VAPOR TRAIL #3
by Chris Lamb

Come, feel my sickness:

‘Girl Anachronism’ opens like stage lights coming up, like the fade from black to empty length of nighttime street. Piano and sticks on cymbals enter as young starlet - complete with Karen O hair cropped to razor’s edge and Frankenstein dress built from prom night’s long past – running towards the camera and song’s proper start. A shout of “TWO THREE FOUR” and it all turns downhill and jagged bits, stumble running over S&M piano playing and too many lyrics crammed in too tight places. Three minutes of poses about posing and couplets hung together like trapeze artists later and I’m reaching for the repeat button like a favorite old spoon and lighter. I don’t know anything else by The Dresden Dolls and I’m scared to learn, scared it won’t match up to this perfect thing pushing through my veins as only the finest chemicals can. ‘Girl Anachronism’ is everything I ask for from pop music, the right bits stuck together at the right angles that makes all the disappointment filling the singles rack worth it. A year from now I won’t care. A year from now there will be a different set of buttons in need of pressing and something else coming out from blown speakers and under three minutes to hold off the shakes. But right now there’s nothing else that matters, that grabs on with teeth and nails sunk in and Just. Won’t. Let. Go.

It’s a feeling to live for. There’s a line from Dave Eggars about pop music, how we obsess songs until “solving” them, until that one liner buried in the chorus or bit of guitar work loses it’s gape-mouthed wonder and we move on to the next bit of shiny. He’s not far wrong. By today’s standard, where grand storytelling operas are something Billy Joel does to remind people he’s old and should die soon, the single is our High Art; a complete story or set of feelings shot directly into your heart, head, and crotch, as free from fat and useless bits as Kylie Minogue in all her reborn-as-pop-hologram glory. See Bowie’s ‘Heroes.’ See the call and answer dysfunction of the Libertine’s ‘Can’t Stand Me Now.’ See The Jackson Five over the top ode to regret in ‘I Want You Back,’ and see me do everything I can to fight spinning in mid-step to the piano roll at the beginning when it comes over my headphones. Or hell, take Avril Lavigne’s ‘Don’t Tell Me,’ a glorious rock opera as horny, over-eager teenager complete with central cast and supporting characters taking some four minutes to explain how you aren’t getting in her pants. You don’t get this level of sincere absurdity with Ride of the Valkeries.

So thinking about singles, about complete experiences designed to hit fast and burn themselves into your brain. There’s an obvious parallel between, say, the singles racks at Virgin and shelves at Forbidden Planet on New Comic Day, but that can wait. Last week was the negative one, after all. Instead, let’s talk about Grant Morrison and Phillip Bond’s nineteen ninety-five mind-bomb KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND, and how nothing in my Walkman can keep up.

KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND is simply everything the people who’ve tossed around words like “pop comics” for the last few years were trying for, if not in form than most definitely in function. Girl goes to school, dates the boring but safe fantasy geek and wear’s her aunt’s sexy underwear under her uniform. Girl hates school, hates her boyfriend, hates her parents and final destination all the mundane road signs are pointing towards. Girl meets Boy. Boy takes apart Girl’s world with a vodka bottle, a load of E and several well-placed bullets. Girl and Boy stomp across countryside, detached from a World to boring to be survived until the World catches up with police snipers in tow. It’s a love story with coming of age trappings that manages to dodge the usual coming of age traps through good old-fashioned brutality and enough sincerity to stun a Cure audience into submission. It’s Fifty-Six Pages of taking it apart and putting it together again, of that time where every move is the Right Move and nothing hurts for long. The sort of book that you read cover to cover and start again before you realize you’ve finished. It’s comics as pop music, a single in words and pictures rather than laser-carved lines on a disc.

Only it’s better.

Morrison takes pop music’s skeleton – the nameless protagonists, the dirty pronoun trick of “you” sucking the reader in, the dialogue as throwing knives, trimmed down to just what is necessary to get the point across and make it stick – and builds an entirely new beast on it, something all at once as fast or slow as you want it to be. Instead of hiding its hooks in a Spector-esque wall of sound, KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND lays itself bare before the reader, inviting, damn near demanding that you try and solve it. There isn’t one panel, one line the work hinges on, one perfect bit that makes the whole thing work.

The hook is somewhere between where Morrison’s script ends and Bond’s art begins, his comics as pop art from nearly ten years ago still putting Allred and Pope to shame. KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND is the sort of book that resonates, that bit of tune you’ll hum long after your next favorite band are playing street corners and kid’s parties for spare change. A thin slab of story that just fucking wrecks me in ways I only pray for a song to.

“He’d gunned down my entire future. I think I’m in love.” That’s it. That’s exactly it.

HOW TO GET IT
TITLE: KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND
WRITER: Grant Morrison
PENCILS: Phillip Bond
INKS: Phillip Bond & D’Israeli
COLORS: Daniel Vazzo
PUBLISHER: DC/Vertigo (criminally out of print, so try Google.)
PRICE: $5.95

‘Girl Anachronism’ by the Dresden Dolls available for download here.

Chris Lamb lives and writes in New York City. All of it. At the same time.


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