Sonically speaking, black metal favors thin vocal shrieking and high-pitched guitar melodies played as a constant stream of repeated attacks (tremolo picking). Whereas death metal was developed primarily in Florida and Sweden, black metal is focused in Norway it’s also more ideological than death metal (the church-burners and white supremacists came from black metal).

ġ) Briefly, black metal is one of the important strands of extreme metal, all of which is characterized by extremely fast tempos, indecipherable vocal delivery, heavily distorted guitars, and deliberately offensive texts. That might make it ironic that a black metal comic is more popularly accessible than a britpop comic, but Spears used the generic tropes of the scene, including a generic fake band (if he’d had the boys meet Darkthrone or Gorgoroth, it would have been completely impenetrable), while Gillen constantly used specific real people and bands, because he felt they were famous enough. Britpop by its very definition was completely saturated in media coverage and analysis extreme metal, on the other hand, has been a consistently underground phenomenon with the exception of the church-burnings. **BRIEF SIDEBAR**: I wonder how much of this was avoidable. ( Phonogram had a key moment depend upon readers recognizing an unlabeled Jarvis Cocker, or possibly Damon Albarn, as drawn by McKelvie.) Much more successfully than Gillen & McKelvie’s recent Phonogram (sorry, guys), Black Metal uses its musical background for imagery and inspiration without ever requiring familiarity with that background. Two reasonable questions might immediately spring to mind: 1) what is black metal? and 2) will this book mean anything to people who don’t know? Let it be known that I am all for it! I’m trying to pass along some observations about the works I read, and if those works happen to be visual, I can hardly expect to communicate my point clearly unless we’re both looking at the same thing.īlack Metal is a new graphic novel about, well, black metal.

There’s been some discussion lately about the role of visual samples in comics criticism. It’s still Monday somewhere in the world! And that means it’s time for the first edition of METAL MONDAYS here at Picture Poetry.

Black Metal Volume 1 by Rick Spears