Pete Townshend’s Life House

The Who guitarist’s long-gestating script “Lifehouse,” which was the basis for the 1971 album Who’s Next, receives a fittingly over-the-top graphic novel treatment. Though knocked into dramatic form by James Harvey (the Doom Patrol series) and David Hine (the Spider-Man Noir series), it’s clear why the screenplay was never produced as a film. A rambling and naive dystopian rock opera about the power of music, it prefigures the sinister silliness of sci-fi music fantasias like David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and Lou Reed’s Rock & Rule—as well as later films like The Matrix and V for Vendetta. Drawn by Max Prentis with a bright pop art precision, the story is set in 2177, 200 years after Britain’s first dictator, Jumbo One, banned pop music. Jumbo Seven (styled like the goddess Britannia after a Camden Street shopping spree) presides over a population in cryogenic sleep whose spacesuits protect them from the poisoned landscape and pipe in soothing dreams. Of course, there’s a rebel vanguard conspiring to overthrow the fascists with an ironic weapon: the primal sound of rock and roll. In one witty scene, the Who themselves play “Join Together” after being thawed. Townshend completists and other fans of ’70s rock will dig this oddball outing. (Dec.)