Blur’s newly minted comeback album, The Magic Whip, is arguably the Britpop outfit’s most cohesive piece of work yet, exploring the concerns and anxieties -- as well as the hope -- of living in bustling, overcrowded metropolitan landscapes, specifically the city that inspired it all: Hong Kong. Now, the band will release a comic book that also delves into those themes.

Blur enlisted the artist KongKee -- one half of the Hong Kong-based design team Penguin Lab -- to create a comic book inspired by The Magic Whip. Travel to Hong Kong With Blur will be available for purchase on June 12. The comic book will place the English four-piece -- Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree -- in a fictional, futuristic version of Hong Kong.

In an interview (watch above) -- which depicts panels from the forthcoming comic book -- KongKee details the making of Travel to Hong Kong With Blur, his connection with the city in which he grew up during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and how The Magic Whip helped drive his creative process.

“Although I didn’t see Hong Kong as a subject instantly, yet I came to realize that it’s almost inevitable for an author to be influenced by the place he [or] she grew up in,” KongKee says. “One can always see such traces in his [or] her work. This realization later becomes a question that I still ask myself: What is Hong Kong exactly?"

KongKee has since posed those questions through his own work, which attracted the attention of Blur, who then asked the artist to create a comic book coinciding with their latest album. Though he never met Blur, KongKee said listening to The Magic Whip helped inform Travel to Hong Kong.

“The album surprises me even more when I see these boys from a foreign land can be so in depth about these topics,” he says, “like the lost people of the city, the path of a civilization, even how humanity is going in general and can still resonate with us.”

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