Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready didn’t really plan to write a graphic novel based on his experiences and those of his friends as the grunge music scene washed over Seattle in the early 1990s.
But sometimes when you’re making an imaginary “lost” rock opera, that’s where you end up, McCready said Thursday, July 23, during a San Diego Comic-Con panel titled “Farewell to Seasons: Mike McCready’s Alternate History of Grunge.”
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“Right around COVID, when we were all kind of locked down, I started reflecting on life and my friends that had died, the Seattle music scene, and just kind of going, ‘Wow, these guys aren’t around anymore,’” McCready said of such friends and peers as Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, and Andrew Wood.
“And I have a new life now, a family that I love and a wife that I love,” he continued during the panel inside the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront hotel. “A different world now. And I was wondering what it would be like if those guys were still around, and wondering if it was all worth it.
“That was my question, and I wanted to answer that in an artistic sense. So I started off writing a rock opera about that, about the music at the time, and my friends that have passed.
“It was kind of a self-revelatory thing for me to go down this road,” McCready said. “And then I talked to Cameron Crowe right around that time and asked him for his advice on how to write a rock opera, and he gave me some great directions. So that’s prior to this whole great thing that happened.”
This whole thing started to evolved, McCready said, when he took “this great left turn” and connected with Z2 Comics, which has done other graphic novels by and about musicians and music. They reached out to writer Marc Sable and artist Sebastián Piriz, and now the rock opera was going to be a graphic novel, too.
“When Mike presented it to us, the opera script, I was like, ‘Oh (bleep) yeah, we can do something amazing,” said Rantz A. Hoseley, Z2’s editor in chief. Sable had already met McCready and talked about working together at Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, Hoseley said.
“Sebastián, especially in sketches that you put on socials, there’s this kinetic life in it,” Hoseley continued, looking down the panelist table to Piriz. “It’s just so fiery and alive, and then there’s so much personality with color and movement and exaggeration and everything.
“And I love that because of what we wanted to capture with the idea of how you depict visually how music makes you feel internally,” he continued. “Seeing those first pages coming out, I was just like, ‘Oh god, yeah, this is wonderful.’”
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Neither rock opera or book are direct histories of the Seattle scene that delivered bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden and more to rock stardom, McCready said. As a fan of Shakespearean plays such as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Joseph Campbell’s books on myth and religion, he wanted to go beyond the basic facts of “this is what Seattle was like,” he said.
“I wanted to gain an alternate universe in terms of the Seattle music scene and what [it was like] with me in the front-row seat of it,” McCready said. “I really wanted to have its ultimate universe with a mystical quality and mythical availability for people.”
So characters and band names are fictionalized, though fans with deep knowledge of the scene will spot Easter eggs in the words, art and music of the project.
“It was hard,” McCready said. “It was also fun to try to create something different and mystical and force myself to think outside the box.”