SILENCE! #96
March 15th, 2014
PACKED MY BAGS COS I’M OUTTA HERE, MOMMA DON’T LOVE ME AND MY MOMMA DON’T CARE
OI! i bloody love of it I do innit yes bruv yes bruv COME ON! Disemobodied Britbot X-15735 bruv innit? Bloody love those old times when you got your meat ‘n’ 2 veg innit? Yes bruv. Old times. Good times innit bruv. When a man had his right old bloody knees up didn’t he bruv. Yes bruv.
We all did bruv.
Now here come a trio of wendys to talk a load of old comics nosh innit bruv. It only bloody is ‘n’ all! Cor! What bloody larks. LA LA LA LA LA LAAAAAAH!
Oo did? Only Gary Lactus, The Beast Must Die & special guest Bobsy all havin’ a right old time of it! GET IN.
<ITEM> It’s a bumper edition as the boyce go long due to Friday night drunkeness and guest star gobshoite Bobsy! The most chaotic indulgent admin ever? They barely manage to thank their sponsors the loathsome oiks! Too much HOTTT COMICS ACTION to waste time though as we take a cooling plunge into…
<ITEM> The Reviewniverse wherein in epically meandering but actually pretty good (or maybe I’m still drunk) chat , the trio suckle on Stray Bullets, Nemo: Rose of Berlin (featuring the ‘Alan Moore Has Turned Into Chris Claremont’ argument which will soon be canon), the wonderful Auteur, Afterlife With Archie, Jonathan Ross & The Hugos, The Big Woof, The Comic Relief Comic, The Bojeffires Saga, Starlight, Avengers Undercover, Saviors, Hawkeye, and much much more.
<ITEM> The naughty tricksters try to make Gary piss himself.
So have a right old bloody listen, you bunch of effing WENDYHOUSES! IT’S SILENCE! 96!!!
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This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
March 15th, 2014 at 6:28 pm
Heh, I remember hearing about Jimmy Bradfield using a tech to press his guitar pedals for him back in the late 90s/early 2000s, when Mogwai were touring with the Manics and found themselves baffled by this set-up.
It still sounds like an unnecessary fuck-up magnet to me, but what do I know – I don’t even have a string section.
March 15th, 2014 at 6:29 pm
Shit, actually, I’ve just realised that I’m currently working on project with a string section – take that, Bradfield!
I mean, it’s a small string section made up of my friends, but it’s still a guarantee of stardom and the moral high ground, right?
March 16th, 2014 at 10:57 am
A++ podding boyce, I could genuinely listen to you drunktalk forever, even if it would cost me my job and relationship in short order.
And yes, much as I love the original SILENCE! line-up, Bobsy’s backing vocals really add something to the experience – you should let him “sit in” with you on SILENCE! live if you do it again at Thought Bubble, it’d be classic (#classic).
I’ve got some thoughts on your Stray Bullets chat but I’m going to save those for a post – this’d be a bit time = money if it wasn’t for the fact that nae cunt’s paying me – but The Beast Must Die is on money when he says that it was the first time in ages that a monthly comic has caught me like that.
Lots of good stuff coming out at the moment (Prophet, Zero, Pretty Deadly, etc) but while I have enjoy reading and thinking about those, there’s nothing coming out right now that I’m as tangled up with as I was(/am!) with Stray Bullets.
Great Nemo chat as well – congrats to the beard for leaving the songs out, but having read the book twice now I find myself agreeing with Bobsy that there’s too much fudge in the recipe. The set-up’s great, emotionally compelling, etc, but every encounter reduces the drama by way of arbitrary coincidence. Plus, given the centrality of the setting to the time period that LOEG has focussed on, there’s a strange absence of insight or resonance here.
TBMD and Markypoodle (in the Mindless mail) are both right that the Nemo books are obviously just Moore sitting back and letting O’Neill show his stuff, but it still slightly fucks me off that they’re binding these comics hard and pricing ‘em high when they’re so slight in comparison to what came before.
(So very bourgeois, Dave: “I’ll pay £10 for proper literature, but for this… let’s say five shillings and speak of it no more, lest our sensibilities coarsen and our fine words dribble like mud from ragged lips.” And yet… we all know the language of comic book formatting, and this move to a “prestige” format is deliberate, feels related to the high tone of Century. This isn’t just comics, young man – this is Alan Moore. So who’s bourgeois now, eh? Is it me, or is it the new Chris Claremont?)
I wonder if I’m in the minority in preferring Century to the Black Dossier? The latter book took a bit of a kicking at the time, I seem to remember, but I’ve come round to it a bit since then.
Anyway, The Black Dossier‘s the more formally unified and impressive work in some respects, but I think there are “soft” moments in Century that haunt me more – it’s a genuine old man’s work, for better and worse, as I argued here.
And now I feel that I need to check out both Afterlife with Archie and The Auteur, damn you SILENCE! Those bills can wait – I need some hott comics!
March 16th, 2014 at 7:11 pm
The first four issues of Stray Bullets are available for free on Comixology and the whole series is up there at $2 a pop starting with issue #5. It ends up costing a bit more than the Uber Alles edition, but if you’re like me, confounded by 1200 page comics tomes, then this is the (legal) way to go.
March 16th, 2014 at 9:48 pm
Bonne podde. Kept me entertained during my insomniac Saturday night.
I remember flicking through The Big Woof in my local Asda and not buying it. So many regrets. Loved the Comic Relief Comic, though. No idea why they/others(/we?) never tried another. I expect it’d probably would be full of Towie Lemon Dec Voice Borat shit, though. “WHERE’S DAVID ATTENBRA?!”
