Pop Music Comics: Steeltown Rockers

Growing up in a dead-end town, practicing guitar in the basement.  Hoping music could be the ticket to something better.  Ambitions of stardom, rehearsing the songs, taking any gig that comes along, imagining away the harsh realities of everyday life.

Steeltown Rockers is exactly that, a story of kids dreaming rock and roll dreams.   It’s a soap opera, a teen movie, an afterschool special.  It’s a story of a world filled with obstacles– alcoholism, intolerance, drugs, poverty, adolescence.  The characters are textbook clichés: the fast-talking younger brother who plays a mean guitar, the bassist with a hightop fade, the frontman who writes songs and idolizes Springsteen, the sax-playing girl from the wrong side of the tracks (with a punk haircut and a crush on the singer), the science nerd with a keyboard rig, the troubled drummer with no self-control.  A bunch of kids starting a band, driving around town, forming alliances, and imagining the escape that music can provide.  Inevitably, hardships intercede.  Family dynamics and dysfunctions conspire against the cast, but still they persevere.  Writing songs.  Honing their skills.  Playing music.

It’s far more like a creator-owned project than your average Marvel comic.  The real-world issues and lack of superheroics make it something of an anomaly, especially for a series published in the early 90s at the height of mutant-mania.  The writer, Elaine Lee, had previously created the successful indie comic Starstruck and was a well-known avant-garde playwright and Emmy-nominated actress.  The artist, Steve Leialoha, was a penciller and inker who had bounced around various Marvel and DC titles for the previous decade.  (Since then, Lee has written videogames, cartoons, audioplays, and a variety of acclaimed comic books and short stories; Leialoha has continued his career in comics and won an Eisner award for his work on Vertigo’s Fables.)  Together they created a series that’s full of real-world concerns, but doesn’t bog down in too much social relevance.  Lee’s light touch with the dialogue and Leialoha’s sparse and cartoony delineation combine to move the plot along at a healthy clip: guitars squeal, drums roll, attractions rise and fall, aspirations build.  The conclusion is nicely open-ended, leaving the kids on the eve of their first real gig.

And for all the working-class melodrama, it’s a really entertaining read.  The text is minimal, the art evocative, the story compelling; occasionally sublime, largely ridiculous, totally rock and roll.

Steeltown Rockers was published by Marvel Comics in 1990.  The six issues have not been reprinted or collected, but are readily available for cover price (or less) at comic shops and on eBay.

All articles in the Pop Music Comics series can be found here.

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