Category: Phonogram: The Singles Club
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Gillen mildly redeems himself–not really, he avoided the most interesting characters in Singles Club and filled three issues with malarky, but somewhat–with an almost wordless issue featuring Kid-With-Knife, another supporting cast member from the first series. He ends up with the girl from the first issue, the one we’re not supposed to like. Otherwise, the…
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Wow. Gillen wants the reader to through pages and pages of poorly written text with bad punctuation. The writing eventually gets so bad I had to give it up. Here, instead of a bad person in Phonogram, Gillen wants the reader to enjoy making fun of the loser. I’m not sure why he included this…
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Here we get the story of another depressed girl–she opens the issue cutting herself–and she tells most of her story in quotes from songs. While it’s admirable how much work Gillen put into finding those quotes and making them work in the narration, it’s not good writing. His first person narrator is talking directly to…
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Whether Gillen intends it to be or not, this issue is more a concept issue than anything else. The protagonists are the two DJs at the club and we pretty much don’t see anyone but them for the entire issue. There’s a lot of affected dialogue, but Gillen can get away with it because of…
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Not sure how you’re supposed to read this one. Gillen’s protagonist this issue is Emily, a supporting cast member from the first series. But it ends with her having casual sex with a complete stranger in order to forget her past. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to judge her for it–Gillen would probably argue…
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Oh, wait, the girl from the first issue isn’t really that terrible and didn’t deserve to be treated so meanly? Gillen is apparently doing a night at the club from everyone’s perspective, so this issue we get to see how some other guy spent the night. Basically, it was him being depressed over some foreign…
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The issue has three stories in it. The most successful is the two-page one, illustrated by Ellerby. It’s just a little, amusing strip… but it manages not to have the problems the others do. The second back-up should be a blog post discussing the casual misogyny of indie music, using a suffering woman as an…
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