By Shaenon K. Garrity
I'm so over this thing where cartooning is set to old-timey jazz music. Just because Robert Crumb fussily collects records from the 1930s doesn't mean everybody else has to do it. Yeah, yeah, they're the two indigenous American art forms, but rock is American too. Some comics should be set to rock. Or pop or rap or R&B. Even Harvey Pekar, another jazz nut, picked "Ain't that Peculiar" by Marvin Gaye as the theme song for
American Splendor, and he was right.
I know Pekar and I aren't the only cartoonists who indulge in making up soundtracks for our own comics. For the record, the theme song to my webcomic
Narbonic is either "Some Fantastic" by the Barenaked Ladies or "Frankenstein" by Aimee Mann, and I have assigned my current comic
Skin Horse both a bouncy opening theme (Garbage, "When I Grow Up") and a more somber end theme (Bowie, "Oh! You Pretty Things"), anime style. Yeah, I've got it all worked out. And I've picked some theme songs for other comics, too.
Fables, Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham and various
"These Are the Fables," the New Pornographers
So come in and play
The song of the siren
It's commonplace
You hear the voice rise in one wave
And crash on your doorstep
Making the circle here perfect, complete
These are the fables on my street
Okay, yes, obvious, but can't you imagine this as the opening credits music to the currently-in-production
Fables TV series? With the characters turning dramatically to the camera like in
Smallville? This is going to happen. People in $700 loafers are planning it right now. We cannot stop them, so we might as well get Neko Case on board. Also, if "Ten thousand dancing girls/Kicking cans 'cross the sky" isn't a James Jean print, it ought to be.
Concrete, Paul Chadwick
"Flesh 'N Blood," Oingo Boingo
Drop the mask, take away the house
And forget about the income and the car
We're all the same underneath our shell
We've all been to hell and we know what it's like
Even though I've read all of two issues of
Concrete, I feel totally qualified to select pop theme music for it. This is one of my favorite Oingo Boingo songs, with the repeated chorus of "After all, we're flesh and blood/After all, we're flesh," which is what you have to keep repeating to yourself when you're a man who's been turned into a giant concrete monster by space aliens and then has a midlife crisis or something.
Ghost World, Dan Clowes
"Metal Detector," They Might Be Giants
Look past the volleyball
Look past the squawking gull
Ignore the mountain of discarded folderol
L'Cause I've got something to make you understand
Something hidden there underneath the land
My metal detector
Is with me all of the time
I know, I know: Clowes' 1990s hipster manifesto in graphic novel form deserves cooler than the nerdiest nerd band in all of Nerdistan. But the next-to-last scene, in which Enid spots Slim-Jim-faced nut Bob Skeetes canvassing the beach with a metal detector, always reminds me of this song, and vice versa. The comic and the song have similar themes of searching for meaning in the frivolous, neglected and odd, hoping that if you can just peel back the tiresome surface of reality, everything on the top will just suddenly stop seeming interesting.
Wolverine and all comics featuring Wolverine, various
"Tom Sawyer," Rush
Modern-day warrior
Mean, mean stride
Today's Tom Sawyer
Mean, mean pride
Wolverine needs a Canadian backup band, and who better than Rush? Not only is this song as badass yet cheesy as the man with the adamantium fists himself, according to
Origin Wolverine grew up at about the same time as Tom Sawyer. So it's beyond appropriate, and I am frankly shocked that Rush's
Gold album is not playing on permanent loop at the Marvel offices.
Cerebus, Dave Sim
"Kodachrome," Paul Simon
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
They'd never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white
I don't know why I think of this as the
Cerebus theme song. It should be something by the Rolling Stones, right? Like "Under My Thumb." Or else nothing at all, since I think the last time I checked Dave Sim had gone off music on general principle. But this is the connection my hindbrain makes. Maybe it's the simultaneously chipper and melancholy tone of the music, the sense of something sweet going slowly and confusingly sour.
Uzumaki, Junji Ito
"Spiraling Shape," They Might Be Giants
The spiraling shape will make you go insane
But everyone wants to see that groovy thing
And nobody knows what it's really like
But everyone says it's great
And they heard it from the spiral in their eyes
I hate to include two They Might Be Giants songs on the same list, and they're even from the same album. But dammit, the plot of this song is exactly the plot of Junji Ito's horror manga about a town possessed by spirals. Incidentally, the TMBG song "The Statue Got Me High" is supposedly based on the origin story of Doctor Fate. And now it's obvious that I know nothing about music and am just a big old nerd, as if I hadn't made that obvious with all those LiveJournal posts about "Star Trek."
Absolute Boyfriend, Yuu Watase
"Coin-Operated Boy," The Dresden Dolls
Made of plastic and elastic
He is rugged and long-lasting
Who could ever ever ask for more?
Love without complications galore
Many shapes and weights to choose from
I will never leave my bedroom
I will never cry at night again
Another literal concordance. Manga seems to match neatly to pop music; for example, you can pair every shonen romance manga with every Spin Doctors song. In this case, I guess it would be even tidier to pair Amanda Palmer with Neil Gaiman, but Gaiman's comics
oeuvre is covered by, like, a billion Tori Amos songs.
Garfield Minus Garfield, Jim Davis and Dan Walsh
"I Don't Like Mondays," The Boomtown Rats
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I wanna shoot the whole day down
My husband suggested this one. I'm pairing it with
Garfield Minus Garfield rather than regular-strength
Garfield because the former usually ends up being about Jon's lonely descent into depression and madness, and the song is presumably the chronicle of his inevitable rampage. On the other hand, the crazed shooter in the song is a girl, so maybe this is about Liz the veterinarian.
Garfield is confusing sometimes.
The Autobiographical Comics of Robert Crumb
"Fine Artiste Blues," The Cheap Suit Serenaders
My paintings are famous and they're worth lots of dough
Pretty girls all hang around my gallery shows
I'm as good with my paintbrush as I am with my lips
Stick around, honey, learn some aesthetic tips
Baby, I'm a fine artiste
And maybe I deserve to be kissed
Okay, I've got to give Crumb an old-timey song, plus I like it when cartoonists write their own theme music. (My other favorite cartoonist bands: James Kochalka Superstar, Keith Knight's hip-hop duo the Marginal Prophets, and nerd supergroup Seduction of the Innocent.) So here it is, R. Crumb's career in a nutshell, the happy banjo version. Man, Steve Martin was right about the banjo making everything sound happy. This is way better than my first choice, "Baby Got Back."
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
