For this week’s Fund It!, we’re going to presenting you an article that’s a tad different than normal. With this week and the next two weeks that follow, Walt, Josh and myself will be presenting you a trilogy of articles that all thematically tie together: what would happen if some of our favorite concept albums became comic books? While we (and by that I mean Walt) came up with the idea somewhat at the last second, the idea ended up being fairly fruitful considering we all listen to quite different music. We kicked some ideas around (such as a literal translation of Frightened Rabbit’s Midnight Organ Flight written by Kieron Gillen, where the characters just sit around and drink/cry for a couple hundred pages), but in the end we got a tad more serious. So with that in mind we’re sharing you not only some music that we love, but also some creative teams whose talents we admire.
And I should note – it’s not that I don’t love Frightened Rabbit, or Kieron Gillen for that matter … but that idea is not exactly the most sustainable one, is it?
Today’s album selections? Murder By Death’s Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?/Red of Tooth and Claw, Olafur Arnalds’ Eulogy for Evolution, and Supermachiner’s Rise of the Great Machine. But who will be writing them? And who will be illustrating them? For that, you’ll have to click behind the cut.
Murder By Death – Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?/Red of Tooth and Claw
I suppose I should start this part of the article by saying Who Will Survive… is one of my favorite albums. I can still remember to this day going to the Newbury Comics in Peabody, MA when I was in high school and buying this album on a whim because of the black O-card cover and the tiny bit of buzz that I had heard about it. I can also very vividly how I essentially swallowed the album whole, burned tons of copies for my friends to listen to, and spending hours on my own listening to it. Heck, I even convinced my friend that we could put on a school play based around this album (which was about as good as you’d assume it would be, to be honest). But that aside, I love this album, and I love this story.
For those unfamiliar with Murder By Death, Who Will Survive… is a very straight-forward concept album centering around a small Western town back in the days of the mythical wild, wild West (sans Will Smith). The Devil comes to town and, in a bit of a drunken blur, begins running his mouth at the local tavern, which in turn leads him to get shot. He later wakes up in a hospital bed with business men literally collecting his blood, which is made up of oil, to then sell. So the devil swears vengeance on the town and everything falls apart from there. The town slowly falls apart at the seams as the Devil throws plagues at the town, turning children into zombies and fleeing citizens into salt before eventually coming to the town with an army of demons to destroy it.
Then, in 2008 (7 years after Who Will Survive…), Murder By Death released the album Red of Tooth and Claw, which (as lead singer/guitarist Adam Turla says) tells a story similar to The Odyssey, focusing on revenge “only without the honorable character at the center.” Running around 40 minutes, the story of this album featured a nameless character as he trekked across the land seeking vengeance on those that did him wrong, spurned by the woman he loved. Of course, it pleased fans to hear that as the album came to a close with “Spring Break 1889”, a very familiar tune began to play – the opening track from Who Will Survive…, thus making Red its prequel and revealing that the main character had been one of two characters from Who Will Survive… all along: either he was the Devil (in a bit of a more unlikely idea) or he was the man who shot the Devil. And thus we have our story. So we have two stories here to tell. Who Will Survive…, where the Devil goes to war against a small town, and Red of Tooth and Claw, in which we learn the origin of our “hero” is not as noble as we had assumed. Either way, we have a roaring rampage of blood and vengeance as you can only get from a good Western.
Continued belowNow, as far as a writer goes for the comic version of this, we have a few options. The obvious choice? Cullen Bunn, of the Sixth Gun. Seeing as he is currently writing a horror/Western, there’s really no reason to think that he couldn’t handle another. The Devil in Texas? It has Bunn written all over it. But we don’t necessarily want to just go with the obvious, especially in a medium that has such a vast array of comic writers. Heck, Brian Azzarello has had his stab at the Western genre with Loveless. However, as I’ll mention later in the article, there is certainly something to be said about a writer who is already working well in a specific genre. While it’s always entertaining to see a writer work outside of his or box, you’re also more likely to give someone a project if you think it’s something that they can handle. And as similar as Who Will Survive… is to the Sixth Gun, there’s a lot for Bunn to play with within Murder By Death’s world.
(Additionally, we recently interviewed Bunn for an episode of Spoiler Alert (to air soon) and his love of Westerns is quite palpable, so I’m not sure if I’d want anyone else to touch the title, truthfully.)
When we move to the art side of the story, though, we move in a less conventional direction. For your consideration, I’d propose Chris Burnham to be the artist of this series. Some of you might know him recently from his work on Batman Inc., but if you look earlier you can see his work in Amory Wars and in the Officer Downe one-shot from last year. Burnham has not drawn a Western (to my knowledge), but he has proven to be quite a formidable and highly underrated artist in the medium. Featuring a style somewhat similar to Frank Quitely, Burnham’s rough edged pencils and big characters help fill out the very violent world’s he’s usually drawing – and if Officer Downe wasn’t proof enough, the man can draw some mean looking brutes with appropriate facial hair. I would imagine that he could draw some similarly brutal Western cowboys, and probably one damn snazzy Devil, all duking it out with pistols at dawn while demons battle in the background. That and the hero of Red riding on a horse through a desert on his way to his next kill (similar to Downe riding his bike at the end of the one-shot) are things that I would very much like to see.
