Mindless Ones

Writer/artist, Suzanne (2022), I’m A Luddite (And So Can You!) (2023), Introduction to Charts (with Chrissy Williams, 2024). His Grave Offerings newsletter is gorgeously illustrated and sharply written; you might go so far as to say it’s ELITE.

What can you tell us about the similarities between comics and poetry?

There’s a quote in Alan Moore’s Writing For Comics where he discusses comics that try to mimic film techniques that has always stayed with me:

“In the final analysis you will be left with a film that has neither movement nor a soundtrack […] Rather than seizing upon the superficial similarities between comics and films or comics and books in the hope that some of the respectability of those media will rub off upon us, wouldn’t it be more constructive to focus our attention upon those ideas where comics are special and unique?”

Too many people, I think, see comics as storyboards for film projects or view the page as a series of shots rather than a collection of panels. It’s always struck me that we were looking to the wrong medium for inspiration. Comics, for me, have always been much closer to poetry. And thinking of them that way allows a creator to do so much more lateral and abstract thinking about how to approach a page’s layout and composition. You stop thinking in terms of shots and think more holistically about the page itself. That’s not to say I don’t look to film for inspiration – I’m always reading about what cinematographers have to say about depth of field, shot compositions, lighting and colour. But we should, as comics creators, be looking to every medium to help us understand what our own does so well.

Chrissy Williams and I co-edited a book about poetry comics and came up with a list of statements that could be true of poetry and comics:

• economy of line is paramount
• each panel and page must be carefully constructed
• consider how much will fit on the page
• put everything in its right place
• choose whether to prioritise ideas or form
• juxtaposition is an important tool
• composition is not linear, but a whole system of architecture
• the reading process is one of interpretation rather than perception
• the reader is inextricable from the art
• all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order
• what happens off the page is as important as what happens on it
• the impossible can be made possible

What can you tell us about the differences between comics and poetry? 

Ultimately, I think it comes back to that Moore quote about trying to focus on what makes comics special and unique. You can draw parallels to and inspiration from other mediums, but as a comics artist, I think it’s also worth coming back to asking yourself: “Why should I communicate this idea/story/feeling in the comics medium instead of all the others?” Sometimes the answer to that question can be as simple as: “Because I know how to make comics.” But it’s worth thinking about all the same. Comics can do things that other mediums can’t and can’t do things other mediums can – we have to find ways to play into their strengths.

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Writer/artist/certified hunk. Collaborator with Iain Laurie on small press comics with unpleasant titles (Crawl Hole, Roachwell, acht, Metrodome’s not too grotty). Purveyor of occult wisdom (Billy Quest, The Ultimate Ross Geller Fanzine). Script droid on Ales of the Unexpected.

How did you and Mark Brady come to do a monthly strip for Ferment magazine?

Mark and I had finished our first bit of collaboration – tactile medieval battlefield workplace silliness in Medieval Times – and were considering a few things for our next project. I’d been getting Beer52 boxes for a few months and noticed the comic they had going in Ferment had dropped out the magazine. I thought we could have a lot of fun with it and I do like the challenge of a short gag strip, so we worked up some strips for a speculative pop at it. Unexpectedly enough, we were successful!

Do you guys get much feedback on the strip from readers?

Not a thing! It’s kind of crazy to think that given the membership of Beer52 and the number of people receiving Ferment magazine we must have somewhere between one and two hundred thousand people at least giving the strip a cursory glance once a month. Far, far more than has read any of our other small press work. But no, not a word either way. It’s cool though, we are stoic in the face of ambivalence.

Are there any particular strips that are favourites or felt like some sort of breakthrough?

I wouldn’t say breakthrough, as the groove and working pattern we found from the get go has served us really well and we haven’t had to modify it. But I have loads of favourite strips, and what’s fun is to link back to older strips and characters and expand the secret internal mythology of Ales that only Mark and I care about. To pick a favourite off the top of my head, maybe the Pilsner Pickelhuabe one as it’s a bit of classic Ales escalation and exactly the kind of thing Mark does an outstanding job on.

Any chance we’ll see a collected edition of these strips in the future? 

I’m pulling that together, albeit in a stop-start manner for what seems like forever!

Do you and Mark have any other projects on the go, together or separately?

