SILENCE! #49
February 5th, 2013
I’M PICKING OUT A THERMOS FOR YOU!
Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday dear SILENCE!, Happy birthday to us.
Yes, that is correct fleshy ones. It is one year since your life was free of SILENCE! The world’s 243rd most favourite comics podcast* is one year old today. Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 of course does not have a birthday as he merely came into sentience, in one of the data-spore RAM-wombs, sluicing in the nano-placenta, along with the other 980,457,002 Disembodied Narratorbots (X Class). All this cake and cards business as alien as the concepts of love, giving and Michael Bolton.
*unconfirmed
But nonetheless Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will turn on his celebrato-function, and pretend to merry it the f*ck up with those two self-important featherweights of the internet opinionsphere, Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die.
<ITEM> In this special anniversary edition there are special guest appearances from comics celebrities like Al Ewing, Frank Miller, James Stokoe, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Brandon Graham, Dan Didio, Little Kieron Gillen, Geoff Johns and none other than Stan Lee!
<ITEM> The SILENCE! News features a live satellite link up with Danny Beastman and Gary Lactenberg, live from the capital city of America, New York
<ITEM> The Sponsorship Boys cover Hawkeye, Behind Watchmen: Dollar Bill, Flash, Batman Inc, Mind MGMT, Journey Into Mystery, Superior Spiderman, Hickman’s Avengers, Silver Surfer: Parable, and the very sensual and manly X-Treme XXXMen.
<ITEM> The Beast talks up design godhead Saul Bass, and Phase IV in notcomics, while Lactus sheds a teenage mope for Hugo Tate.
<ITEM> SO much more, including a discussion of the Green Lantern Emotional Colour Paint Range, Golden Girls, Happy Days, Birthday Suits, Poltergeists and the longest goodbye in this podcasts shonky career…
So Annie, get your gun, the rest of you get your listening devices, and Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will get all of your private data and sell it to the Martians, and then we’ll all have a NICE BIG LISTEN TO SILENCE!
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
February 5th, 2013 at 12:11 pm
PHASE IV! I have a custom soundtrack lurking around here somewhere…
Trailer: well haunto.
February 5th, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Didn’t we talk about PHASE IV at the YA launch, Beast?
February 5th, 2013 at 4:27 pm
Dazzler on Dazzler violence is the mark of a sickened society. Oh, comics.
February 5th, 2013 at 4:56 pm
Kieron – very possibly. By then tje vapours had taken over…
February 5th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
Oi Gary Lactus, I was in Brighton yesterday for the first time in a while and realised you’ve been completely underselling Dave’s Comics (and the equally wonderful neighbouring Dave’s Books).
Why (oh why) have you been hiding their light under a bushel so much and utterly neglecting to mention all the really cheap Magic cards they have in that back room? I grabbed these bargains for my Magic obsessed nephew who’s now very very happy…
February 5th, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Tam, man, I’m really sorry about that. Really sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I feel just so awful about that. I’ll try and do something about that in future advertising sections.
Sorry.
February 5th, 2013 at 11:51 pm
I fell asleep with Petit Guillen’s air-vent Mabel’s voice whiss-whiss-whissing in my ear, and now I have a custardy beard.
I also typed a birthday greet-o in the scuff-shoe squeak of Claire “Shirley Manson was a Terminator” Grogan, but WordPress ate it, along with the caked I baked.
(I didn’t bake a cake)
//\Oo/\\
February 6th, 2013 at 9:37 am
I don’t like to criticise, but can you PLEASE tell Danny Beastman and Gary Lactenberg to stop trying to do their ‘comedy English accents’ when they’re talking about the UK?
I know they think they’re being funny, but someone needs to tell them their feeble attempts at British accents sound even worse than Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins
February 6th, 2013 at 10:31 am
I agree but it’s just the price we pay for those amazing scoops.
February 6th, 2013 at 11:32 am
MR LACTUS! Re your romantic passion for comics of the late 80s/early 90s: if you haven’t already, have a shufty at Suggested for Mature Readers, a blog wherein Tom Whitely (not this one looks back thoughtfully at material from around that era. (Eg, he’s recently been reassessing some of the material from Crisis, such as Straitgate and The New Adventures of Hitler)
And congrats on your anniversary: I’m not generally a big fan of the comedy song, but one of the highlights of Year One was your rhyming of ‘Vertigo banner’ with ‘fucking Zatanna’.
