Reunion tour captures life spent on the road
Hard Core Logo is as old as most punks thought
Hard Core Logo: Portrait of a Thousand Punks Nick Craine, based on the film by Bruce McDonald and the novel by Michael Turner House of Anansi Press 152 pp; $ 19.95
Hard Core Logo, the novel by Michael Turner, first appeared in 1993. Following a legendary fictional punk band from Vancouver as they reunite and go on tour in Western Canada, the story is told through a collection of notebook scraps, overheard conversations, set lists and song lyrics. A book that looks like a poetry collection from a small publisher (in this case Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press), it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to take off. But the book found success the old- fashioned way: readers recognized that it was something special and passed it on to friends. The story of Joe Dick and Billy Talent getting the band back together for one last hurrah — forcing themselves into the inevitable futility of touring the prairies, and the unavoidable financial failure of a mildly successful Canadian band — was something anyone who knew even a little bit about the life of a Canadian musician could relate to. It was real.
The book’s growing audience set it on a course that mirrored a typical band’s career. The original release, a glorious, rough debut, was followed by a more mainstream version, in this case Bruce McDonald’s 1 996 faux- documentary, which was successful even as it conceded some of what made t he original book great to the realities of filmmaking. Both were followed in 1997 by the graphic novel Hard Core Logo: Portrait of a Thousand Punks, a sort of return to what made the book good, like a band trying to shake off the compromises of mainstream success without alienating their new, wider audience. Hard Core Logo spinoffs have continued since, with a play, an opera and a second film moving us firmly into the “Oh, they’re still putting out albums?” phase of the franchise.
House of Anansi’s rerelease of the graphic novel as part of its A List series is a pleasant return to the story’s more inspired beginnings; it may not be the book that the source material is, but it’s the best of the inspired works, and, if we’re being honest, more accessible than the original. As expected with a re- release, there’s new material added — a new introduction by Lynn Crosbie, a “handy tearaway church chart,” and an excellent afterword by Nick Craine on the process of adapting the work into a graphic novel.
Craine’s version follows the basic arc of the movie, which necessarily lost some of the book’s naturalistic reality in favour of a more plotted story. Craine did, however, drop the film’s documentary style, rightly feeling it wouldn’t translate to comic form. Where the plot’s advancement hinged on untranslatable film methods, Craine reintegrated material from the original book. He also drew from his own life as a touring musician — a van he toured in with his band, an acoustic guitar he once loved. As with Turner’s book, these added touches come from a place of lived experience and add a sense of legitimacy. He also includes Easter eggs hidden t hroughout for those who care to find them. ( Most readers won’t notice the make of a distortion pedal the band uses, but musicians will recognize the MXR Distortion Plus without the on/off light as the legendary pedal used by Bob Mould of Hüsker Du, beloved by punks for its simplicity).
Craine captures life on the road; the long Canadian drives, a lone van crossing the prairie at night and the sudden light of a city in the middle of nowhere. From wide- open spaces to claustrophobic old venues full of punks thrashing around, the art style adapts to the scene; old punk- rock drinking stories are set as an action- adventure comic, Joe Dick’s face changes with his drugged- out moods. And the physical ephemera — scrawled set lists, handwritten diaries, newspaper clippings — all combine to bring the graphic novel closer to the feel of the original book.
Turner’s novel was a perfect bit of literature; real and illuminating. McDonald’s movie treated its characters less well; they seem, at times, to be caricatures — more what a filmmaker thinks a punk is than what any punk really is. Craine’s graphic novel meets both works halfway, taking the realness of the original book and maintaining the more accessible nature of the movie. Adaptations always owe much to what came before them, but Portrait of a Thousand Punks is also able to stand on its own; an honest take on life on the road that still resonates 20 years later.