The success of Phonogram has put both writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie on the map, but also leaves the tricky task of following it up.  There are more Phonogram stories in the pipeline, but before that, McKelvie has struck out on his own with the four-issue Suburban Glamour miniseries.

That's "Glamour" in the magical sense as well as "Glamour" in the dressing-up sense, by the way.  Astrid is a teenage indie kid - or whatever the young folks are calling themselves nowadays - living in the small Worcestershire town of Lanbern.  She has a handful of friends who dress like her, she has vague and unformed plans to leave when she's older, and in the meantime she drifts around going to parties.  Then magical stuff starts happening.

Now, the exact nature of that magical stuff is a bit vague in this first issue.  There's something threatening going on, and Astrid is visited in her sleep by her long-forgotten imaginary friends, but the plot is left entirely mysterious for now.  That could leave McKelvie open to the accusation of writing a first issue that doesn't really take the plot much farther than the two-line summary on the back cover. 

But it works, because most of the issue is devoted to setting up Astrid and her world, showing us some essentially banal teenage parties in an entertaining way, and generally making us like her.  This is harder to do than just ploughing on with the plot, but by persuading us to care about Astrid, the story gets away with the relatively hazy magical storyline.  She's a familiar type of character - the vaguely alternative girl in a small town - but McKelvie has enough subtlety to bring her to life and charm the reader.

Unlike Phonogram, Suburban Glamour has colours by Guy Major.  It's an improvement.  Although McKelvie is good with body language and character, and he's always had a powerful design sense, he doesn't go in for shading or cross-hatching, and his work can sometimes look a little two-dimensional in black and white.  Major gets rid of that problem, by providing highlights while still using fields of uniform colour that match McKelvie's style.  McKelvie also has a tendency to draw panels with no background at all once he's established a scene, and the use of bright backgrounds livens them up tremendously. 

For me, as a British reader, it probably gains a lot from being set in a very recognisable England, instead of the all-purpose American small towns where such stories tend to take place in comics.  A curious feature of the British comics industry is that creators like McKelvie and Gillen now find it easier to publish their British stories to British readers via American publishers.  It's bizarre, and a little regrettable, that there's no obvious domestic outlet for a comic as British as this.

Granted, the story is fairly familiar, as are most of the elements of teenage life.  But it's very well done, and if the story hasn't quite hooked me with the plot mechanics, it's made me care about Astrid enough to see where this is going.

Rating: A-

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