Spectrum was almost never meant to be.
“This was one of these projects where I just put it aside,” said writer Rick Quinn. “Like, ‘OK, let’s not worry about anyone wanting to publish this.’ Or, ‘Let’s not worry about how I get an artist to do this and just focus on writing something that I really want to write.'”
And for Quinn, whose credits include Saltwater, Spectrum really is a dream project — as in, it’s akin to a wondrous fever dream. Amid the backdrop of 1999’s WTO protests in Seattle, Melody Parker finds that she’s losing her mind. Until, quite suddenly, appears the strange Echo, an “elemental being with the power to alter reality through music.” When Echo “invites Melody to join her as she brings about the end of the world,” the youngster begins to experience “suppressed memories from across vast spans of time flood into her awareness, bringing her very identity into question.” Think of Spectrum, then, as music transmogrified.
“The story itself was inspired by my love of music and wanting to tell a story that had something to do with music as a central theme,” said Quinn. “A lot of the other things I’ve done have had a musical component to them as well. It was mainly about taking inspiration from music from a certain era of my life and certain songs that really spoke to me in a profound way and using that as the inspiration, especially for the beginning and the first chapter of the story.”
But while Quinn was more than happy to let this story remain in a desk drawer, friend and artist Dave Chisholm, who is also no stranger to music-centric comics himself, effectively saved it from non-existence.
“Dave and I had been friends for years, and we always share what we’re working on with each other,” said Quinn. “I knew that he would enjoy it because we share a lot of those things in common. I sent it to him like, ‘You will read this and appreciate it.’ And that’s enough for me. And he emailed or texted me, pretty much within hours, saying, ‘We need to do more with this.'”
@davechisholmcomics SPECTRUM issue 1 of 6 November 2024 Words by Rick Quinn Pictures by Dave Chisholm Published by Mad Cave Studios #indiecomics #comicbook #comicbooktiktok #comicart #arttok #comictrailer #graphicnovel #madcavestudios #davechisholm #artistsoftiktok #arttok #spectrumcomic #indieartist #readmorecomics
For his part, Chisholm connected with Spectrum almost instantly.
“When I finished reading, it was such a great script,” said Chisholm. “It was exactly what I wanted to read and what I would want to draw. Similar to Rick, most of my published work has been music-related. I love leaning into this side of things, but especially at the time I was a little bit burned out on nonfiction music stuff. I wanted to do something that was fictional. It was almost like it was written just for me. When I got to the end of the script, I was left with a really wonderful feeling.”
Once they actually finished Spectrum, the duo had to shop around this rather complicated project. Both Quinn and Chisholm were acutely aware of how hard a sell Spectrum may be in the modern comics industry and its tendency for more “efficient” storytelling.
“An issue #1 can be so obvious sometimes,” said Chisholm. “Here’s the hook. Here’s the angle. Here’s the conceit. Here’s the big idea. And with this, it was so mysterious and all those little asides to the in-world historical happenings. It all felt like a pinhole into a really, really big world. On top of that, the feeling of it, the emotion that it left me with, was totally unique in my comics reading experience.”
Chisholm added, “Huge props to Mad Cave for biting on this. I haven’t been published by a zillion different publishers, but it does seem from the reader’s perspective that, for the last decade or more, the whole angle is that if you don’t sell your entire idea by page five of issue #1, it’s not going to get picked up by a publisher. People want to know what they’re getting themselves into. There’s not really room for a flowering and an opening of ideas.”
Courtesy of Mad Cave Studios.
And both creators never wanted to make it easy for readers. Quinn, for instance, recognizes that Spectrum is “very intentional with details,” and that process can really challenge readers.
“It’s just with any kind of visual storytelling — when you take away those less obvious sign posts and you’re left with more subtle things that are open to interpretation. The granular detail really matters,” said Quinn. “That was another piece that was like very much by design, the feeling that it could go anywhere. I think as far as your question of how much is explicitly rather than not, it’s almost both extremes with not much in the middle. Either it’s just like bluntly tells you information or it’s very ethereal and leaves a lot to interpretation.”
There’s also what the pair call “asides” mentioned above — these little tangents that explain some part of the lore of Spectrum and it’s unique take on the world.