There was a page with some kind of pan-African spirit talking about the exploitation of that continent, as I recall. The comic put me right off the Hofmeister bear, as well. Something about the effects of alcohol, the effects of mascots on underage drinking. Did he get his head bashed in by a brick? Did he bleed yellow? Something like that.
Haven’t read much Stray Bullets, yet. You know what it was? I tried the first issue of Murder Me Dead and didn’t quite dig it. Hm. Always been meaning to go back. It’s like Concrete or Strangers In Paradise: one of those essential creator-owned comics from the ’90s that proved it could be done. (or something)
I dunno about this Auteur comic. You guys made it sound great then honking in quick succession. I don’t know if I want to read more American apocalypse envy after a decade of same across literally all media (except Lego).
I haven’t been to the comic shop for a while, but I did buy the new Dennis The Menace Epic Magazine. 9 pages of comics plus a load of advertorials and tat for a fiver. That said, Nigel Parkinson’s pup-Gnasher is the cutest thing you’ll see all year.
The Beano was great, mind. Kev F Sutherland and Wayne Thompson bust out a MiracleMan parody with possibly the dodgiest belt buckle in comics. I also enjoyed Becky Cloonan’s The Mire. Which wasn’t in the Beano, but fueoufpf
//\Oo/\\
March 17th, 2014 at 1:41 pm
Might have to give stray bullets a go. Have to say I first discovered Lapham through his Crossed run. That was full of exactly the sort of gratuitous nastiness that Ennis’ original series was unfairly accused of. Tellingly I saw Ennis – Ennis! – mention in an interview that he couldn’t write anything as nasty as Lapham was doing… so don’t have a very high opinion of Lapham but it sounds like Stray Bullets is a bit different so I’ll give it a look
By the way, thanks for recommending The Midas Flesh recently. That’s one of the best and most unusual comics I’ve read for ages and reminded me a bit of Paul Chadwick’s vastly underrated The World Below
March 17th, 2014 at 4:14 pm
“I was lost and loveless in reviewniverse… I was packed an kicking in that alien land… And I wanna’ know, wanna’ know, what to read.”
(Sing it to the tune of “Soul Desert”)
March 17th, 2014 at 7:02 pm
I’ve got some Stray Bullets reserved at the local library, so that’s something? I’m not too keen on crime comics, but it sounds like there’s more to it than that, really. Lapham’s interesting, certainly, though I’m one of those chumps that’s mainly read his work for hire stuff.
Young Liars was pretty ace, though, and his Terror Inc. was surprisingly good, considering the character.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_Inc.
I really like his art, as well, it’s clean and ‘classic’ in a sort of 80s underground way? A bit like Marvel meets Los Bros Hernandez, or summat.
March 18th, 2014 at 12:33 pm
Thrills, you are going to have a completely different view of Lapham after reading SB. I don’t know if we made this clear – most of us here at Mindless Ones think Stray Bullets might be one of the best comics ever written.
(Murder Me Dead is very, very good too).
Just put aside ALL your concerns about crime comics. Seriously.
March 18th, 2014 at 12:38 pm
I’m so jealous of all the people on this thread who are going to read Stray Bullets for the first time!
But there’s new Stray Bullets too! WOOP!
March 18th, 2014 at 1:35 pm
Got momentarily PUMPED for reading Stray Bullets as one of my reservations was in at the library. Turned out it was some Liefeld Heroes Reborn Avengers thingy. I shall no doubt also enjoy that, but in an entirely different way.
March 18th, 2014 at 1:49 pm
Stray Bullets is my favourite comic. The end of nuff said.
March 19th, 2014 at 3:14 pm
Best comic ever produced, in my opinion. The fact that it has returned makes me so very happy. I thought the day would never come.
March 19th, 2014 at 5:32 pm
I read the first issues of Stray Bullets and Murder Me Dead when they came out. I didn’t particularly enjoy either, but destiny is forcing me to give them another go. I want to like them, so that’s something.
I hated this month’s Hawkeye, I really can’t bear Chris Eliopoulis’s Watterson wannabe cuteness. PTUH! I wanted to spit on it, bro.
Another comic I will be revisiting shortly is the Comic Relief Comic. I also remember being massively confused by its weirdness, I remember some page with famous chins including Bruce Forsyth, Desperate Dan and Judge Dredd. And maybe Jimmy Hill? And a bizarre Bisley image with Jonathan Ross and Lenny Henry.
Now the idea of a Drunken Avengers has been bandied about, hopefully the powers that be at Marvel will realise which title to add to the ever-growing plethora of Avengers tat. I need to see that exist.
Interesting to note that David Lapham started his career in Valiant comics, and also co-created the ‘Warriors of Plasm’ with Jim Shooter for Defiant comics. A favourite of many SILENCE! listeners for sure. Reading the wikipedia page for Defiant comics ticks many boxes on the list of ‘reasons the comics industry in the 90s imploded.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiant_Comics
March 19th, 2014 at 6:46 pm
Yeah didn’t they have a comic that was made up of trading cards?
March 20th, 2014 at 4:47 pm
You are not to judge SB by its first issue, Melt!
March 31st, 2014 at 3:30 pm
I agree with Gary Lactus, The Beast Must Die and Bobsy that fake names are for wankers.
(<3 <3 <3 <3 I enjoyed this episode x x x x)
(Yes I am very behind on me pods)
March 31st, 2014 at 10:55 pm
Just a quick afterthought to the German language in “Nemo: Roses of Berlin”: Many of the errors suggest that a computer was used to translate the text into german. There are actually so many mistakes, that it’s pretty sure that no one involved in the translation could actually speak, read or write German.