An Interview with Dave Chisholm: "Music is weird, right?"

An Interview with Dave Chisholm about 'Spectrum'

Earlier this month I caught up with comic book artist Dave Chisholm about his latest comic book series, Spectrum. A comic book which taps into the very essence of music, the emotions its evokes, its unspoken yet undefinable humanistic quality, and the obsession around vinyl collecting.

Now, I was meant to publish this interview back on the 12th March, but life got in the way. So some of this article may come off as a bit dated due to the questions being centered around the Spectrum's second issue. That said, I think much of this interview will resonate for any and everyone who's familiar with the series, despite whether they're caught up or not.

RELATED: Spectrum #1 Review (Mad Cave Studios)

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My Kind Of Weird: You’ve brought your flair for music back into the world of comics. Would you care to give my readers your elevator pitch for the Spectrum series?

Dave Chisholm: Spectrum is about an cosmic, eternal war happening in the realm of music and sound, told from the point of view of two ground-level women, each embarking on a search for family.

My Kind Of Weird: Let’s address the elephant in the room. I’m assuming Spectrum was a working title which speaks to neuro diversity as well as the diversity is music - in how each person responds to it? Or am I miles off?

Dave Chisholm: Ah, I don't want to speak for Rick. If readers make that connection, then great--there is a neurological angle that shows up more overtly later on but I doubt it's anything readers would be able to predict.

My Kind Of Weird: After reading the first two issues I would say that Spectrum presents the world of music much like an artistic canvas. With sights, colours, movements and tragedies that can be found wherever you look so Id like to get your take on this, how do you overcome the challenge of translating an audible medium into a visual worlds?

Dave Chisholm: This challenge is a real obsession of mine--how to do this in specific ways, not just general VIBES, but how to really take tangible elements of a piece of music and reflect them on the page. To me, it's just a hop and a skip over from the challenge of depicting movement on a comic page-movement in a static, still medium - and there are a bunch of tried-and-true techniques for that.

So, by this point, with something like 1000 pages (is that accurate?!? haha) of published music-related comics under my belt, I have developed a number of techniques for this challenge. I teach a college class about this topic here in Rochester at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology).

It's called COMICS & MUSIC!

Spectrum issue 2, page 9 - artwork by Dave Chisholm

My Kind Of Weird: There’s a layer of existential surrealism at play as your protagonist, Melody Parker, explores the world around her. Specifically, page 9 of Issue 2 feels very kaleidoscopic. Was this a means to communicate and represent the collision of thoughts and ideas in a music composition?

Dave Chisholm: I think that any music connections readers might make are great but I definitely don't want to overexplain any specific bits just in case anybody comes to different conclusions--any conclusion is great and valid, not just the ones Rick and I intended.

So, yeah, there are lots of musical connections in any comic I make, intended or no. Rhythm, color, pacing, dynamics, structure - these are all part and parcel of both of these types of media!

My Kind Of Weird: I’ve been following your work for a while now. From Enter the Blue to Mikes Davis and the Search for the Sound. For me, Spectrum feels like all of those works and more have formed a new animal in Spectrum. Almost like Rick Quinn has been in your head this entire time. What’s it been like collaborating with him as opposed to owning the entire project?

Dave Chisholm: It's been wonderful working with Rick. We've been part of the same Slack group, a small group of comic creators, since like 2018 and Rick has been an amazing sounding board for all of my projects. Really, his editor brain is something to behold, so, in a way, he has been in my brain the entire time, and Spectrum feels like it was written exactly for me, especially those first couple of issues (but really really the whole darn thing, truly). Rick knows what I like to draw, knows exactly the kinds of challenges I will tackle--I would collaborate again with him in a heartbeat. It was a real joy!

My Kind Of Weird: I love Melody’s perceptions. How her concept of reality is seeing all sorts of machinations. From Androids to Aliens and more. Is she slipping into a kind of music-led neurosis?

Dave Chisholm: Music is weird, right? You listen to something - literally just waves moving the air - and it can evoke colors, images, full-blown memories, entire scenes in your head that didn't exist before. It's a creation machine, a time machine, a magical box that can undeniably influence reality. So, the question is: are we all already living inside a music-led neurosis?!