Who Will Survive… is probably the most straightforward concept album on this article today, with Red being similar but less strict. However, the idea of Cullen Bunn continuing his Western trends with Chris Burnham is quite possibly one of the most obvious team ups in comics imaginable, and should almost assuredly sell out with a story like this.
Olafur Arnalds – Eulogy For Evolution
I suppose with this and the next album on my list, it might be a tad hard to fully imagine what the comic would be like. There is no set story, as often happens in an instrumental concept album. Rather, the “story” of Eulogy For Evolution centers on exactly that – the eulogy for the evolution of man. The idea of the album is that it begins at the birth of man and works its way to the end of his life. Think of something like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but less about the full evolution of man as a species and more about the man in his lifetime as the character in that famous riddle by the Sphinx.
So what will our story be about? Pure and simple, I think Eulogy For Evolution as a comic book would make a wonderful portrait of a man’s life. I’m actually quite a huge fan of silent comics, and considering the instrumental nature of this album I don’t think a silent comic is that far off. Usually the idea of a silent comic is used sparingly, in order to convey a deeper emotion in a story due to various reasons (often times the death of a character), but I don’t think an entire series that was silent would be too far off. If the entire series was done without dialogue, forcing the reader to create the same connections that the music itself does (albeit a little bit less internalized), it could be an incredibly powerful comic worth coming back to frequently for study in the same way that we come back to the album and its esoteric story.
Continued belowAs far as plot points go, every time I listen to the album I find myself thinking of the 1940s in Europe, focusing on war torn lands and snowy plains. To personalize a tad, the album always makes me think of my father, who grew up in Russia in the 1940s at the tail end of World War II. It’s with that in mind that I think that the album could theoretically be a similar story to that of my father – about someone who grew up in the worst time to grow up and in one of the worst places to grow up as well. Picture, if you will, a tiny and rickety house, covered in snow with cool blues all around. Whether this main character is an old man at this point or a child is up to debate, as both could theoretically work. Either way you choose to imagine it, the story of growing up in our modern era wouldn’t be that interesting in conjunction with the music. The idea of growing old and passing on in our modern era is theoretically an OK one, but for the most part this story works by looking back into the past and watching life grow in an era that wasn’t so incessantly commercialized.
So, for sake of argument, let’s pick one story: a young man, growing up during World War II, who flees to America with his family and grows old in our country. In doing so, he leaves what little friends he has behind in hopes of a better life, only to find that the country he has dreamed of is not all that it’s cracked up to be for a poor immigrant with no money. It’s a classic story for sure, but our angle here is to show the history without dialogue. Yes, there will be a great love, and unfortunately there will be an inevitable loss. Our hero, however you want to define that word, will ultimately have to grow alone and die in an era that he does not understand, where everyone is Tweeting and using Google as a verb. The idea ends up moving from the silent story of a man just looking for a better life to a reflection of where we have been and what we are now, because as much as we like to poke fun at this idea that we are no longer the same country, it’s something that I think has been made fun of to the point that it is no longer a serious “issue” and rather just a way for people to pine over lost Americana. Not to put too fine a point on it, but American culture is rather decadent, and we derive entertainment from watching other people suffer. As odd as that is – considering that, to an extent, that’s what this story is – it never hurts to have a serious and emotionally driven reminder of this.
I suppose you’re wondering who I nominate for such an endeavor? Well, since I started musing about the possibility of this album coming to life, I have not seen a single artist in my mind besides Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Essex County). Lemire is an artist who captures emotion very viscerally with his art, and I’m sure anyone who has read Essex County by now will know this to be true. A very personal story, Lemire led us through the lines of several intertwined characters living in Essex County, all of whom were more important to each other’s lives then they realized. As Sweet Tooth progresses more, Lemire puts more and more emotional resonance in the title with the various characters, who have been through a ringer of events to say the least. The last major arc in the book ended on a rather heartbreaking revelation, one that was made all that more painful due to the beautiful art Lemire had in the title in his unique style.
With that in mind, I fully believe Lemire could handle both the writing and artistic details of the title. Since the comic is entirely silent, the story is dependent on the interpretation of the music. In reality, all Lemire would need to do is close his eyes and listen to the album, interpreting the music with visuals in turn. For example, “0048_0729”, the second track, could find the character looking out at the icy waters of the ocean as the boat sails to its destination in America. “3055”, which features one of the albums recurring themes and most powerful motifs, could represent the great love our character will find in America, before eventually losing that love in “3326.” And of course, “3704_3837” can represent the final part of the man’s life as he grows old and eventually closes his eyes for the last time. The album itself could theoretically just work as a soundtrack to the story, picking out specific points of the main character’s life to represent as we, the readers, are perfectly capable of assuming events based on the passage of time.