If I get an Ales collection complete in some shape or form it would be lovely to go back to Trapped!, our dungeon crawling fantasy comic.

Finally, if you had to be any X-Men character who would it be and why is it Gambit?

Covid brought about significant changes to th’ way we live, and some of them have been difficult for ol’ Remy LeBeau. Jus’ one example is the ubiquity of de contactless payment. One day Gambit is taking an X-Jet through McDonalds drive through (de McRib is back). Garçon leans out wit’ the payment machine an’ the Cajun reaches for th’ Mastercard. But den de muscle memory kicks in – first we charge de card MWAAAAP – an’ den we flicks it through the window. Bang. Limbs an’ blood an’ broken glass… that boy is dead. Maybe others. Next ting we know, de Cajun is on th’ run an’ de Professor is screaming in his head “GAMBIT, RETURN TO DE MANSION! REMY, YOU HAV’ TO FACE DE JUSTICE!”. An’ no McRib. So what I’m sayin’ homme, is dat Gambit is tryin’ to be a better man in a complex an’ ever-changing world.

A new girl steps into the starlight. A girl who is a radio journalist. A girl called Brenda – no, wait – Jennifer! DANGER ON THE AIR promises DJs and “Pop” stars although there’s an awful lot of talking to local council officials here. Nevertheless, the decisions God (Dan) gives Jennifer (Fraser) are genuinely difficult and the writing is compelling. Could Danger On The Air be the greatest Starlight Adventure yet? Listen on, Fellow Traveler…

Dan and Fraser’s Starlight Adventures can be supported on our Patreon where (at time of posting) you can listen forward to Episode 26 and hear two episodes of us tackling a pretty bad Gladiators game book.

I’VE MADE A MOUNTAIN FROM A LOVEBITE AGAIN

The Beast Must Die, Lord Nuneaton Savage and Gary Lactus gleefully jump back into Batman and the Outsiders #8 on behest of The Drifting Reviewniverse.

There’s mysterious adverts, there’s adverts that pull the brave reviewmonauts down plastic rabbit holes and there’s the rest of the comic too! This masterfully told story breaks heads in all directions! The impressive! The absurd! The amusing! The Traumatic!

THANK YOU, OH BEAUTIFUL REVIEWNIVERSE!

The next episode of SILENCE! is already on our Patreon alongside around three-hundred exclusive episodes.

Find Lord Nuneaton Savage on Instagram and on the Savage Beast Substack

Enjoy The Beast Must Die on his website

Gary Lactus also exists

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Guitar/bass/effects/vocals: Guisers, Even Sisters, Blue Kanues… fukken hunners of bands, honestly (see below). You can enjoy Isobel’s patter here, and support her on the Vivarium Sounds Patreon or by trading cash for local sonics on Bandcamp. 

What are the best sounds you’ve made?

The stuff I’m doing in my band Blue Kanues each time we play together. No matter what song I bring to practice, the three of them Hannah, Laura and Mattie all come up with the most beautiful parts. We are going to record an album and will be playing a Glasgow show at the end of June (UPDATE: June 27th at Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, gig fans! – Ed).

What are the best sounds you’ve heard?

The best sounds I have ever heard was deep in Hangasjarvi when I lay down in the what seemed to be quiet forest and then after a few moments of silence there was sound coming at me from every direction.

What can you tell us about East Kilbride? 

Coming from Motherwell, East Kilbride seemed quite fancy when i would visit my uncle as a kid and when I was a bit older I played in bands there with my cousin and his pals and smoked a lot of hash with old punks and hippies and bams and listened to all the music they would play me, a lot of which was terrible but among the dross was stuff that really encouraged me to play more music

What can you say about Glasgow?

Glasgow is where I live just now. I like walking up to the flagpole in Queens Park and try and get up there to see the nick of the central belt every day. The buses are extortionate.

You’ve got a track called ‘Target: 2006‘. Which Transformers are best and why?

Target 2006 was the first big story in the UK comics after Dinobot Hunt for me. I remember reading it all before the movie came out so knew who Galvatron was in advance. My favorite Transformer is probably Ratchet. I had the wee toy of him and thought he looked really cool and then saw that the comic and cartoon representation of him was quite different to the toy. I really liked him sneaking about the Ark and recovering the Dinobots and then later the horror of him being merged with Megatron. Great cunt.

