The Pain or the Hangover?

After overdoing it the last few months, Tim + Alex missed the deadline for their last couple of essays, and TWATD went on a massive bender small hiatus. But we’ve since been to blog rehab, cleaned up our act, and are back with a new format: one essay per issue, alternating between the two of us each month. Starting… 

Now!

Alex: Gillen has repeatedly described “Imperial Phase” as a double album. Now we’ve slid the first record back into its sleeve, and issue #29 has put the needle in the groove of Part II, I’m stuck on that comparison. Not least because the double album is normally the bit in a band’s career where I turn off.

But if I was picking a musical analogy for how issue #29 feels, it wouldn’t be a double album. It would be The Weeknd’s 2011 album/EP/mixtape House of Balloons. 

I’ve kind of fallen out of love with The Weeknd these days (yes, I have become an ‘I liked his early stuff’ snob), so to explain what I mean, I’m going to steal some words from 2011-Alex.

“House of Balloons sounds like a world where it is constantly the early hours of the morning, where it’s cold and smoky outside, where the party is always just ending. A world with the colours turned down slightly, viewed through a lens smeared with vaseline … or are your eyes just bleary?”

That’s the music I hear when I read this issue. I mean, it literally opens, the morning after the party, with Persephone saying “I feel so sick”, and later gives over a full page to the words “Is the High Worth the Price?”.

The shared feeling is more than just a hangover or a comedown, though the issue does capture the associated emotional brittleness and mental lag perfectly. It’s not even the shame and regret that comes from a half-remembered night, suspecting you did things you shouldn’t have (friends don’t let friends eat friends).

The thing that The Weeknd captured so beautifully was the anhedonia of hedonism. And that’s all over issue #29.

That sense of pointlessness that can come from overdoing it, and deciding that the solution is just do it all over again, except a little harder. 

This is pretty much Persephone’s journey through the issue. She starts the issue bleary-eyed, is faced with the consequences of last night, and heads straight for another bleak night out. 

As Singles Club, the Dionysus issue and the climax of Young Avengers illustrate, Gillen and McKelvie know how to throw a fictional party. Issue #29 turns that inside out, giving us all the signifiers – beautiful McKelvie dance moves; Matt Wilson strobe lights; just enough detail in the string of toilet/bar/dancefloor/DJ booth to evoke real clubs you’ve been to – but transforming them into a horror film.

It’s not necessarily all about excess. It’s more a case of the old things not bringing you the joy they used to. That’s as true of a song as a drug as a comic as whatever you rely on for a little hit of pleasure. As Phonogram has always made excruciatingly clear, it’s terrifying to turn to those things – especially when they’re something you’ve dedicated your life to – and to discover they do nothing for you.

It’s a feeling I’m familiar with, enough that I didn’t need to Google how to spell ‘anhedonia’ even when Tumblr threw one of those squiggly red lines under it.

Just to underline all this, Issue #29 does give us a taste of the party before the hangover, but it only serves to make the pain sharper. Not least because the night before that it flashes back to, the crystal-clear pleasure of Baal and Sakhmet’s first performances, was 18 months earlier.

It’s a reminder that, in the modern day, we’ve seen less and less of the gods performing since Persephone’s gig at the beginning of “Rising Action”. There were two performances in #27, but they were squeezed into a few tight panels, not even the main attraction on those pages.

This isn’t really a comic about pop stars anymore. As Laura goes from a fan in the front row, overjoyed to be sharing a room with these people, to a superstar sharing a bed with them, the ‘god’ half of the equation has taken over pretty much entirely.

This is a shift that I know some readers have been uncomfortable with. But the truth is, it couldn’t still be that comic of a fan standing in a crowd, blissfully watching her idols. Not only is that dramatically inert, it’s just not accurate.

The thrill naturally wears off with time. That’s true of me and House of Balloons, and it’s true here. For the thing you love to keep being effective, without changing, it needs to deliver in higher and higher doses – and even then, sometimes it doesn’t work.

Issue #29 is one of the most accurate portrayals of it not working that I’ve ever seen. As I tried to communicate in my CBR review, that doesn’t necessarily make for a very satisfying reading experience. It’s certainly less appealing than the beautiful glamour that The Weeknd lent to these same feelings, but it’s more true. 

Is that worth the price?