Benjamin Frisch strips the saccharine from the Sunday Funnies page in his new graphic novel, The Fun Family. A bitingly dark and oft hilarious portrait of such domestic icons as Family Circus and… Family Circus, Frisch’s comic gets meta in the travails of a cartoonist whose panels are far more ideal than the cracks forming around his own personal life.
When tasked with setting up a playlist to this dysfunctional bombshell, Frisch vouched for tunes full of dissonance. Ranging from the pastoral mellow of Boards of Canada to the subversive nightmare fuel of Burial, any major chords soon ebb into pitches far less settling, mirroring his own characters’ trajectories. The Fun Family releases this week from publisher Top Shelf Productions.
Benjamin Frisch on the Music Behind Fun Family
Cartooning is extremely time-intensive, but a perk of the job is that it leaves your ears free. I listen to a lot of music while working, so when I was invited to make a playlist I thought I’d make one that has some thematic resonance to my work, and specifically to my book, The Fun Family. The Fun Family is a story about a perfect cartoon family that finds itself on the precipice of a changing world, fracturing its ideas of family and self. I love music where there is some dissonance between the form and the content of the song, so I chose some of my favorite pieces following that idea.
The Playlist
“From One Source All Things Depend,” Boards of Canada
I feel obligated to start with Boards of Canada as their music is The Fun Family: woozy nostalgia for a past that never existed. Feel free to replace this list with their albums Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi, and have fun.
“All Those Weird Things,” Lone
I imagine this is what it’s like to be trapped inside a kaleidoscope. It’s a lot of fun until you realize how claustrophobic it is. It’s Boards of Canada for the dancefloor, but even stranger.
“CANDY CANDY,” Kyary Pamyu Pamyu
One fun aspect of not speaking Japanese is getting to imagine what J-pop songs are actually about. I’m almost certainly reaching, but I sense an undercurrent of sadness in “CANDY CANDY.” Underneath all the gloss there’s something that suggests that there might be more to life than “candy love.”