February 6th, 2013 at 12:43 pm
Beast already talked up suggested for mature readers on the pod. Good call though. It is good! And yes, I was pleased with how the Heckblazer song came together. Almost makes up for the deep shame I feel at much of the rest of it.
February 6th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
Happy birthday, Silence!
Thankyou for bringing that X-treme X-Men cover into my life. It is taking comics in the right direction.
February 6th, 2013 at 4:14 pm
Happy birthday Silence! Great podcast as always.
It’s nice to see some love for ‘Silver Surfer: Parable’. Mr The Beast Must Die concisely summed up my own (shameless plug alert) thoughts on the comic better than I did. The bizarre fusion of two seemingly incompatible talents like Stan Lee and Moebius actually worked; Lee’s grandiose verbosity and Moebius’s magnificent Moebiosity created this unapologetically biblical tone and it also had a positive humanist message to it (often spelled out in big on-the-nose dialogue) too.
The X-treme X-men recap was convoluted beyond convolution, anyone who can follow that story deserves a medal. A medal in the shape of an ‘X’.
In Hickman’s defence, he only seems to write that way for Marvel. Perhaps that’s what a 36-issue-per-year contract on top of a raft of creator-owned work will do to you.
["It was a time of overworked writers' idiosyncrasies laid bare before the gaze of a mostly uncritical audience..."]
["Some say the fire grew with DC's increasing reliance on Geoff Johns..."]
["But the spark truly came when a prodigiously talented creator of crime comics decided to disassemble the Avengers..."]
I kid of course.
February 6th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Happy birthday, cunce!
February 6th, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Happy Birthday Silence! You are a weekly staple in my podcasting diet. Here is to many more.
February 7th, 2013 at 3:26 am
One year, and forty-nine episodes. You boys have really missed the boat on that “New 52″ fifty-two episode tie-in possibility; it’s nearly Zero Month where all the secret origins are laid bare, poorly.
As ever, Silence! is golden.
February 7th, 2013 at 9:54 am
Did you know Paul ‘Concrete’ Chadwick used to draw the title, and then wrote and drew a lovely little coda to the series in an early issue of Dark Horse Presents which is reprinted in one of the Concrete collections. Can’t say for sure, but I’d wager those were the only good Dazzler comics ever published…
Also Kathryn Immonen’s Hellcat is probably the most charming Marvel comic I’ve ever read
February 7th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Yeah, I’ve read most of those Chadwick Dazzlers. The printing didn’t do his lines justice.
February 7th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
The Chadwick Dazzlers sound like a dance troupe from the 40s
February 8th, 2013 at 6:33 pm
Beast: I believe it was part of a conversation about that series of 70s Sci-fi movies they ran in the early 90s on Channel 4. Started with A BOY AND HIS DOG.
February 8th, 2013 at 9:13 pm
‘A boy and his dog’ is a great film and Richard Corben did a good adaptation of it too. Plus it’s got a great trailer (It completely rips off the trailer for Clockwork Orange, but that’s no bad thing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu9fESAlGc4
February 8th, 2013 at 9:15 pm
ooh look, someone’s put the whole film on youtube! I love the internet sometimes…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP1nfVP1C5w
February 9th, 2013 at 2:16 am
Yes, that’s right, I remember the conversation now Kieron. I believe I wad also extolling the virtues if Bob Balaban’s ‘Parents’ too…
February 10th, 2013 at 11:19 am
Bob Balaban is not a name.
February 10th, 2013 at 2:05 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxDJCZ2Rr8
February 11th, 2013 at 2:47 pm
Happy birthday men of comics. Really glad you’re getting into Mind MGMT, been reading it since you mentioning it’s first iss (maybe second). I think it’s a really nice package as a monthly with all the extra bits, nooks, crannys and alcoves, but am slightly worried about TV adaptations. Anyway keep up the good work, and thanks for being reliable pointers to good stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with.