Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie have done a sterling job of promoting Phonogram, their six-issue miniseries from Image.  For a creator-owned book from Image Central, it's had quite a bit of attention.

David Kohl is a phonomancer - he's a magician, and his magic is linked to pop music.  Basically, imagine John Constantine reimagined as an NME journalist and you get the general idea.  The end result is every bit as punchable as you might expect, but then that's the point.

This could easily be gimmickry.  But in fact, when you put it in the context of the way writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have used magic in recent years, it makes a certain degree of sense.  Traditionally, magic was basically a set of genre conventions for fantasy stories.  Old men in robes and pointy hats, that sort of thing.  Moore and Morrison belong to a rather more philosophical tradition, which sees magic more as a kind of contemplative spiritual process, and puts the emphasis more on magic as a different way of seeing the world.

At this point in the explanation, we usually get something about changing the world by changing your perceptions.  Depending on your point of view, this is either a fundamental philosophical challenge to the notion of subjectivity and objectivity, or just some harmless old fool trying to convince us that his acid trips are meaningful.

The point is that this line of thought turns magic into less a genre device, and more a way of thinking.  It becomes about non-literal ways of seeing the world, alternative perspectives, and so forth.  That makes it more akin to art, which is also essentially about providing access to somebody else's subjective view of the world.  If pop culture bonds people together in a common shared experience then it's unifying everyone's subjective perspectives for a moment, and that's magic - well, in the eyes of the critically acclaimed acid casualties, anyway.

Now, personally, I think this is all a lot of nonsense, at least when you get people claiming that magic "really works" on any level other than helping you to think about things in different ways.  But that's beside the point.  Whether or not it works, it's a much more interesting way to think about magic in the context of fiction, because it becomes a metaphor for all sorts of cultural intangibles.  Such as the shared experience of pop music, for example.

It occurs to me, at this stage, that I might be making Phonogram sound dreadfully pretentious, like an issue of Promethea incorporating an essay from Record Collector.  It isn't like that at all.  It's about music being like magic, and about the way you can influence people with an understanding of the right symbols, and of what their music means to them.  Rather than doing flashy magical stunts, Kohl manipulatively exploits people's emotional connection to their music, making him a Constantine-style bastard.  There's also a vengeful goddess involved, but that's another matter.

I have to wonder whether Gillen is possibly overdoing it with the Kenickie references.  In some ways, they're a great example of the point - a band who had a small following but a very passionate one who felt that they got the music.  Now, personally, I'm 100% behind him when it comes to Kenickie's music.  They're inexplicably underrated, they always suffered from a perspective that they couldn't be clever because they weren't angst-ridden or serious, and their debut album is well worth hunting down.  But they're also, let's face it, mid-nineties also-rans who never even made the top twenty.  They're rather obscure to be a focal point of the first issue.

But I can't think of anyone else who'd be better known and would still make the point as well.  The editorial insists that they're not seriously expecting readers to get all the references.  Hopefully the story works for those (surely the majority) who don't know the songs involved.  It certainly does an excellent job of explaining quite why Kenickie were so good and why they could mean so much to people.

Despite my nagging fear that this may be aiming at a rather niche crowd, it's passionate and imaginative stuff.  And even if it is a niche, it's a niche that includes me.

Rating: A

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