PopSyndicate.com

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s night of music and magic continues in Phonogram: The Singles Club #5 as Laura Heaven, at best a supporting character in other’s stories, takes the spotlight and we get a glimpse behind her sad eyes.

This is the story of Laura Heaven, the girl who didn’t exist.  She speaks in quotes of Long Blondes songs.  In many different ways, both real and metaphorically, she covers up the damage that’s been inflicted on her.  Even in her own story, she is defined by her relation to other characters; to Penny B, to Lloyd and to Emily Aster.  She exists as much as a reflection of them as she does as her own, unique being.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #5 continues Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s look at one 2006 night in a British club full of musical musicians, or phonomancers as Gillen has dubbed them.  Each issue has focused on one or two characters during this night.  With this issue, they focus on Laura Heaven, Penny B’s friend/sidekick/plus one from the first issue, Mark’s inconsequential encounter from the second issue and Emily Aster’s bathroom encounter in the third issue.  During this series, we’ve seen characters move in and out of other’s personal space as people bump into each other during one night of music and dancing but Laura’s story begins to firmly ground all of these stories together.  She’s the supporting character who moves in and out of everyone’s story and now, with her issue, we see her night more completely instead of the bits and pieces we’ve seen up to now.

None of the characters in Phonogram: The Single Club are necessarily what you’d call completely emotionally healthy but issue #5 opens with a cringe-worthy scene as Laura slashes small cuts into her arms with a razor blade.  There are numerous cuts on both arms so you know she’s done this before even as she protests “I’m just me.  And I’m working on that.”  Laura is a work in progress, a little girl who tries to be tough and hard but has no idea how to do that other than by trying to inflict pain on herself or on the people around her.

Laura is the kind of girl who wants to feel something.  You could see her longing in the past issues of this series in the perfectly sad eyes that McKelvie gives her but you couldn’t understand why the sadness was there until this issue.  There was never any story to go with those eyes before this issue.  The sad eyes are still there, sizing everyone up and looking for an opening, any opening to find love, like or, at the very least, lust.  In the Long Blondes lyrics, Laura finds the words to express her own desires that she’s unable to talk about herself.  When everyone ignores here or, worst even, turns her away, she strikes out, looking for draw out pain from someone if she can’t get their love.  “But my failure includes a certain neediness” she tells us at 2am after she hasn’t been able to find any love or lust during the night’s party.

For a comic book about music, The Singles Club #5 is strangely quiet.  It’s much more of a mood piece than the other issues of this story have been.  While issues like #1 and #4 made me want to dance along with the characters, the volume here is turned down a bit and the music isn’t quite as boisterous.  With each issue having a different story, Gillen and McKelvie have done a great job giving each issue its own vibe.  At the same time, each issue is part of a larger story of this one night and, as this issue perfectly demonstrates, no one issue here exists in its own vacuum.  This issue is both its own story and part of a much larger, more rounded story.

Laura Heaven doesn’t exist.  Back in the first issue, Penny B tells us that Laura’s name is Laura Evans but she calls herself “Laura Heaven.”  Penny even goes on to tell us that Laura’s new name “doesn’t seem to quite fit.”  It’s one of those small details that you have to go back and reread the series to find.  It seemed like a throwaway line at the beginning of the character’s night but now it perfectly describes Laura Heaven; she doesn’t seem to quite fit in with this life that everyone else is leading.  She desperately wants to be part of the life and energy of the music club and the night everyone else is having but in the end, she’s by herself, dancing down a darkened street and possibly looking happy for the first time all night.

Oh, and the backup features ska music and the band Madness.  That there makes this a nearly perfect comic book.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #5
“Lust Etc”
Written by: Kieron Gillen
Drawn and Lettered by: Jamie McKelvie
Colored by: Matthew Wilson

“Ska Attack Squad”
Written by: Kieron Gillen
Drawn by: Dan Boultwood

4