We’re one week out from Dead Air launching on Kickstarter at www.deadaircomic.com ! Click the link to be notified when we go live the morning of Tuesday, May 23.
One of the things I remember most about being in my early 20s was how often the people around me at the university radio station turned to the music they listened to as a way to explore and establish an identity. Fashion, politics, and even friendships felt inextricably linked to the music subcultures propagating their way across the airwaves.
Much of this was compounded by the fact the school was located in a very small town, insulated by a French-speaking monoculture here in Quebec. Chances are you might not have that many other super-fans of your particular genre to surround yourself with. Limited interactions with the culture at large often seemed to encourage people to double-down on their image-making and live out their interpretation of the lifestyle to the fullest, as kind of a ‘last outpost’ in a wilderness of competing ideas.
Artist Joe Ng did a fantastic job of illustrating this mind-set when desigining each of the characters in Dead Air. Each of the DJs who play an important role in the comic book are lovingly depicted living their musical passions to the fullest in the form of the clothes they wear, the hairstyles they rock, and the language they speak.
By creating such vivid snapshots of each Dead Air character in their youth, Joe was further able to push the contrast against their future selves. When we meet each of these individuals again as adults later in life, the growth that they’ve achieved and the struggles they’ve gone through are often written not just in the stories they have to tell, but also in their faces, their eyes, and their new wardrobes.
