I’m going to regret making this statement… The last issue of Phonogram is great. Gillen retroactively pretends the series was about people and he sells it effectively. Instead of all his music-based “modern fantasy” special vocabulary, he just tells a story about a egoist who ends up doing something good and helping people. It’s fantastic.…

Wait, this whole musical movement they’re talking about in Phonogram is Oasis? Those guys who were bigger than the Beatles, so they proclaimed, and then they disappeared in like two years? I remember them being awful too. This issue might be the best of the series–like the last issue, it approaches being a reasonable comic…

It’s got a cliffhanger. A genuine cliffhanger. It’s like Gillen’s writing a serialized narrative. How exciting. Before I actually start saying nice things about Gillen (for a change), let me keep with the standard of saying something nasty. Gillen makes a big reference to Dante’s Inferno—the protagonist’s guide is Virgil, same as Dante. Well, I’ve…

In this issue, Gillen introduces time travel. Well, it’s not exactly time travel and I shouldn’t say Gillen introduces it. It’s basically the time travel device out of Somewhere in Time. Has anyone else noticed I keep coming up with movie references to describe plot points in Phonogram? It’s possibly because Gillen doesn’t have a…

Gillen describes Phonogram—in his pointless, self-indulgent essay at the end—as “modern fantasy.” Meaning, presumably, there really are ghosts of people who aren’t supposed to be dead and the protagonist is really haunted by an ex-girlfriend who’s become “the goddess.” She possesses people and sends him on missions. It’s kind of like a lamer Sixth Sense,…

Calling Phonogram pretentious would be a little like calling the sun hot when asked for its exact temperature in Kelvin. Between the endless glossary (which features some of Gillen’s best writing in the issue) and the story itself, Phonogram reads a little like that friend who knows oh so much more about music than you…