Mindless news: so that’s what you’ve been up to…
June 22nd, 2008
Check this out. One of the greatest icons in the Mindless Hall of Fame and Mirrors writing a teeny-Beebies cartoon, with interactive online games and super-psychic timetraveller vampire detectives in a flooded future London.
It’s called Meta4orce, and you can watch the whole lot here (possibly. I gather some geographical limitations may apply to BBC stuff.) The intro graphics and that are nice, but the animation’s kind of flat and cheap, not going much beyond stand-blink-talk. However, the inevitable themes are all present and correct: gorgeous gamine adolescents unsure of their bizarrely sprouting new abilities and the wrenching existential crises wrought thereby. Violent introspection and doomed identities sure to follow, as well as some witty wordplay, a few crushing put-downs, and a lovely, tragic-romantic sensibility.
In case you are truly mindless and that didn’t give it away – it’s written by Peter Motherfuckingilligan.
6 Responses to “Mindless news: so that’s what you’ve been up to…”
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June 23rd, 2008 at 10:32 am
Milligan is frustrating me recently, in that he’s churning out crap. The ham-handedness of the “Kid Amazo” storyline left a gaping black hole in my soul, where a wellspring of delight should have been. Milligan by the numbers, indeed. And the less said about the moribund “Programme” thing the better.
And yet I buy his stuff religiously, for the gleamings of brilliance dimly reflected therein: the “twist” ending of KA, some of the ghoulish critters of the P.
The guy needs to get his creative juices flowing pronto. The world can use a juicy Milligan.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:50 am
I forgot he was still doing The Programme at all, to be honest. I couldn’t get with that past the first issue – it’s a ‘get the trade from the library’ comic if ever there was one. Kid Amazo was better for being ostensibly fun and bright, but still lacked the wit and vim that you would have once expected. Really it felt like the gaudiest distillation yet of his time-honoured Nietzsche schtick, which he probably wrote with one eye open.
Difficult to know where Milligan could go to get his mojo back – I think TV might be good ground for him. TV Sci/Fantasy is still a bit primitive, for all the good work Who, BG and Lost have done in recent years. A TV take on something like Human Target for instance (the first fifteen issues or so of which was the last pure Milligan work, as far as I remember), heavy on the identity issues and paranoia, could work very well. This Meta4orce thing (I hate typing that) could definitely be a step in this kind of direction, so I’m glad it’s out there.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:55 am
The Human Target would work very well indeed. Hear me US TV networks!
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
<a href=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mw3WEtJjw1AI thought that was ringing a few bells.
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
well that went well
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mw3WEtJjw1A
September 6th, 2008 at 1:39 am
I just found this gamebook on eBay, an RPG I guess, from ’86 called Intergalactic Quest, author Peter Milligan; ‘s him innit? We all like to forget the Crossroads tenure too, eh? And there’s a couple films, I think, one with Ray Liotta?