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a few things. The Blue Kanues album is the main focus but I also play bass in a band called Life with Laura who plays guitar in the Kanues. I just recorded a black metal record with Laura and it will be getting mastered and mixed by Robert Dallas Gray and we are going to look at having it come out as a physical thing. The band is called Spring and the record’s name is Forth.

I walk around with a microphone and make noises for Even Sisters with Robert. I do a band with my bf called The Loaning where we have been filling up cassettes with jams and field recordings all made on a portable wee fisher price cassette recorder. I have a country band called OPULENCE who plan to play one gig and record an album.

I’m also working away on a lot of songs I have been recording on my phone and then overdubbing on a 4 track and there are close to 30 songs on it. I keep playing guitar and bass, either or both every day.

From secret staging grounds on two of Cybertron’s moons, the valiant MINDLESS ONES prepare to draft some short comics reviews…

Metamorpho: The Element Man #5 – Steve Lieber (art), Al Ewing (script), Lee Loughridge (colours), Ferran Delgago (letters)

Issue after issue, Ewing and Lieber find new ways to turn the language of groovy “educational” comics into an invitation to play. My favourite individual example of this so far is in issue #3, a two page spread drawn like a maze puzzle for kids/timefuct beatniks, with inserts showing our heroes blundering through a series of traditional perils.

Without this fundamental conceit, and its perfect extension of “a solid chromium foot… one of the hardest substances in the human body” into a bespoke absurdist aesthetic, some of this comic’s barbs against “A.I.” would have felt like mere prompts for applause. As it is, they’re of a piece with the Mad Mod’s monologues, or this issue’s grand duel between solar avatars – carefully arranged incongruities set in opposition to the banal ones our culture is producing en masse.

Resistance is all about finding the space in between the circuits, you see. Easier for Element Woman and Andor than you or me, but don’t let that stop you trying, Metamaniacs!

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Annual 2025 – Dan McDaid (art), Christopher Cantwell (script), Mark Waid (story), John Kalisz (colours), Steve Wands (letters), Dan Mora (cover)

Let me pay this comic one of the highest compliments I know: having read it, I don’t need to read any of the other issues in this series. This despite the issue in question being part 3 of a 6 part crossover between this comic and Justice League Unlimited. Writing an entertaining single issue under these conditions is a distinct formal challenge, and Cantwell and Waid have a lot of fun with it here, loading up a villainous plan with a twist that is both skilfully foreshadowed and compelling in its own right.

Artist and friend of the blog Dan McDaid has been doing some great work over at DC comics lately, finishing up extended runs on Kneel Before Zod (with Joe Casey) and Shazam! (with Josie Campbell). Zod provided plenty of opportunities for McDaid to flex his big boy drawing arm while depicting rugged action against a series of classic sci-fi landscapes. Shazam, meanwhile, showed that he could provide moments of formal play and true menace in an otherwise amiable fantasy.

This World’s Finest annual is all about the villains, though, and its chief appeal – beyond the old school comics writing craft mentioned above – is the amount of fun McDaid has drawing these goons. My favourite moment comes in this panel, where Bizarro, Cheetah, Lex and the Joker contemplate their own dark futures.

I don’t know which detail I’m most fond of here, Bizarro looking like he am no shat his pants, Lex and Cheetah’s duelling eyebrows, or the Joker’s stream of consciousness slowing to a trickle as he doubts his life choices and the company he keeps.

The annual is full of wee bits like this. Plastic Man swamping the villains and the page itself; a fun collision between Superman and Bizarro; some impeccable disdain from Lex. The art of providing familiar pleasures is easy to underrate until you realise how seldom it’s done well.

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Issue six of our weekly newsletter went out early this morning, ft: Andor; The Blob; The Black Casebook; Andrew & Steven; Suede; PAAI; and Ray Vaughn.

This edition was put together by The Beast Must Die, Bobsy, Botswana Beast, Dan Cox, Gary Lactus, Illogical Volume and Spare 5. Previous issues have also featured work by Ad, Andrew Hickey and Paul Jon Milne. As Tegan O’Neil said, “Y’all need to pay attention whenever the Mindless Ones speak…“

ITEM

Tell just one person that you liked our newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

Best Batpod or bestest Batpod? You can support Walt on Patreon, or by getting your own rubber Batsuit made up and joining him as he patrols the city at night. 

