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About Spectrum #1:
Writer: Rick Quinn
Artist: Dave Chisholm
Letterer: Dave Chisholm
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios Publication Date: November 20th, 2024
Logline:
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.
Quotes from Rick Quinn and Dave Chisholm:
"You know that part in “99 Problems” where Jay-Z says “You crazy for this one, Rick”? That’s how I feel about Mad Cave agreeing to publish Spectrum. This is not an ordinary comic book. It’s a story about art and madness, told in a kaleidoscopic style that spans the whole of the 20th century. Dave and I pushed ourselves to the absolute limits of our creativity, wanting to make something idiosyncratic and unconventional in every way that reader’s could get truly lost in." - Rick Quinn
“When Rick sent me the script for the first issue, I was floored. I had to draw this book. It was like he read my mind. As a lifelong musician, comic creator, sci-fi fanatic, and obsessor of everything weird, strange, and uncanny, Spectrum had everything I would want in a book. It manages to be simultaneously heartfelt, experimental, cosmic, and personal. I wanted the visuals to follow suit, and so I pushed myself in every way. Each issue will surprise and wow readers. Needless to say: I'm really really happy with how it turned out. We were both elated when Mad Cave Studios picked it up for publication!” - Dave Chisholm
Spectrum #1 Review:
I recall a moment in a forum once — probably Discord or some other nonsense —where the question from an at the time budding young comic book writer was posited to the group as “how do artists draw music?” Insert a cavalcade of horrifically bad recommendations and you can probably imagine the aspersions thrown at the original enquiry.
At the time, “Enter the Blue” had just been released by Z2 Comics, a company which promised to bridge the gaps between comics and music. This comic book was American folklore at its heart, grounded in realism and highlighting the sounds of music as its own character just as writers have in personifying Batman’s Gotham for several decades.
This was followed shortly after by “Canopus,” a 4 issue mini-series release by Scout Comics, taking the reader through the existential horrors of space travel. Both published in 2021, they highlighted an inventive array of colours and flavours in brilliant musician turned artist Dave Chisholm’s wheelhouse. In understanding what Chisholm had sought to accomplish with the flow of “Enter the Blue” I recommended the budding young writer get familiar with Chisholm’s work.
He’s certainly one to watch, he has a way of personifying the sounds of the trumpet, it’s music folklore at its heart, all the usual bla you type when entering the fray in a forum comment section. So it’s with no surprise this brand new series, Spectrum, in which Eisner-deserving artist Dave Chisholm is a part of, takes flight into areas of the comic book consciousness like what “Enter the Blue” and “Miles Davis & The Search for the Sound” have done.
So much that the brilliantly scribed narrative and dialogue of Rick Quinn’s in this first issue of ‘Spectrum’ gives rise to the theory they’re occupying the same brain. A feeling that starts with musical folklore before it evolves into this surreal push into the existential just like Neil Gaiman did (at times) with Sandman or like what Grant Morrison did in his epically-charged run of Doom Patrol.
Rick Quinn and Dave Chisholm tell the story of young woman, Melody, who is inexplicably tied to a vast array of musical styles and the musicians that have co-opted them over many decades. What evolves throughout the issue is an exploration of her importance to the universe-at-large.
The artwork is a dreamscape filled with unforgiving nuance. The coloring normalises a blue palette with highlights of reds, pinks and oranges which highlight the ever present danger as Melody’s reality shifts, changes and distorts. It’s like you’re watching an extended jazz soundtrack unfold over several decades compressed into less than 30 pages. Spectrum is bold, avant-garde and constantly evolving.
I give this a 9/10.
