Spectrum
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Spectrum is a frenetic, genre bending, formally inventive story about the magic and power of music with words by Rick Quinn and visuals by Dave Chisholm (Chasin' the Bird, Miles Davis and The Search for the Sound).
Melody Parker is losing her mind. She’s living on the streets of Seattle during the WTO protests of 1999. She is seeing things. Androids. Aliens. Pigs in high fashion. And a creature named Echo—one of the Sustained: elemental beings with the power to alter reality through music. She invites Melody to join her as she brings about the end of the world. As Melody tries to escape this strange woman, suppressed memories from across vast spans of time flood into her awareness, bringing her very identity into question.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A pair of lost souls trip the light fantastic in this dimension-spanning, over-earnest graphic novel from debut author Quinn and artist Chisholm (Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound). Two young women are convinced the visions and synesthesia flooding their senses when they listen to music are signs of impending madness rather than what they actually are: signals that they're the tools of battling godlike beings. Melody, a homeless emo teen quickly losing her grip on reality, and Ada, a record-store owner with the same issue, find common cause in trying to grasp how their psychic breaks are related to music. But the script keeps postponing the explanation, as the two flit between cross-dimensional realities ("Melody found a thread in the discordance" after a "thundering voice that burst with ethereal energy" tells her to run from a steampunk-styled pursuer). Other sections contain capsule portraits of cultural figures in an alternate history who so closely resemble real people (Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol) that the point of the conceit seems muddled. Though the plot underwhelms, Chisholm's art is appropriately fantastic and storybook-like, overflowing with giddy colors and trippy transitions. The overall effect resembles an arcane concept album.
