Last of the Pops is the story of a rising musician who vanishes and leaves behind a timeless body of work that inspires and unites long after his mysterious disappearance. Where did the idea for this book come from?

Music is something that has really shaped a lot of aspects of my life, from helping me understand the world and connect with it, to shaping the relationships I form with people, even my writing process leans heavily on music. I build out soundtracks to help me set the tone and in some cases even get inside characters’ heads. But despite it being such a big part of my life, I’ve actually never written about music – it’s always just something that’s tangentially connected to what I write about. So, with Last of the Pops, I really wanted to dive in and explore my connection to music, and how a lot of different people connect to it.

Like, if you think about your favorite songs, they can be very personal things. You have this history tied to them, whether it’s some kind of emotional response or memory, but at the same time, these songs are a shared cultural experience. The songs don’t exist just for you (even if they can feel like that). So they end up carrying with them the collective memories of all the people who listen to them over the years. And I really wanted to play with what that could mean – especially now – at a time when streaming and the internet has made it so that pretty much all music is literally right at our fingertips.

What inspired you to take this story to the next level and create a graphic novel?

Last of the Pops really became a graphic novel for a couple of reasons. For starters, comics have always been kind of my default when it comes to writing. Most of my books are graphic novels. But, when I sat down to write Last of the Pops, I didn’t know what it was going to be. Initially I just really loved the name Last of the Pops, as a take on the old Top of the Pops show. I couldn’t believe no one had used it before and I just really wanted to be the one who did. So for a long time, I just had a Google Doc titled Last of the Pops on my phone and I’d jot down different ideas or musings about music. Every once in a while I’d go back to it and see if anything jumped out at me. For a long time, it was just a bunch of ideas. Over time though, I started to see different characters taking shape – different personalities in bits and pieces. And the more I started to hone in on that, the more a story started to build up. It wasn’t a clean narrative though, in a way it was taking shape more like an epistolary novel. All these ideas could be different character’s journal entries and you could piece together the story within the context of the letter.

As I worked on that though, I realized the book was missing something. It was a book about music, a book about the personal soundtrack to all these different people’s lives. In a way, it was like a mix tape I was writing, but there were no actual songs or lyrics. That’s when I realized why not play with that idea a little. I started thinking about all those old music videos where they were basically mini-movies with the song playing in the background and you had these two different experiences: the visual storytelling and the lyrical storytelling. It seemed like it would be something fun to try with sequential artwork. Each scene could be like a music video with part of the story playing out in the panels of the comics, with the other part told through these different narrative devices – like journal entries or podcast transcripts, interviews, letters – all the standard epistolary storytelling devices.

I tried doing some research on this kind of thing, find examples of stories that have merged sequential and epistolary storytelling, and with the exception of a few single-issue comics, it hasn’t really been done before. Especially not as a full-length graphic novel (though if anyone knows of any examples, I’m open to being proven wrong). But this just made me want to try it out even more – to see if it was possible. As it turned out, the format really clicked. Getting to play with these two different storytelling methods helped bring the story together in a totally unexpected way – especially exploring the harmony and dissonance between them – how sometimes they were completely aligned in what they were telling the reader, and sometimes not – it ended up adding a new layer to the entire storytelling experience that was so much fun to work with, and added to the musicality of the book using harmony and dissonance the same way a songwriter might.

The images in this novel are fantastic. Can you share with us a little about your collaboration with illustrators Dr. Demus and Dapit Jamur?

Sure! Initially, it was just Dr. Demus and I. We found each other online and I really loved his art style. It was completely his own, yet it had elements of all these great comic artists like Jamie Hewlett, Dan Hipp, the Hernandez brothers – all these artists who had done comics about music in the past. Which I thought would be a nice homage.

His style worked perfectly for the book, but as we were going through it, we couldn’t crack what to do with the one character, Penny. Everything I did for her felt forced and didn’t fit her character. It wasn’t till I took a step back and thought about where she was in the story. She’s closed off, she’s stuck in this situation she doesn’t want to be in. She’s not really going to open up. She wouldn’t be the type to keep a diary or be writing letters to someone. But she’s an artist, and artists keep a sketchbook.

Once we realized this, it really opened up opportunities for us to tell her story in a very different way. I always refer to the sections of the book as the instrumental tracks, cause they’re no narrative like the other chapters. But we figured, some we’re already doing something different but her, we could switch things up and give Penny a style all her own to really let her stand out. That’s when we found Dapit. His artwork really brought a new level to the book. Penny was a seventeen-year-old wannabe street artist, and his style really brought her voice to life. It also opened the door for us to think about instances where maybe we could stretch the form a bit more – like the email newsletters from 45s on Main that helped to tell the part of the story we didn’t even think to include in the beginning but really helps add this very different layer to the mythos of Skylar Chase both in how we’re able to think about him and his music, but also I’m how it’s presented to the reader.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

At the moment, I’m teaming up again with S. Atzeni for a new anthology Disco Fries & Scenic Drives which is the third volume in the Life in the Garden State series we created to celebrate the untold stories about our home state of New Jersey. New Jersey is one of those places that often gets pigeonholed into very specific perspectives. But as people who have lived here all our lives, there’s something special about New Jersey. It’s completely one-of-a-kind while at the same time being incredibly universal and relatable to people from all over. So this anthology is designed to celebrate that. We’ll finish accepting submissions at the end of June and then the book will be hitting shelves in October.

After that, I have a new graphic novella I’ve just started writing for Read Furiously’s One ‘n Done series. It’s still in the very early stages, but it’s inspired by the band Good Luck who recorded two different versions of the same song on their album Into Lake Griffy. They’re both about stars falling from the sky with the same lyrics and chord progressions. But done in different styles with different singers. It’s not about the band or the songs though, but takes inspiration from some of the lyrics and more importantly, how there are two very different versions of the song. That one will take some time to get going though, so details on that are forthcoming. But I’m excited about it.

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