So Phonogram has been sitting on my shelf for a couple months now, and I still haven’t gotten around to reviewing it. I don’t know if I ever will, but the short version is that I liked it. Of course I liked it – it’s a comic about sorcery and Britpop. How could I not?
I figure I can make up for that bit of reviewing negligence by covering the first issue of Suburban Glamour, Phonogram artist Jamie McKelvie’s solo outing. Like Phonogram, it’s an odd, quirky book with some lovely art and nice characters. Unlike Phonogram, the casual reader is unlikely to require a glossary. (I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but then I didn’t require too much of the glossary in the first place.)
The first issue is largely setup: Astrid and her friends are bored teenagers in a small English town, until some weird stuff starts happening. Not much happens in Lanbern, aside from the occasional party no one really wants to go to but goes to anyway because there’s nothing else to do. It’s a bit of a problematic setup, as McKelvie has fallen into the common trap: Lanbern is boring. School is boring. The party is boring. And it’s, well, boring. Most of the characters are pretty boring. Even Astrid’s friend Dave is a bit dull, a fairly generic guy friend sidekick.
But at least we have Astrid. Even if the series goes nowhere, Astrid is a creation McKelvie can be proud of. She’s cute, smart, funny, and completely likeable; McKelvie has managed to make her a quirky outsider by giving her a defined personality, not simply by having her reject everything else. Perhaps it’s because Astrid is so well developed that her co-stars seem so flat; even too-cool Aubrey, who’s just opened a new clothing store in town and is almost certainly involved with the supernatural shenanigans, doesn’t seem half as interesting as Astrid.
Astrid is the visual star of the book, too. While McKelvie is generally very good at characters and facial expressions, he does some wonderful work with Astrid, who just leaps off the page. (I’d post some scans, but my scanner is buried under a pile of crap and I don’t feel like moving any of it right now. Maybe later.) Most of the storytelling in Suburban Glamour is fairly straightforward, but there’s a fantastic three-page opening sequence that shows he’s not just about drawing pretty faces. It’s so good, it makes the rest of the book feel a bit stiff; while most of the book relies on dialogue, it’s impressive how much information McKelvie can cram into a few wordless pages.
I’m re-reading what I’ve written, and though it feels like a negative review, I did really enjoy the book. While Suburban Glamour is not without its faults, it also has a lot of charm to make up for it. At the very least, McKelvie has turned in some very nice art and created a great lead character, and that goes quite a ways towards making a good book. It may not get the series through four issues, but leaves you with a pretty good first one.