You bring a lot of different theoretical approaches to comics in your show. Can you remember the first comic book that got your brain fizzing like that?

I first got into comics when I was in middle school thanks to an online friend with an FTP, so like any teenaged boy in the Aughts I gravitated toward comics with “Hell” in the name. It would be years before I understood the nuances of Mignola’s inking or why the Brits hated Maggie Thatcher so much, but the blend of folklore, pulp, history, and the occult in both Hellboy and Hellblazer instantly enchanted me.

(I’ll never forget reading the Newcastle issue of Hellblazer around the same time that I was first assigned Hamlet in school, seeing the demon say “Get thee to a nunnery,” and realizing that there was no inherent divide between fine literature and disreputable comic books.)

Was The Black Casebook always conceived of as a podcast?

Yep! It was inspired directly by my college buddy Nat Yonce’s show Collective Action Comics and Connor Goldsmith’s X-Men podcast CEREBRO, both of which I was listening to obsessively in 2021. Quietly fuming whenever Nat (playfully) slandered Batman had already given me the idea to do my own Batman podcast to correct the record, and when Nat reached out to have me do a guest episode about the politics of Batman—including fronting me the cash to buy a decent mic—my path was set. I finished recording my first episode directly after that interview. Blame him!

You’ve crossed over with Collective Action Comics, but do you feel part of much of a scene with other people talking about the form? 

I do, thankfully. Nat immediately welcomed me into his circle of lefty comics fans; Cole, Stu, and Nicole of the Marvelous! Or: The Death of Cinema podcast welcomed me into their MCU opposition movement; and more established writers like you Mindless Ones and Travis Hedge Coke welcomed me into the ranks of comics critics who like to do more than summarize new issues. I don’t know if it constitutes a scene, exactly, but I’ve been fortunate to join the somehow-not-insignificant quorum of Marxist comics fans on the internet. (Deniz Camp is actually a tulpa we summoned into existence a few years back—that was a fun afternoon.)

I’d like to get to know more folks in the industry itself, but I also don’t want to pull any punches for the sake of preserving connections or advancing my own career, such as it is. I never want to be in a situation where I have to tiptoe around, say, Tom King’s feelings in order to maintain access to writers and artists I admire.

Top 5 Bat artists? 

(Honorable mentions: Matt Wagner, Marshall Rogers, Paul Pope, Frank Miller)

5. Norm Breyfogle

4. Greg Capullo

3. Tim Sale

2. Darwyn Cooke

1. David Mazzucchelli

Top 5 Bat writers?

(Honorable mentions: Steve Englehart, Archie Goodwin, Alan Grant, Paul Dini) 

5. Peter Milligan

4. Scott Snyder

3. Darwyn Cooke

2. Frank Miller

1. Grant Morrison

What’s next for The Black Casebook?

More episodes, God willing. 2024 was my Rick Wakeman iridescent cape era of unsustainably long, self-indulgent episodes, so I’ve been trying to figure out ways to get the show back down to a manageable length (and more satisfying release schedule). I’ve learned by now not to promise too much, but I do hope to incorporate more interviews and guest episodes so as not to deprive my beloved listeners. I’m also working on some creative projects where I can, but those are, to quote my friend Sid Hudgens, off the record, on the QT, and *very* hush-hush.

Finally, if you had to fight any Batman villain who would it be?

The Riddler. I’m not sure I could take him, but I’d love the opportunity to find out.

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A HARE CALLED LUCIFER!

The Drifting Reviewniverse gifts The Beast Must Die, Lord Nuneaton Savage and a rather muffled Gary Lactus the hands down, straight up, no word of a lie best comic so far in this chance-led odyssey, Batman and the Outsiders #8. The fearless reviewmonauts pour over every page until they run out of time. Part 2 is already on our Patreon.

Find Lord Nuneaton Savage on Instagram and on the Savage Beast Substack

Enjoy The Beast Must Die on his website

Gary Lactus also exists

Click more for gallery

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