by the way). But right from its first page, “Wolf Like Me” flips that on its head – just because these people think they’re the only ones touched by (or infused with) the power of music, it doesn’t mean they are. And KWK’s TV On The Radio-fuelled romp (and there’s really no other word for this issue, what with it being applicable in more ways than one) is no less valid an expression of “music as magic” than Marc’s “curse song”, or Lloyd writing Dexys-inspired grimoires, or Kohl scratching sigils into a record.

It’s a bold move, to essentially puncture your series’ core premise in one fell swoop – but KWK has always served the purpose of deflating the pretension of those around him (his backup-strip retelling of Rue Britannia remains one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages), and it becomes clear, indeed, that the “lightening up” of Kohl post-Britannia may even have something to do with the influence of his guileless chum. Once again (if not to quite the same extent as in the even-more-blatant-this-time backups), it’s hard to separate the role played by David from the ever-changing way Gillen seems to perceive himself; and it’s almost as if, having spent four or five years writing a deep and meaningful treatise on the power of music (of the sort that you half-suspect only an old-school Manics fan could ever really come up with), he now feels the need to indulge the playful, “enjoying things for their own” sake side of his character in print, too.

But we’re not here just to make presumptions about the author’s character and motivations; it’s worth looking, too, at just how well the issue stands divorced from all that context (even, given the inherently “standalone yet connected” nature of each issue, from the pure context of the ongoing story). It’s a little lightweight, it must be said – very little happens, and there’s little to no dialogue (most of the issue instead relying on a frequently hilarious substitute for actual words), which naturally makes it quicker to read and digest. If anything, it almost feels a shade like one of the backup strips, extended to full length – with the importance of its implicit commentary on the series as a whole being perhaps the thing that elevates it to “main feature” status. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun, and as someone who’s never really clicked with KWK (too much of an indie snob to get on with his music taste, really), it’s impossible not to find oneself warming to him here.

It’s pleasing to see that, in an issue that relies heavily on the artist’s choreographic skills, McKelvie isn’t found in the slightest bit wanting – the extended sequence of sort-of-parkour that makes up most of the first half of the issue (and which I still can’t figure out whether it’s meant to be “real”, or exaggerated by KWK in the later telling) flows gloriously – and in its immaculate pacing, is perhaps the best example yet of the visuals syncing perfectly with the issue’s “theme song”. It’s perfectly possible to stick the track on and read the entire issue in four minutes and thirty-five seconds, although I’ve yet to experiment with just how the pages would line up with the slow bit. It’s also – as you’d expect by now – another showcase for the artist’s innate design skills, with a cracking bit of layout for the title page, and a brassy use of lettering as panel borders late on.

It’s a little odd having this as the last issue, though, and I do find myself wondering how deliberate that is – the backup strips aside (which include Kohl musing on the first “death” of Britannia, a lovely Becky Cloonan-drawn conclusion to the Indie Dave story, and Gillen deciding “to hell with it” and sticking a load of his mates in the last one), this simply doesn’t feel like The End, and thus it’s hard to feel like we should be writing the series’ eulogy at this point (that’ll probably come when the trade comes out). There’s still so much to say about the series – as if we haven’t said enough on here already – but for now, all that seems appropriate is to remark, once again, on what an achievement these seven issues (towering even over Rue Britannia) have turned out to be. It’s far too late for exhortations to go out and make the series a success – perhaps it was always destined to be a resolutely “cult” thing: absolutely beloved, but only by the few – but this one last time, it really does bear repeating: as a whole, it’s an undeniable masterpiece, of the sort that comics rarely get any better than. Any comics fan in their right mind must surely hope that we haven’t seen the last of it.