Elise Dietrich's Kill Your Idols, Part 1

Many of Elise Dietrich's autobiographical comics have been in the form of travelogues, but Kill Your Idols follows a different journey: one into the musical idols of her past. This is mostly about Dietrich as a teenager, "a mostly unformed mass of anxiety and passion." Music and art can often provide both an outlet and a template for teens, as well as a parasocial relationship that can inform their path and decisions. 

Unsurprisingly, Dietrich details that she first started becoming a fan of alternative rock in the late 80s and 90s, as an older boyfriend shared a lot of different bands with her. While the boyfriend didn't last (although the regrets did), the musical obsession did. For Dietrich, it centered around Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. With the ostentatious Farrell, it was the kind of devoted desire given to a magnetic cult leader. With the cool and reserved Gordon, it was the urgent desire of having a role model. Dietrich points out that their identities became fantasies that she wove in her own head, especially when any significant investigation into Farrell's life and aesthetic revealed a great deal of pretentiousness--and not even original pretentiousness. Gordon at least gave Dietrich a creative direction as a musician and an artist. 

Dietrich explores whole-cloth adaptation of another artist's aesthetic and perspective as a way of cycling through influences in order to find one's own voice. The next part of the story will include Dietrich's present-day evaluation of her idols. In this issue Dietrich uses a mostly open-page layout to her advantage, which allowed her to adapt the imagery and album art of her favorites. It's a quick and easy way to show how they influenced her own aesthetics. Dietrich does her best to express not just what each artist meant to her, but why their songs and visual presentation were so important. There were two essential problems here, however. The first is that the comic doesn't convey much in terms of why the sonic qualities of the music was compelling. It's a difficult ask for any comic, but one that is predicated on music falls flat without it. The second problem is that Dietrich's teenage self is barely a character. This is partly by design, as she presents her teenage self as inchoate, but the result feels more like an extended book report more than a narrative. Hopefully, the second part will help connect the dots with a more pointed critique and deeper self-reflection.