“The fun part of the project was…being able to create an alternate history universe,” said Quinn. “There’s this notion, in the first issue where, at Beethoven’s untimely demise, a fork has been created and our realities have diverged. It’s close enough that you can hear those echoes between this world and that world. I think it allowed us to push our creativity even farther than we already were trying to just say, ‘Let’s write the ultimate book and draw the ultimate book.’ Like, ‘OK, now we’re going take it to this other level where we’re going to create our own parallel 20th century.’ And so that was a huge part of the fun of it.”
While those are clearly fun — less like “haha” and more like a novel commentary on storytelling structures — they also foster a unique pacing for the story at-large.
“Those little asides do take a little bit of a top-down view,” said Chisholm. “And then we get the bottom, the ground level point of view of the experience of Melody and then the other characters that are introduced in the subsequent issues. I think Rick walks a really nice balance through the series so that it doesn’t ever get to the point where there’s too much story being delivered by the top-down narrated sections. But also that we don’t have these super awkward scenes from the ground-level characters of them explaining too much stuff. Rick’s script, it really trusts the reader in a big way, which is a little terrifying.”
But of course, none of that gets at the biggest feature (and perhaps obstacle?) for Spectrum: it’s a comic about music. Sure, it’s been done before — see Chisholm’s own Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound — but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. At one point in our Zoom call, I mentioned that old adage “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
That old chestnut, for me at least, speaks to ideas not just about the “failings” of music criticism, but the sometimes ineffectiveness of trying to dissect music’s abilities outside of its own confines. Luckily, Chisholm had a most perfect response.
“So, first off, I would love to see a dance about architecture,” said Chisholm. “I would love to eat a lovely meal made by a chef about music.”
But it’s not all wonderful snark. For Chisholm, this whole idea or process is central to his work as an artist.
“I love the synesthesia of it all. For what it’s worth, I teach a class at Rochester Institute of Technology that’s called ‘Comics and Music,’ where we talk about the formal overlay,” said Chisholm. “It’s pretty avant-garde thinking, but we talk about how you take something like ‘Frere Jacques’ and make a comic that reflects the structure of that song.”
Chisholm added, “How can we incorporate that shape, that melodic contour of the song? How are we going to deal with that repetition? Like, this stuff is like a total obsession of mine. There’s this whole host of storytelling solutions that take such a roundabout and strange way because we’re using content, formalist data from another tangential type of media, to inform our structural decision-making in a comic. Comics are so form-forward; you can’t escape the formalism of a comic book, right? It’s so much fun to mess with this stuff. I think that there’s a little bit of that at play with Spectrum. I don’t think it’s quite as nerdy as the stuff that I’m going into with this class, but it’s definitely there in my brain.”
Courtesy of Mad Cave Studios.
But Spectrum goes even further still, and there’s layers here that both complicate and extend the narrative.
“With this project, it’s extra fun to put the cart before the horse, as it were,” said Chisholm. “Whereas with the Miles Davis book or the Charlie Parker book, it’s like taking these ideas and reverse-engineering a comics page based on a pre-existing piece of recorded music. With this project, it’s like we can evoke this music in maybe a specific way. Or, evoke a time period in a specific way with our storytelling decisions. It becomes this whole exercise in synesthesia, which factors into the story of Spectrum as well.”
So, then, how do you “dance about architecture,” as it were? Well, aside from the mostly theoretical stuff, it becomes about using the medium as best as you can in telling a story that speaks to something more essential.
“I don’t really see them as light years apart, comics and music,” said Chisholm. “I think there’s like a shared space for both of them in the way they deal with rhythm and the way they deal with color and like so on. And then you can autobiographicalize it. To me, the gutter always felt like the space between notes, right? So maybe there’s a way that we can turn that into some kind of meaningful treatment of the comics page if we’re dealing with a piece of music.”
Chisholm added, “What I tell my students is…here’s a score of music. Look at those notes, right? These notes are like dots and lines on paper that are meant to be read in sequence that stand for something. It’s like a world inside of this page. This page might take up five minutes of music or one minute of music, right? But you can sit and look at it as long as you want. And this communicates that information to you in some way. So this is a comic book to me, right?”
And Chisholm’s deeply human ideas and energies is where we really begin to see what makes Spectrum so effective and impactful despite its “experimental” tendencies: it’s always about the humanity of it all.
