SILENCE! #147
June 23rd, 2015
Angela Grimcock grabbed David’s shotgun from out of the umbrella stand, adjusted her reading spectacles. and looked in the mirror. Running a calloused hand through her blue rinsed hair she checked one last time that she had a hankie tucked up her sleeve. She fished a warm Werthers original from her pocket, unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth. Then she unlocked the door to 43 Arkensword Avenue and stepped into the maelstrom.
Mr Grainger came first, lurching through her Begonias, his face contorted with rage. His skin was mottled purple and red, and his black, swollen tongue poked out of his distended jaw. From a tear in his argyle sweater a new eye swivelled and blinked furiously. He was holding the remains of Miracle, his once beloved Daschund in one lumpen fist, and the small dog’s head lolled and buffeted against his trouser leg. With a strangled scream he launched towards Angela; she raised the shotgun towards her neighbour and pulled the trigger. Mr Grainger caught the blast fully in the chest and he was backflipped smartly over the Begonias, and into the water feature. David’s tasteful Japanese water sculpture bubbled crimson as Mr Grainger, one-time head of the Rotary club and organiser of the Salvation Army jumble sale expired with a keening wheeze, like a whoopy cushion.
Out of the corner of her eye Angela spotted the Bishop boy sliding his way around into her yard. She’d never liked him ever since she caught him urinating on her herb garden as a 5 year old. Now, as his twisted body flipped and swivelled on new joints and three mouths snapped like castanets, she finally took her revenge. The first shot took his arm off at the shoulder and spun him like a top; the second caught him above the back of the neck and his his head disintegrated. Pieces of him dashed against the garden fence and his spasming body collapsed like a deflating bouncy castle on a warm summer afternoon.
“It’s going to be a long Saturday” said Angela, with a grimace. “And I don’t even have a blessed drop of milk in the house. Black tea – it really is the end!”
<ITEM>Strap on your big boy pants and stride into town, cos The SILENCE! van is here delivering delicious frozen podcasts to all the kiddies and neckbearded babymen!
<ITEM> Sponsorship of the most efficient kind, just the way you like it. No shilly-shallying or dilly-dallying.
<ITEM> Podcasts bruv, they’re a game of two halves bruv in’t they bruv? Into the hallowed grounds of the Reviewniverse we go, with The Beast doing a run down of screen-printed hipster fest ELCAF, and discussing Adam Cadwell’s Blood Blokes, Charles Forsman’s Hobo Mom, John Cei Douglas’ Show Me The Map of Your Heart, Rachael Smith’s I Am Fire and Darren Cullen’s Below.
<ITEM> …then it’s Gary’s turn as he talks up Dr Fate, Prez, Ms Marvel, Black Canary, Astro City and The Fiction.
<ITEM> That’s it. Drop some money in the collection on the way out.
Click to download SILENCE!#147
Contact us:
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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.
June 24th, 2015 at 10:54 am
Top report TBMD! I almost went to ELCAF this year, but other life turds got in the way. I sort of feel similarly about going, like looking at young creators’ works somehow invalidates my own. I barely have time to interact normally with reality, let alone create comics. At least you gents are doing it (and well).
Alright Gary Lactus, your comic reviews were also awesome!
YAY!
June 24th, 2015 at 3:07 pm
Hi FFSers!
Just following up on the beast’s review of Hobo Mom. And yeah, you pretty much got max and my collaboration down right. The process went like this. I think I did a first draft of the book, writing it in sloppy thumbnails and then I handed it to Max across the ocean and he did a second run at it filling in holes and making adjustments. When it came to do the final art we decided to work completely digitally. A first for both of us. I blew up our layouts and “pencilled” over them in manga studio and send them to Max, who “inked” them in Photoshop. I took them back and made some adjustments here and there and added in the screentime dots. It was a really fun and strange experience. I think Max agrees that when we flip through the book it almost feels like a 3rd cartoonist. There are certainly traights that I recognize but I think we were able to mesh well on the page.
Anyway, thanks for talking about the book. It comes out in French later this year from l’employe du moi and I’m working on getting an English language version published.
PS “life turds” is now part of my regular vocabulary. Thanks for that.
June 24th, 2015 at 5:12 pm
The phrase Life Turds is catching on more than anything I have ever created. Thrilling but also depressing if I think of it as my legacy.
June 24th, 2015 at 8:27 pm
Once again I used SILENCE! to, ironically, fill the silence in my lonely hairy head as I wend my way around the supermarché. Managed to avoid shrieking the Reviewniverse descendosong into the crinkled faces of all the old dears getting off the bus at my stop, though, so yay me.
