On tonight’s edition of Friday Night Drawing Time (a thing I do on my main blog, basically I draw every Friday night to help myself improve at drawing), I decided to draw my own renditions of the characters from Coldplay’s album Mylo Xyloto. Now, if you’re at all familiar with that album and the tie-in comics associated with it, you might be thinking “wait, but Mylo Xyloto is a single character, right? And he isn’t human?” Well, the story is this… Mylo Xyloto came out in 2011, it painted such vivid, specific images in my head, and I created an entire elaborate story based on it, which I imagined was set in our world and had to do with a bunch of homeless teenage punks fighting against a rival gang. Imagine my surprise when the comic book adaptation, which came out in 2012, revealed that the story took place on another planet (which is why I assume Mylo Xyloto isn’t human, but maybe he is, idk- I haven’t actually read the comics), and that the title of the album refers to a single character and not two characters. (To be fair, when the album initially came out, some members of Coldplay said in interviews that it was a love story between a person named Mylo and a person named Xyloto… although, I even got that wrong, because apparently Mylo was supposed to be the boy and Xyloto the girl.) Regardless of what the “official” story is, I still prefer my interpretation. (I also couldn’t change it for the sake of my story, Concept Album Extravaganza/Strange Fascination, and if I had tried to cut the Mylo Xyloto storyline from Strange Fascination when I returned to rework it in 2022, I would have run into a LOT of problems later on in the narrative. But we’ll get to that when we get to that.)
Anyway! So this is Mylo & Xyloto. Mylo is 17 years old, the daughter of a government worker who lives in Washington, D.C., who dreams of serving her community as an educator or counselor until the soon-to-come End of the World cuts her education short and forces her father out of his job. As tensions brew between her parents at home and her job at McDonald’s runs her ragged, Mylo begins to dream of running away from home… until she actually does it. Xyloto, meanwhile, is 18 years old and has been a runaway from home since he was 13. His parents died in an accident when he was five years old, and until he was 13, his aunt’s family raised him. After enduring abuse from them for years, Xyloto finally escaped and soon thereafter met another teenage runaway, Michael, to whom he decided to stick. Together, Michael and Xyloto, along with another runaway they eventually came across, Jacari, decided to form their own community and live apart from civilization. They decided to call themselves the Sparks.
Both Mylo and Xyloto are passionate about art- Xyloto as a graffiti artist and Mylo as an appreciator. They both experience synesthesia (particularly, the kind where certain words are associated with certain colors), and they both have a disregard and mistrust in authority, although Mylo isn’t quite as rebellious as Xyloto is. As a couple, they make a great pair… at least until a terrible incident occurs to drive Mylo away from the Sparks. Will they eventually get back together? You’ll have to read my story to find out.