Continued belowThere is a lot of room for interpretation, and it will ultimately be a rather sad story, but if anyone could pull it off it would be Jeff Lemire. All he would need is to find himself a colorist to give the album a strictly blue theme with the inks and colors, and you’d be looking at one of the most beautiful comics on the market.
Supermachiner – Rise of the Great Machine
Rise of the Great Machine was one of my favorite albums when I was in college, and no one really understood why. I suppose it’s completely understandable. The album is viciously dark. An ambient album from Jacob Bannon and Kurt Ballou (Converge), Rise of the Great Machine has always felt like one of those great “hidden gems” of music for those of you who are fans of music on the heavier side. Of course, it’s also a highly experimental album, with one song literally being six and a half minutes of a a woman screaming in anguish over a light guitar riff (and I’d be remiss to note at least one amusing memory of my mom asking me what I was listening to and being rather upset when I played her “Bitter Cold”).
Of course, what with this being an ambient/instrumental album, this also does not have any strict story. Rather, the album evokes emotions based around a central idea – the rise of said machine, which in turn is not strictly a machine in the literal sense. Bannon has stated that the album is more specifically about the rise of technology in general, and how it in turn leads to the death of the individual. He also used the term “Supermachiner” as a play on the term “Supermachinder,” the compound word for Japanese Giant Robot Toys from the 1970’s, so I suppose that to an extent helps give somewhat of an evocative idea to the “story” here, if not a very literal one.
That’s where the track list comes in. By reading the track list as a story in itself, you somewhat get an idea of what could be happening, in a very Terminator-esque way as the machine(s) creates a wave of destruction. Beginning with the Rise and ending with the Reign, the album is a dark odyssey of death as the machine – both literal for our terms and figurative for those willing to ponder more on the subject – seeks to conquer. If we’re attempting to take this story and translate it to a comic form, then it makes sense to operate off of the very literal terms of the machine at first. Yes, there is some kind of robot that is destroying everything in its path. What kind of robot? That’s up to our writer (who we will get to soon), but it could be anywhere from the suspiciously humanoid to the gigantic building toppling behemoths from your favorite anime. At the same time, though, it’s important to keep the spirit of Bannon’s original intentions alive, so no matter what form the machine takes, it can’t actually be the focus of the story. Rather, our focus will be whoever our hero or heroine ends up being, who in turn shows us the world as it is – with specific attention paid to the idea that this is really all of our fault. If we’d never gotten so incredibyl self absorbed we’d never have created the machine that in turn destroyed as. It’s both a very realistic fear and one that is a popular story telling plot point, so you’d imagine the story would be rather accessible.
Which leads us to our creative team. Of course, some of you might have suspected that as soon as I began talking about robots used as metaphors, there’s only one storyteller who would elegantly fit as a writer: Warren Ellis. Yes, this story is right up his alley to the point that this concept isn’t inherently new to him (just look at Supergods, to an extent), but just because Ellis has told similar stories in the past doesn’t make his handling of these kind of tales any less relevant. Ellis has a great handling of techno-based phobias in his writing, which would go great with the thematic premise of Rise of the Great Machine. And who would add art to this story? Off the top of my head, my main suggestion is Ashley Wood. Some of you might be familiar with a little book called Zombies Vs Robots or World War Robot, all of which feature beautifully illustrated monstrosities of metal battling it out with various foes in an admittedly kitschy fashion. The base idea of these titles is relatively simple, but the beauty lies in the execution. Wood’s illustrations always hold a thick brown color to them, which really evokes a rusting feel to these mechanical beings, and with an album that is as dark as Supermachiner’s, that kind of visual is neccesary.
To put it quite frankly, Rise of the Great Machine is a dark album. It really is. When I lived at home, my parents always tried to listen to the same music as me to open a dialogue, but they both refused to listen to Supermachiner if that’s what I had in my Sony Discman (remember those?). So if we’re going to try and take an album as dark as this and give it a more literal translation while also keeping the thematic pretense about, we’re going to need an artistic team on board that understands both of those things. Yes, Warren Ellis and Ashley Wood seem like obvious choices for a project like this, but at the same time they seem like the obvious choices for a damn good reasons. Ellis’ ability to tell a story that has a rich subtext and still be a clear and enjoyable read filled with mad technobabble is something to embrace from a written perspective, and Wood’s insane creativity when it comes to robots and the bleak terrain they battle on is the type of visual that should be seen in more comics outside of just one of the series. They may be the obvious choice, but that’s because they are the right choice.