I read some Iron Man vs Hulk comics this week. When did Tony Stark grow that chinge? Because these comics present him with his traditional moustache and he looks SO much better like that. I suppose in these dystopian days of ripped jeggings and Lego quinoa facial furniture like that probably isn’t Tumblr enough, but damnit. Damnit.
I also read some Michty Avengers comics with Marvel’s greatest British superhero, Eric. Blue Marvel’s in there too, with his dysfunctional family, and like so many other cod-Supermanalogues, he seems restricted by the shared universe. Funnily enough, he has the feel of an Astro City character about him. I’m a little over the whole “comics about genre” thing, but maybe…someday…
Young Avengers. I bought them on the digi because I liked the way McKelvie & Wilson looked there, but the Panini reprints are on decent enough paper. The tension and desperation is well done: the kids are constantly in motion, yet locked into a cell, the circumference of which they cannot see.
Been reading more #classic Transy comics. Today I read the first vol of Regeneration One, in which Furman and Wildman present us with a PTSD Optimus Prime, desperate to avoid his soldiers and his responsibilities, who are a bunch of largely aimless mechanoids, desperate for action and damned all the more for it.
(one sentence)
There’s a lot of neat comics stuff on in That London. More of it should be up here in Craigytown, ’cause I can’t get to it. Or in it, more importantly.
Having recently turned fortyyyyyYYYYYAAAAARRRHHH ahem, to see the apprently eternally young faces of all the other comicos at this show or that show really makes me feel…I mean, jesus, what am I doing with my life.
I came to comics through drawing biro comics of my dead dog, so I don’t have the “arty” artistic training of a lot of the sorts of cool young things you see at these shows. It’s amazing, some of the experiments in style, format and printing these artists do. I wanted to do a comic in a skycraper format – A3 folded longways – but bullshit got in the way.
I’m all sad now.
//\Oo/\\
June 24th, 2015 at 8:48 pm
Italian guy from ELCAF here.
Just wanted to drop in and thank you for your review of Chuck and Max’s book.
And while I’m here, let’s also apologize for my broken english.
June 24th, 2015 at 9:54 pm
Mauro my Italian is so broken it’s been towed away as evidenced by my horrendous accent. Thanks for putting out a great book!
June 24th, 2015 at 10:21 pm
Matthew: content goes beyond form. A lot of this stuff exists as design/fetish objects and there’s a dearth of good, meaningful writing out there. That counts for a lot.
June 25th, 2015 at 1:17 am
I recently attended Copenhagen Comics (6th and 7th of June). Special guest: Art “Pulitzer” Spiegelman.
Did I attend his signing? No.
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to stand in that line. ‘Twas a looong line. So what did I do instead?
I met David Lloyd and I spoke to him about Aces Weekly. (!?!?)
He’s very enthusiastic about AW. It’s positively contagious.
Speaking of contagious…
Garylactus, if you shook dear David’s hand, as I did. Then your palm-terrain has in all likelihood been settled by the genetic clone-offspring of my palm bacteria. We now share a cosmic life-link. All hail the goddess nature and her unicellular astronauts. (DIRT AND MEAT! MEAT AND DIRT!)
Of course Mr. Lloyd could be very into hand sanitizers. Which he probably should be. Shaking hands with con-goers is certainly a brave feat. I think I would have opted for a fist-bump, where I in his situation.
June 26th, 2015 at 11:39 am
Aye Gary, The cricket score ‘One [run] for Seven [wickets]‘ would be some truly cosmic bowling…
June 26th, 2015 at 4:16 pm
I get Mark Maron and Dan Harmon mixed up, and when Harmontown appears on my Netflixx I insitinctively think “HEY GANG!”.
So thanks for that. Also, genuine thanks for ‘life turds’. A fine, fine phrase.
It’s nice to hear others having a complain about Nobrow-style designo screenprint comics. I also tire of that whole aesthetic and increasingly just wanna see some super-illustrated Druillet/Moebius/Otomo kinda stuff. I’m hoping Lando and the like are currently influencing alterna comics, ‘cos that is fun and inspiring and that.
I still like hot pinks and bright colours, but. I liked them before they were ‘cool’ etc.
Hmmmm. I probably didn’t, did I?
June 26th, 2015 at 7:17 pm
Get the ‘Screen Printers Are Cunts’ T-shirt screen printed and then you can say it’s self-depracating therby reducing hipster scorn.