Phonogram's Abracadabra Reaches Out To Grab Ya

by Vince Brusio

Kieron Gillen came up with the concept that music could be interchangeable with magic. Imagine a song having power over the physical world. Not that it doesn’t already, as many people get emotional when they hear a particular favorite tune at a party or on the radio. Taking the idea to the next level, however, Gillen created Phonogram, and with the latest installment of his series titled Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl (JUN150532), the writer shows that he still has the ability to write the songs that make the whole world sing. In a William S. Burroughs kind of way.

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl (JUN150532) is in comic shops August 12.

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PREVIEWSworld: If someone wasn’t familiar with the history of Phonogram, how would you go about describing the property to a new reader?

Kieron Gillen: Music is magic. It just is. There's no reason why a noise arranged in a specific order should create this enormous emotional response in humans — making them happy, sad, or even changing their life forever. It may as well be magic.

Imagine if it literally was. That's Phonogram.

Not in a Dungeons & Dragons way — each piece of magic we use is very much a 1:1 metaphor for what music really does to people. The example I always use is from the second series where someone walks into a nightclub, the DJ plays a record and he's confronted with the ghost of an Ex who forces him to relive a series of painful memories of the time they were together. Effectively, he's been cursed by the record. Of course, this is a metaphor for how most people have a record which when they hear it is like a big metal spike through the chest because of the memories you connect with it.

That's a particularly emo example of what Phonogram does. Urban Fantasy stories based around the real power of music and how it changes our lives.

PREVIEWSworld: Does Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl (JUN150532) fall back on continuity in previous Phonogram stories, or is it a standalone storyline?

Kieron Gillen: All Phonogram arcs are conceived as stand-alone albums. In the same way you can pick up any album a band has done, you should be able to grab a Phonogram album and do the same. Hell, we normally recommend people start with our second (Phonogram: The Singles Club) because it's a smoother and more accessible entry point than the first.

That said, it does pick up themes and characters we've introduced in earlier volumes, but knowledge of them is certainly not necessary. Post-The Wicked + the Divine, we're aware that a lot of people will be picking this up without any knowledge of the world.

PREVIEWSworld: What’s the premise for Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl? Can you start at ground zero, and take us from there?

Kieron Gillen: Eight or so years ago, Emily Aster sold half her personality for power. Where she once was a depressive, self-hating girl, she became this monstrous magical queen of a phonomancer coven. For all that time, the other half of her has been lurking behind mirrors and screens, waiting for her chance to come back.

The Immaterial Girl is that story: a war between one half of a personality and another, specifically illuminated with a worryingly obsessive look at 80s music videos.

PREVIEWSworld: What was the most fun you had with this series? And what took you in the opposite direction to keep you awake at night?

Kieron Gillen: Phonogram is hard. It's by far the hardest book I write, just because it's so incredibly dense and coded. It's far easier to find things which were hard than things that were pleasurable, at least in the moment.

The pleasure is when it works, and when you realize some stuff is sliding together in a way which is (ahem) magical. That I wrote it in 2012 and only came back to edit it this year meant that I actually have a little distance from the pages, and I actually get a bit of a kick from just seeing what the hell was going through my mind.

Actually, the real pleasure is just getting stuff back from Matt and Jamie. That there's more Phonogram in the world seems just unbelievable. We're really very lucky. 

PREVIEWSworld: If you had to “geek out” over any particular scene that you’d ramble on about over dinner or on social media, what would that scene be?

Kieron Gillen: As anyone who's had the misfortune to hang out with me will know, I'll geek out over almost anything at the least encouragement. I suspect telling stories about the post-Bis Glitterpop scene during the Byzantine days of Britpop would get most of my best stories, or at least the messiest.