Celso #4

By Celso

Celso has chosen the rather difficult task of adapting a song into comic format in this issue. The song is “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘fuck you’” by Strangers Die Everyday, and the reason the adaptation is so difficult is that the song is purely instrumental, with no lyrics whatsoever.

The band use bass, cello, drums, and violin to create some sort of postrock (or so the internet tells me), parts of the songs kind of remind me of Apocalyptica and Defiance, Ohio, though I’m sure that’s more from lack of knowledge of this type of music than anything else (can you believe I used to write multiple CD reviews every week?). Celso’s introduction said that you could listen to the song on the band’s Myspace, but that is no longer true. However you can go to this site and download a couple of their albums. http://www.thesirenssound.com/2009/05/17/strangers-die-everyday-aperture-for-departure/

Celso has gone pretty crazy with this adaptation. He has tigers attacking a train filled with travelling musicians! That is not what I heard from the song! I like the artwork here quite a lot, it’s got a weird kind of scratchiness to it, but also quite a lot of detail. I do wonder why Celso decided to draw people playing musical instruments not heard in the song, I feel like that kind of detracts from the connections between song and comic.

And while I like tigers a lot, the best part of this zine is the next comic, which seems to be an autobiographic comic about Celso getting stopped by a cop while riding his bike drunk at 4am. It starts out as a kind of poem about the joys of riding your bicycle when nobody else is around, and then becomes a comic as the surprisingly nice police officer stops, berates, threatens, and finally pleads with him. It’s pretty amusing stuff and I guess he got lucky for not running into a total jackass of a cop.

There’s also an essay on Jungism and comic books that I didn’t finish reading. Oh well!