“I think one of Dave’s big strengths is the humanity in just the work itself,” said Quinn. “When you’re getting that, feeling that connection to the character, it’s really the connection through the artwork.”
Quinn added that his presence offers a kind of “balance” to Chisholm, and the book ultimately boils this thought experiment stuff into a deeply important story about the power of music and how it connects us with the world at-large.
“Dave has the ability or in the knowledge to approach music in a way that I can’t,” said Quinn. “Like, I cannot hear something and break it down and identify chords and identify structure and identify all of the intricacies of how it gets made. My connection to music is purely an emotional one. That’s not to say that Dave doesn’t connect to music emotionally, obviously; there’s a different angle for him as well.”
Quinn added, “It’s always the emotions for me. And so I think for Spectrum, we balance each other out really well. As we moved on to issues #2 through #6, and I know that Dave is doing it, then I’m writing basically to push Dave as far as I humanly can with some of the stuff. And so some of that formalist stuff was fun to do. But for me, the core of the story really is built around the emotion of what music does. For me, music is very tied with memory. I’ve always been really fascinated by…it’s not quite deja vu, but that feeling that if you listen to a particular song, you are transported literally back to the moment with that person where you heard it or whatever the associated memory is. I know that Dave loves analyzing it from his point of view. I also love analyzing the behind-the-scenes and the history behind all these different things. So I feel like those two wavelengths of how we approach [Spectrum] makes for a good partnership.”
Courtesy of Mad Cave Studios.
Case in point: as much as Spectrum is about Melody’s journey down this transcendental rabbit hole, the book also touches on familiar musical figures via those aforementioned “asides.” It’s those functions, then, that really speak to how engaging Spectrum is at its core.
“I would say that the inspiration or the reference, where we’re homaging and remixing is, of two tracks,” said Quinn. “It’s either a historical track or a personal track. So it’s either things that, again, are close to me or close to my heart as far as what I listen to, or it has some kind of historical resonance that we’re trying to draw on.”
It’s not lost on Chisholm that readers, just like his own students, may be unsure of what they’ve gotten themselves into.
“On day one, they’re like, ‘I just want to draw One Piece characters,'” said Chisholm.
They eventually get it — and perhaps we will, too — when the students realize that it’s all an exercise in telling the biggest, most impactful stories possible.
“What if this part of the story, your gutters on your page looked like this, and it can reflect this meaningful aspect of this story,” said Chisholm. “Then you can see the light bulbs coming on like, ‘Oh, like, the whole thing is storytelling. It’s not just the picture inside the box, but the whole thing is storytelling.’ And like that’s what makes comics so special. And honestly, that’s what makes music special too, right? It’s not just the lyrics that are being sung, right? It’s everything, form the vinyl insert and the artwork on the little disc in the middle to your favorite band’s website. It can all become this synesthetic of experience.”
Similarly, Quinn explained that Spectrum is part of a larger tradition of like-minded projects that almost demand your continued engagement.
“I’ve enjoyed other pieces of art that do the same thing, where they’re these little secret treasure chests that when you open it up, everything might not be obvious at first,” said Quinn. “It might just be a stray illusion or a visual reference of this famous painting or whatever. Then, because you’re interested in it, you look into it and then you can connect those dots. I think we’re walking that line between a reference and a homage and spinning off from there as well.”
You also have to talk about the WTO protests within Spectrum. It’s just as much about exploring and honoring both the artist, their art, and even what the act of creation means.
“I think that one of the large themes of the book is this idea of madness and art, and their relationship,” said Quinn. “If you’re an artist, you’re inherently walking closer to the edge than normal people. And so that’s an ongoing theme throughout the book, and this idea of starting it with this riot, essentially. And then, as the story goes on, there are more riots. There’s moments in time where there have been these protests. So, to me, it was both a personal history, but then it also thematically ties in and reverberates as the story progresses.”
Even some of the more involved aspects of Spectrum are about the lingering impact of art on life itself.
“A large part of the story is that there’s been this musical war that’s been happening from the beginning of time, and Melody may be this manifestation of one of these gods or whatever,” said Quinn. “Part of that is just drawn from my own fascination with the effect music and just art in general has had on the world.”
Courtesy of Mad Cave Studios.
If you’re getting caught up in the sheer complexity of Spectrum, just remember that it’s not that big of a deal — only if you want it to be.
