Yes, Even More First Thoughts On Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie's "Phonogram: Rue Britannia""

10.

Once, when I was an idiot boy of 15, I fell in love before I'd even had the time to know that it had happened. I remember everything about the moment, though nothing of the details of the irrelevancies of what went before, nor much of what occurred later that evening. Similarly, I can recall with flashbulb precision the events of perhaps another two dozen moments in my life when something utterly unexpected and fundamentally moving rose up out of the everyday, froze the events which framed it, summed up what I'd been before and predestined what I was going to be afterwards, and then blinked right back into the fabric of the typical, into the standard-issue ordinary, and time rolled on. A car crash, a desperately needed and quite unforeseen kindness, the last paragraph of Gatsby, the "Ah!" at the beginning of "Born Under Punches"; all brief moments of the remarkable between which my haphazard life now appears to have been strung.


Pressed to name Jamie McKelvie's leading quality as an artist, I'd say that it lies in his ability to precisely identify and movingly depict these life-defining, time-freezing moments. (Such events are, after all, far more frequently encountered in pop fiction, because that's what pop fiction is often largely about.) In the pages of "Phonogram: Rue Britannia", Mr McKelvie not only effectively ensures the plot's progression, but also defines in his untypically precise and touching fashion why the reader should care about the sequence of events they're witnessing. There's a constant sense in his work of his character's lives being marked by intense flashes of emotion sweeping often unexpectedly out of apparently unremarkable events and entirely commonplace settings. In other words, his art functions as a shorthand summary of the business of the experience of real life, and of all those one damn things after another broken up by seconds of emotional intensity. To achieve these effects without derailing the reader's engagement with the storyline, to accentuate the inner lives of his characters while never abandoning his intent to do so subtly and without careless recourse to cliche, marks out Mr McKelvie as a highly effective storyteller, even at this relatively early stage of his career. Drawing on the traditions of Manga and indy-autobiography, he so effectively presents us with an everyday world that we can clearly recognise, depicting comic-realistic backgrounds against which his cartoon-vulnerable characters can act out their recognisably prosaic existences. In such settings, the contrast between the remarkable, when it occurs, and the humdrum seems all the more startling and involving.


It's a world so objective and yet so distant from the emotions of the folks of Phonogram that it almost demands that something of the sacred flashes into existence across its face, for those lonesome canals and bridges, those empty motorways and deserted beaches, seem saturated with a sad promise that nothing wonderful will ever happen until it's all too late to matter. (It's the world of The Smiths and Suede, of The Auteurs and post-shoegazing Blur, of Pulp and the Manics, but it's certainly not that of Oasis and the guitar-anthem tendency which proclaims that everything'll be far more than alright if we're just loud enough, bloody-minded enough and, of course, constantly hammered.) Mr McKelvie's landscapes are just somewhere melancholic where their characters are passing through in their restlessness and sadness in order to get to somewhere else, which'll no doubt be more of the same, since even Indy Dave's shack in the countryside is little but mud and rain and, of course, isolation. Such settings are the perfect background to carry the meaning that all the tightly-curated, anally-dictated pop culture in the world won't make these Bristols and Londons meaningful. Being compassionate to others, Dave Kohl, is the only thing that can achieve that.


We can see a great deal of this process, this business of the unexpectedly intense, for good or ill, counterpointed with the mundane in the panel above, wherein Dave Kohl recalls the first time he saw Britannia. The goddess is shown perfectly balanced in that exact moment when her carefree progress forwards is distracted by her future acolyte's presence to her right. She's so fiercely alive, so full of energy, so luminous, that every limb is purposefully describing her forward motion; even her handbag is being swung before her, as if this were a woman who's not only got somewhere transcendentally splendid to go to, but who possesses the ability to be absolutely invigorated even while travelling there. And that sense of kineticism and purpose is accentuated by the still and colourless street-scene that she's been placed within, while her fundamental other-worldliness is signalled by her lizard-dark eyes and her noticeably absent shadow. This is a human being who isn't a human being at all, and she's not of the world so much as dancing through it. It's a scene of the first moment of a future love-affair as viewed from the wrong end of time's telescope.


That there's a naivety to the composition of the panel is undeniable, but then, what we're perceiving through the lens of Dave Kohl's memories is a moment of beguiled naivety. What matters is whether the panel works, and it works wonderfully well. It describes that moment when the world as David Kohl knew it and the life he wanted to own seemed to suddenly and glamorously separate one from the other, and it achieves that so effectively that I can understand exactly why Dave has done all that he has, and why he's so resisted the not-incidental responsibilities of growing up these past ten years or so in favour of a narcotising nostalgia.


There's a similar attention to the detail of body-language and the emotional meaning of the script in even the smallest of Mr McKelvie's panels. The scene of Dave Kohl assuming the identity of a pre-Britpop Manics fan for a second time in "Rue Britannia" - above - takes up but an eighth of a page, and yet it's designed in such a way that it carries a mass of visual information which would otherwise weigh down the frame with story-deadening text. Quite unlike his previous appearance in the height of 1993/4's anti-fashion, Dave Kohl's here presented as a man unashamed of what he's wearing and who he is. He's deliberately adopted the pose that he would have cut 12 years before, and by doing so, he's presented himself to Beth's ghost as a citizen of the same lost culture to which she's bound because that's what she most needs. With his head tilted confidently to the right while his body leans to the left, with his leather jacket thrown casually over one


shoulder and that ever-smouldering cigarette, with the apparent arrogance of a man who believes the world won't listen and doesn't deserve to hear, the reader is immediately being informed that Kohl is using style as a means to help Beth rather than as a weapon to bolster his own ego. We know that he isn't this man anymore, either in form or content, and so we're immediately being told by Mr McKelvie that this is now both an act and a mission of some mercy on his part. The soulless, ashamed, almost Frankenstein-like awkwardness of his first appearance as a "harmless freak", as a glum/glam Manics fan, is so marked in contrast to this purposeful, new/old Dave Kohl that the reader can't help but grasp that what we're seeing isn't a rebel without a shred of decency, despite all surface appearances, but a human being with a kindly purpose. And it's something well worth noting to remark how that key information is subtly and unpretentiously carried within that single small panel, as Mr McKelvie, working with Mr Gillen's sparse and yet similarly informative dialogue, creates the maximum effect from a minimum degree of detail.



To be concluded ...

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