Side B: The Music Lover’s Comic Anthology [Review]

This is a guest post by George Watson. George does nefarious work by day for an academic institution. He is currently engaged in mortal warfare for control of the office Spotify playlist. Last week he introduced his colleagues to the delights of the KLF – who knows what he will spring on them tomorrow? (Hint: Trent Reznor)
George is also on Twitter: @grwatson

In 2007, many moons ago, the indie publishing house Poseur Ink produced the well regarded anthology Side A: The Music Lover’s Graphic Novel – a title that set itself up for a sequel. Well, that sequel arrived in 2009 as Side B: The Music Lover’s Anthology. With 54 contributions within its 225 pages,  this anthology is certainly dressed to impress on this second date – but is the magic still there?

Stretching the date analogy, Side B is a classy broad. Output from smaller publishing houses can sometimes score higher for enthusiasm than production quality – tales of misaligned photocopied pages and badly bound spines haunt indie publishing like the ghost of Christmas Past.

There are no such issues here – Side B carries its content with pride. With a nice matt softback cover containing full color, wraparound artwork with high-gloss areas supporting the design, she’s clearly wearing her best party dress here. The binding is solid enough to withstand the cruel and unusual punishments meted out to it by this reviewer with nary a crease or hint of a loose sheet and, despite contents that range from black-and-white penwork to more painterly tones and the occasional photo reproduction within its pages, print quality is crisp and sharp.

Your hard earned cash buys you something that will still be with you in five years time, albeit a little dog-eared from use and with that coffee cup stain on the back cover from where you put your Starbucks down in a hurry when it burnt your lip. And it’s good that this book is built to last – this is a tome that rewards repeated reading, with interesting and varied stories that you’ll want to dip into and re-read as the mood takes you. I’ve touched on the range of art types here already when commenting on the quality of printing but that doesn’t really begin to say it – there are lush, flowing borderless works; punky, scratchy pieces that wear aggro on their sleeve; deceptively simple illustrations that wouldn’t look out of place in a children’s book, arty tales that use tone without line (and would look good in a French cafe); and arch photo-reproduction work that is so hip it bleeds. And the range of tales! Intensely personal, autobiographical tales; whimiscal flights of fancy; love and hate; joy and loss; robots and spaceships and clockwork people – they are all in here!

Of course, that doesn’t really cover it -  and I’d be neglecting my job as a reviewer to leave it there. So, let me try to show you the range of work through a closer look at a few of the stories here:

• Warren Wucinich tells a tale of love and a date to music without words in a world out of a Paris summer rendered in greytone without line. The only markers are the track numbers that break the story into mini chapters and… but that would be telling.
• Gary Scott Beatty’s Punk Stew gives his take on the impact of punk in the 70′s using over-enlarged photos, mismatched cut-out newspaper text, and sharp graphics to fill his work with the same energy that he’s describing.
• Cover artist Lucy Knisely’s wonderfully innocent art style recounts the autobiographical pains of losing all your music collection to a hard-drive crash, the freedom from the tastes of the person you used to be – and the evitable downfall.
• Tim Hengeveld’s ‘Alison’ uses empty space, clean line and art – together with the best example of layout on the page that I’ve seen for a long time – to lead the reader through an illustrated letter to a musician.
• Different Sounds by Madeleine Flores is a piece about being an immigrant in a foreign land, making sense of a new culture and strange language – and the part music has to play in that.
• Jim Mahfood uses his energetic art to tell his story of discovering the music of Gary Wilson and what happened to a man who made a seminal album – and then vanished.
• Mike Lopez and Rachel Dukes tell a light and humorous tale of connecting through music – and Rock Band on the Xbox.

But wait: There’s also Mitch Clem’s story of a break-up inspired by The Mr T Experience and Ned Hugar’s tale of sleep-deprivation, The Smiths and car accidents, Elizabeth Gerhart’s romantic tale of a dead opera singer and a cat and Brandon Graham’s comic foreword which helpfully warns of the dangers of headphone plugs and pets and and and …

Ahem. You get the point. There is so much more in this book that I want to tell you about. But of course, that’s what reading the book itself is for. The depth and range of stories and styles in Side B is simply staggering (and I hope you appreciate that I don’t use such don’t use hyperbole lightly). Even the tales that I don’t care for so much are well-executed – they simply don’t hit my tastes. And this is Side B’s real strength – as long as you have an interest in modern music and are happy to read something that uses words and pictures, there is something for you here. More than one something. Probably many, many somethings. This is actually a great way to get a taster of the range of work that being done in sequential art today…

Listen – let me let you into a secret here – ‘sequential art’? That’s simply telling stories using pictures, one after the other – what would normally be called ‘comic books‘, if so many people didn’t automatically think of Superperson, Batperson and the Ambivalent SpiderPerson as soon as you say ‘comic’. Superhero books are fun and entertaining, but while there’s underwear on show here (Just checked – yep, undies, and even no undies and some sex), none of it is being worn over Spandex costumes. Promise.

So yes, (*koff*) if you want to see what kind of things comic books are doing today, this is a great sampler. A lot of the writers and artists here put their hearts on their sleeves about their own musical tastes here as well, which makes it surprisingly informative about music and artists you may not have heard of too.

It can’t all be awesome though?

Well, no. With so many pieces squeezed into this volume, browsing would be easier with a little more separation between pieces. Some whitespace would help separate the stories here, and some of the artwork would benefit from a larger page size. Of course both of these would increase the cost of the book – and if Side B’s worst flaw is that they’ve squeezed a bit too much funky art into this book and given you the biggest bang for your buck? That’s not really much to complain about.

There is the occasional dud note – the book is at its strongest when dealing directly with how music affects people, and when it switches away from personal tales to something more abstract, the results aren’t always as compelling. But, as I’ve noted, the sheer range of content means that there’s still plenty to enjoy – and everyone will take away something different from this, depending on their tastes.

Overall, this is a quality book that contains such a well-rounded range of stories that you’ll be dipping into it for years to come. Absolutely recommended.

And Michael Bolton’s music? Just as evil as you always suspected. Side B contains the proof.

SIde B: The Music Lover’s Comic Anthology. $22.99 by Poseur Ink. Available from Bookshops and Comic Stores or directly from www.poseurink.com/sideb.

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Tagged as: Comics, Music