Curt Pires on LP and Rock and Roll Comics

Curt Pires answered my questions about his one shot comic LP, his thoughts on his creative process, and the melding of comics and rock music.

How did you come up with the concept for LP?

To be honest, I can't really remember when I specifically came up with the idea for LP, but I had been fooling around with some different music/comic ideas because I was really into it.  I  had written a couple of different scripts, kind of a bit in a similar vein about the idea of what would happen if people tried to steal records, sort of playing very literally with the idea of the value of music.  That didn't end up going anywhere, and then I was in this phase of listening to a lot of this band called Thee Hypnotics, it's this band Paul Pope's super into, and I was reading a lot of Paul Pope's stuff and just listening to this music, and not really reading a lot of other comics.  I don't really pull from comics in particular because I'm not a shut in or anything...I get out, and I'm super into music and stuff, so I sort of had all these different ideas and I decided to sit down and try and write a one shot about this story.  My initial concept was to explore the idea of a heist , but they're trying to steal a record. What if a record was the most valuable thing in the world?

LP has a couple of places in the book where there are direct quotes from classic songs, such as "withinuwithoutu", "shiver and say the words of ever lie you've ever heard", "be here now".  How do you feel about music as an inspiration for your comic book writing, and how do you try to meld those two different mediums?

I don't really know how to answer that question...I don't really know how one does it properly.  I think we sort of did it on LP, I think they did it on Phonogram, but I don't know if there's really a particular science behind it.  It's still a weird sort of thing, because it could just as easily fall flat on its face and make no sense, but I think in both pieces it sort of works.  I won't assess LP in relationship to Phonogram...I think in Phonogram they did it amazing.  I just think if you really like music and you really like comic books they just sort of bleed together.  There's a very thin membrane in my head between the two mediums.  I think they're pretty intertwined.

Do you feel like Phonogram is kind of a big influence on LP?

Not like a huge influence.  Like I said, the Paul Pope stuff was a bigger influence on it than Phonogram.  There's this Paul Pope story printed in the THB book one shots that Ad House put out, which is like this six year old kid listening to a David Bowie record.  That was the biggest music comic influence, that five page story, but just sort of the energy of Paul Pope stuff.  It's not getting bogged down in a comic book is a comic book, music is music, I'll take the energy of rock and roll and fuse it to a comic book which is why the whole comic book is basically just this F guy being a huge douchebag and just doing drugs and getting into these crazy situations.  I just want to make rock and roll comic books.

On the LP website, you describe LP as "in the style of Our Love Is Real".  I'm wondering how you feel about producing one shot comics as a way of breaking into the comic book industry in a similar way that Sam Humphries did?  How do you feel about one shot comics in general as a specific way of telling a story versus long form, six or seven issue story arcs?

When you're wanting to break in, it's probably the smartest thing to do.  So many guys who try to do these six or seven issue miniseries to break in, it's honestly really stupid.  They don't have the means to distribute it, they don't have the means to really publish it, and they go broke making them.  A lot of the time they're not even really good, so the Our Love Is Real thing, the comparison on the site, is a very calculated thing because basically if you make an off beat one shot book, that you can manage to infuse your creative ethos into it, and you manage to make it unique, professional quality...you market it in a professional way to people, it's a valuable avenue for sort of introducing yourself as a creator, so I think it's the smart thing to do, which is why I took the gamble doing it, right?  And comparatively, it's a lot less of a risk than...like doing six or seven issues is such a pipe dream.  When I see someone online talking about doing that, an extended superhero thing for their indie debut or whatever, it seems real stupid to me, taking into account the business side of distributing and publishing your own work before you pull the trigger on any one format.

In LP, you put text in the gutters a couple of times.  For example, that thing I mentioned earlier, "withinuwithoutu".  Unless I'm mistaken, I think you do it at least one or two more times, so I'm wondering how you feel about that...that's something I saw in Matt Fraction's run on The Defenders.

That's where I pulled it out of, The Defenders.

Oh, interesting!

That book was one of my favorite comics being published for like the longest time, and they did all that cool stuff.  They'd have the narrative running in the book, and then you'd have the gutter captions which are almost like their own narrative.  I thought it was cool, the idea of a counter narrative.  So me doing that in LP was a direct result of how I saw it worked in The Defenders.

Are there any other projects you have in the works that you want to talk about?

I'm doing a book with Dalton Rose that I can't really talk about too much.  I don't want to do that thing where creators talk about their stuff so much in interviews so by the time it comes out, you already know everything about the book.  We've been talking to a publisher a lot today.

LP: A Sequential Single

F has it all . Fame, Fortune , Women, and enough chemicals to make his head spin, but when he picks up a strange record his life changes forever.

Pulled into a world of mysticism, shamanic electric guitar feedback and mega yakuza , F gets way more than he bargained for.

One record can change the world.

(Full disclosure: I'm currently collaborating with Ramon on a comic project.)