“I’d like to point out that it’s not homework,” said Chisholm. “Or, ‘Oh, you need a freaking compass to figure this out.’ The emotional through line is crystal clear to me. And then all the extra stuff is a bonus of what you can really dive into.”
But that bonus stuff is quite fun. So much so, that it seems like Spectrum has had a much larger effect: the book seems to be making its way into the creators’ actual lives.
“To me, it’s just really interesting that there were a lot of things about this project from the start with all of these eerie coincidences,” said Quinn. “You’d put one thing down and then another thing down and suddenly I’d be researching or thinking through it and suddenly a new connection pops up.”
Quinn added, “In the coda, there’s that whole thing of a music journalist wondering what the title for his book should be. And then he finds the magazine — stuff like that was happening to me as I was writing it. And so that the description at the end, where he’s having these visions and he’s seeing it all come. It was definitely like that, just not to that extreme. Part of the fun of writing is finding all these connections and trying to link them together in a creative way.”
Chisholm, meanwhile, picks up on this idea as it relates to fugue states in music. It’s a tad complicated (and maybe I’m under-explaining), but it certainly gets at notions of the music “coming to life,” and building itself through this decidedly organic process.
“As the book goes on, especially issues #4, 5, and 6, it really feels like we’re getting to a fugue state,” said Chisholm. “You have one melody enter, and then you’ll get the same melody, but starting on a different pitch come in while this melody keeps going. Somehow they work together while still being totally independent. And then the third one comes in, starting on a different pitch, but playing the same melody, but then spinning off, and then they’re all intertwining. You get these little echoes between them and little bits of imitation. And you could have four and five voices coming in, all acting independently. Drawing those like later issues felt like trying to play a fugue on piano. We have one page with six different things happening that are all related but are all separate. And without spoiling too much, maybe I’m using totally different techniques to do each image.”
There’s one point, after Quinn gets up momentarily to answer his door, where it seems like Spectrum is even invading our call.
Dave: What if it’s Echo at his door?
AIPT: That would be so meta and so wonderful for my story.
Dave: Maybe not so good for Rick…
Courtesy of Mad Cave Studios.
Don’t be too intimidated, though. Just as with other parts of Spectrum, this whole “function” is in service of the book’s deep humanity and wells of emotionality.
“Speaking of fugues, one of Dave’s superpowers as an artist is that he is able to do things that are crazy complex and crazy out-of-the-box and very original, but in a super accessible way and very visually appealing and visually fun,” said Quinn. “I’m actually stunned at how accessible this is considering how wild what we did with the story goes. It’s all kept on the tracks by Dave’s artwork.”
It also helps, then, that “each issue is very much its own special little thing,” said Quinn, and that aspect is important in building a story where each chapter holds substance and value.
“Each one is, I would say, very much anchored in a time and a place,” said Quinn. “Some of them get less anchored and are just floating through.”
But, rather quickly, Chisholm had both a solid joke and a musical reference as his response.
“I remember in this interview with Ron Carter, the bass player, about his time with Miles Davis’s quintet in the late ’60s,” said Chisholm. “And someone said that all the musicians are playing so freely, and Ron Carter is anchoring them down with his bassline. And Ron Carter’s like, ‘The anchor keeps the boat from moving. Please stop calling me an anchor.'”
And that interaction/dynamic may be why the “tune” of Spectrum works so effectively. It isn’t just the lofty concept, the synesthesia-inducing tendencies, and/or the book’s celebration of great musicians. It’s the connection between Quinn and Chisholm.
“I’m glad to have a friend like Rick, who saw this aspect of my art and my comics-making and was like, ‘Oh, I can take advantage of this guy,” said Chisholm.
And Quinn is hoping that, beyond anything else about this book (and there clearly is a lot), people can share in it as well. Spectrum is, at the end of the day, just a damn good comic.
“I think Dave and I are both nerds about the formal aspects of comics and what you can do formally with comics,” said Quinn. “And I think if you really pay attention to some of the panels, the way the panels are done on the page or the way that the story is told, I think that…I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing ever, but we did put a lot of thought into that. And I think that if you are similarly a dork about those kinds of things, it’ll speak to you.”
Spectrum #1 is due out November 20 via Mad Cave Studios.
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