Nicky Marshall was saved by rock and roll – or so he likes to think. An awkward upbringing and turmoil following his father’s suicide led Nicky to form a band called Ecstasy with his childhood friend Drey. The music takes them to Los Angeles, raw and gritty and teeming with personalities.
If you struggle with surviving, Last Song (2017) is a book for you. If you look at a blank paper, at your instrument, at a pencil, thinking about some way to deal with reality, to make it more easily manageable, to have a purpose for your day, year, life. If you struggle to see how those things make sense. Nicky and Drey’s journey together is a complicated one, driving you through many different places, overstimulated joy, painful desperation, irrational hope, reckless sacrifice, inexplicable anguish. And still, there’s something familiar, close and warm about these pages. Even when they hurt.
My guess is Holly Interlandi is not only creating characters, even if she’s wonderful at just that. If you cheat your read and go to the last page of the book and put the soundtrack while you enjoy it (maybe pausing the music or maybe turning it up when it gets too intense, that’s on you), you get she’s grasping for creating a comic that reads like rock and roll sounds. Desperate, difficult, hurtful, but filled with an angsty hope and optimism and passion for life. And the success at that is powerful, and shared between her sincere writing and Sally Cantirino’s art. She draws black-and-white zine-style, simple at first glance but filled with textures and spiraling panels and a tremendous detail at page design, seems sometimes like the inside sleeve of a CD, sometimes like a show, sometimes like the sad tale of a teenager’s diary.
And it’s not only that the vibe of this book is really what it grasps for, or the writing is a noticeable effort for giving life to a story that was gestating right back at the year 2000. Even with some rather pointless moments, like a bestiality joke bad placed or too much focus on Charlie’s (the bassist of the band) sexist jokes, there’s an undisputed relevance to these characters. The themes of addiction, life-long complicated love, childhood trauma, and the weight we place on things like fame or authenticity for surviving, run through them. And Drey and Nicky, right in this over-sized first issue, feel like one of the most relevant complicated love/romantic/friendship stories I’ve seen in any comic.
You might get close to this comic thinking it’s for rock n roll fans, but really, you’re gonna find something more. This beginning is even more like rock n roll made comic than a comic about rock n roll.
Final Thoughts
Get ready for a vibrant deep read, as this 60-pages issue will pull your attention to it by its original and punk-ish art and sincere and relevant writing and characters. This isn't about conclusions, it's about life and how we get by with it.
Last Song (2017) #1: Did Rock N Roll Save My Life?