LP is a one shot comic written by Curt Pires and illustrated by Ramon Villalobos.  The plot involves a rock star who possesses an LP record with mystical properties, only to have it stolen by "mega yakuza" on one hand, and sought after by gangsters in bunny masks on the other.  However, that's not what the comic is about.  LP is about music. It's about that strange alchemical power that music has over ourselves and the world as a whole.  LP is an explosion of psychedelia, it's a weird, genre defying mixture of magic, gangsters, and rock music, and it will remind you that a record can possess your soul and change the world.

Pires begins LP in media res at the climactic point of carnage.  The reader knows from the captions that at some point, something we can assume is the titular LP was taken from the protagonist, and that, "There was only one way this was ever going to end".  This line can be read as a bit of metatextual commentary, given that the comic has begun with a snippet of the ending; there is literally only one way for this story to end because we are actually looking at that ending on the first page.  LP begins by dropping the reader into the middle of a massacre, and we are immediately hit with a shot of gory destruction and ultra-violence that leaves us wondering what exactly has happened here.  

The next page transitions from the previous scene of bloody havoc to a tight shot of the rock star protagonist "F" backstage before a show.  The first three wide panels of this page are wordless, and Pires lets the images breath a little after the dense first page of bloodshed.  They pull out slowly from F, and this gradual zoom out shows us his ennui and general numbness to his surroundings.  The transition from a red tinted vision of death to a very tight shot on F's green tinted mouth is jarring.  The juxtaposition would give the reader the sense that the preceding scene was a fantasy, if only the captions hadn't explicitly stated that it is in fact the end.  One of the major strength's of LP is Villalobos' coloring;  the neon glow of the colors is bold and distinctive, and more importantly, they serve to enhance the narrative flow of the comic.  

F is called to the stage, and the narrative momentum begins to build.  We learn from his internal monologue that F doesn't just look dissatisfied, he has begun to hate his fans and "The managers, the agents, the reporters. This entire generation of MTV fed future psychiatric patients".  F laments a generation of "self-described artists" only to realize that he is contributing to this culture and is just as culpable as anyone else.  Villalobos' last panel here depicts F on stage with his band in front of a crowd of adoring fans, and he uses a very interesting panel shape.  This hexagonal panel uses the negative space of the gutters to focus your eye from the crowded foreground to the stage where all the attention of the audience is concentrated.  It's like the shape of the panel is funneling your vision towards the stage, and you feel like you are actually in the audience.

I'm sure you've figured this out already based on the images you've seen, but I should mention that Villalobos is really good at drawing these crowd scenes.  The faces in the crowds are distinctive and not repetitive, the hair and clothing varies, and you get that appropriate feeling of density and chaos that a huge group of people provides.  While I'm sure they were a chore to draw, the crowds feel alive.  We learn here that F is a drug addict who is finding it hard to really enjoy "anything but his chemicals", and we see a little kid stealing a record out of a guitar case.  

Everything goes to hell from here.  

F stop by his local record store slash drug dealer to pick up a fix, and he's beat up by a gang of thugs because of his surmounting debt to them.  The mob wants his mystical record that may or may not be inhabited by an entity with Brian Wilson's face in return for his drug debts.  Of course, the LP was stolen by the mega yakuza, and F must get it back from them.  However, as I said earlier, the plot isn't important.  It's the execution of LP that makes it such an interesting and idiosyncratic comic.  

Pires peppers the narrative with lines from classic songs ("shiver and say the words of every lie you've ever heard") in a way that reflects on the themes and plot of the comic, sometimes in the gutters, and sometimes in the panels themselves as text floating outside of caption boxes.  It's like the playlist for the comic is enmeshed into and in between the panels.  It's a technique that accentuates the sequential current of the comic which Pires structures like a fast paced, rhythmic rock song that cruises along to a crashing crescendo of psychedelic insanity.

Villalobos' art in LP is, in a word, transcendent.  A cursory glance reveals a striking similarity to Quitely's work, which Villalobos admits to attempting to emulate, but there's something more there.  There's a frantic reality to his depictions of groups of people as if they are living, breathing creatures rather than pieces to move around on a page.  

The above page shows a scene in which F locates his stolen LP by meditating, and Villalobos' construction of the page is inspired.  The image of F's head divided, like an anatomy book cross section, revealing his brain and the skeletal structure of his hand is amazing.  The red balls of psychic energy orbiting his head and flowing through him, the apparition of the LP on his forehead like an opening third eye, the dotted line shooting from his mind and into the billowing panel below, it's all an extraordinary illustration and panel lay out.  There are several pages in LP that reach this level of awesomeness, and I could have spent a few more paragraphs dissecting them, but it would be better if you just read the comic yourself and I spare you a few hundred words of my pretension.

LP is a comic that, "grabs you and it doesn't let you go" in the way that a good song can.  It's about that odd alchemical energy of music.  The magic of the titular LP is a metaphor for the magic of music itself, and the way that it can "shake you to your core", possess you, and transform your consciousness.  It's a comic that is not easily categorized according to genres and expectations...it is aggressively its own thing, a sequential single release.  Pires and Villalobos have created a comic that is unique and interesting, and you should check it out.