When Music Stops: Grief, Memory, and the Making of Disconnect

In Disconnect, debut author Magnus Merklin tells the story of two musicians reuniting after the death of their best friend and bandmate. Set in a remote summer house once filled with music and laughter, the book explores what happens when grief lingers, and creativity can’t fill the silence.

Drawing from his own experience with loss, Merklin captures the emotional dissonance between friends who grieve differently — one pushing forward, the other stuck in memory. As they try to finish a song left incomplete by the friend they lost, what unfolds is not catharsis, but confrontation.

“I didn’t want to make a book about grief in the usual way. I wanted to show how it quietly hangs around, how it doesn’t always scream — sometimes it just lingers.”

The graphic novel deals with emotional paralysis, guilt, and the unspoken tension that lives between people who once created in harmony. The narrative is quiet but charged, with moments of tenderness interrupted by resentment and silence. The studio becomes a pressure cooker for two people avoiding the thing they need to face: that their connection may have died along with the friend they lost.

Disconnect is a story about grief — not in its loudest moments, but in the long, aching quiet that follows.

Now available from Black Panel Press.

🎥 Watch the full interview with Magnus Merklin below.