There’s a long history of music using comics, and later graphic novels, as inspiration, and as I found out when I asked for suggestions on this subject last year, I got even more songs than I could ever have expected.

---

/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

---

---

That said, some of the suggestions turned out to perhaps be somewhat tenuous, but I did have a large number that I could have used. In the end, I tried to spread things a bit so that everything wasn’t from the same writers (I could likely have done an entire ten purely on the work of Stan Lee), and also at least one where a song ended up inspiring the name of a character.

Anyway: thanks to everyone who suggested songs, as this was a fun one to research and write. Hopefully I got none of the details wrong – please correct me if so…

---

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).

---

/Queen
/Flash
/Flash Gordon OST

---

Across the seventies, Queen proudly proclaimed on their albums that they used no synthesisers: something that changed as they headed into the eighties, and they used them extensively on the mostly instrumental soundtrack to the film Flash Gordon, a film whose high camp and sly humour seemed to suit Queen very well. The film itself – a moderate success upon release, but later became a cult classic – was an adaptation of the comic strip that began in 1934 to compete with Buck Rogers, and amazingly continues today with various revisions…

---

/Gorillaz
/Clint Eastwood
/Gorillaz

---

Gorillaz were a sensation when they first appeared – being basically a virtual band in cartoon form. Sure, it had been done before (The Archies, for a start), but this felt very different. Especially as Gorillaz were formed in 1998 by Damon Albarn of Blur, and Jamie Hewlett, the latter best known for the co-creation of Tank Girl. Bearing in mind Albarn’s primary role in Britpop, Gorillaz couldn’t sound more different: initially a chaotic hip-hop collective, and the marvellous single Clint Eastwood even sees laconic rapper Del the Funky Homosapien join Damon Albarn, and it sounds all the better for it.

---

/Little Simz
/Venom
/GREY Area

---

There’s been a lot the Marvel-originating Spiderman franchise in cinema over the past 25 years or so, with three separate series of Spiderman films (the latest set with Tom Holland and Zendaya cleaning up at the Box Office and becoming a key part of the wider MCU), but alongside those there have also been a series of films featuring the alien symbiote Venom, starting with the surprisingly fun 2018 film starring Tom Hardy.

Little Simz released a striking track for this, with minimal backing and much of the rhythm determined by Little Simz’ fast-paced, chaotic rapping style. The song appears to be from the point of view of them, fighting with Venom as an unwanted host, who may be struggling with a woman as their victim…

---

/MF DOOM
/DOOMSday
/Operation: DOOMSday

---

The late MF Doom was a fascinating rapper, who’d retreated into anonymity by creating a persona based upon the Marvel villain Doctor Doom, after an initial early career in a rap collective that ended when his younger brother died in an accident. From unimaginable tragedy, MF DOOM was born (and there are perhaps parallels to Doctor Doom’s origin story), and the insanely detailed Operation: Doomsday was the debut for MF DOOM. The title track takes many listens to take in the complex, detailed rhymes fully, which are never obscured by the mellowed-out jazzy backing track.

Doctor Doom, of course, is one of the iconic villains of the Marvel universe, and makes his debut in the MCU film series next month, in Avengers: Doomsday…

---

/Monster Magnet
/Negasonic Teenage Warhead
/Dopes to Infinity

---

A rare case of a character being inspired by a song, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Marvel superheroine was inspired by the mighty Monster Magnet’s breakthrough single from 1995. The song was Dave Wyndorf’s way of poking fun at the miserable rock stars of the grunge and alt-rock era, and this song was the point where most of us realised that Wyndorf really did want to become a rock star, and somehow his stoner rock band found surprisingly wide appeal for a while – mostly thanks to bangers like this and Space Lord. Everything about this song screams MTV-friendly – the planet-sized riffs and chorus, the faintly ridiculous video – but it works, and it should be noted that Wyndorf was clearly something of a Marvel nerd, as another song on this album has the title Ego, the Living Planet…

The character Negasonic Teenage Warhead, of course, became more widely known beyond comic circles thanks to being a major character in the wildly successful – and enormous fun – Deadpool and subsequent films…

---

/Suicide
/Ghost Rider
/Suicide

---

There’s number of Marvel characters known as Ghost Rider, but the version of Ghost Rider used here is Johnny Blaze: and was apparently inspired by Alan Vega’s lifelong love of the character. Like most classic Suicide songs, it is stark minimal synths and a vocal, and that’s about it. The character is an interesting one, a motorcycle stuntman who sells his soul to “Satan” (ok, Mephisto) to save the life of a family member, but finds other changes he must endure as a result of the deal he made…

Coincidentally, there’s also a take on The Crow soundtrack – but a very different take by the Rollins Band. Actually, speaking of The Crow…

---

/The Cure
/The Hanging Garden
/Pornography

---

James O’Barr’s legendary gothic, supernatural comic book series became infamous when it was adapted into a pitch-dark fantasy film whose star, Brandon Lee, died during the making of the film. And while The Cure created the brooding epic Burn for the film, in the original comic – and originally intended for the film – was the dramatic song The Hanging Garden. The latter track is a study in nervous energy, the dense mass of drums and basslines providing an overwhelming sonic experience, and I’ve long wondered how the feel of the film might have changed with this track featuring instead of Burn. It certainly would have changed the rooftop sequence…

---

/Spin Doctors
/Jimmy Olsen’s Blues
/Pocket Full of Kryptonite

---

A rare look at a side-character, the young photojournalist at the Daily Planet who looks up to Lois Lane and, of course, Clark Kent. This is also a rare featuring of the sometimes-maligned Spin Doctors in this series (it isn’t the first, though), and listening back to this for the first time in some years, Jimmy Olsen’s Blues has a similar structure and feel to Two Princes, the mega-hit that the band will forever be remembered for.

Poor old Jimmy Olsen, in this song, anyway, imagines him as a young man consumed by jealousy, his love for Lois Lane loud and clear but without any chance of anything happening: after all, how can you compete with an all-but immortal being who can fly and save the world? Maybe if he had a pocket full of Kryptonite…

---

/Anthrax
/I Am The Law
/Among The Living

---

Remarkably the second song to reference Judge Dredd with the same title (The Human League did the first in 1981), and I did think long and hard over which song I should include. What decided it? Somehow, I’ve never, ever featured Anthrax, so clearly that needed to change. And I Am The Law is a banger (it is possible to not bang your head to that mighty outro as soon as you hear it?). It’s Anthrax doing what they do best – galloping rhythms, Joey’s powerhouse of a voice, gang backing vocals and those riffs. Here, Joey’s vocals take in a bunch of Dredd references, giving an origin story and references to much of his earlier storylines in 2000AD.

One more time: “Because in Mega-City… I AM THE LAW“.

---

/Katscan
/Be Pure. Be Vigilant… Behave!
/Feral Bios

---

One of the strangest of the British Industrial bands this century was Katscan, whose take on the genre was distinctly strange and unsettling, with a very different arsenal of electronic sounds and samples to any of their peers and a confrontational style that pretty much set them up as the outliers – or villains, if you will – from the outset. The album Feral Bios remains a fantastic album, too.

The chaotic, rapid tempo switches and pummelling beats of Be Pure. Be Vigilant… Behave! is one of the highlights of the album, and lifts the striking title from 2000AD, as it was the catchphrase of the villain Torquemada (who appeared in the series Nemesis The Worlock). Katscan have been far from the only artist to use this phrase, and most notably the Manics also used the same phrase for their 2019 film about the band.