Mindless Ones

PRELUDE

In times like these as in all other times, you are allowed to be relieved when someone else has done the heavy lifting for you.  As such, it’s comforting to find that Clark has put together not only a series of thoughtful posts on the immediate impacts of Covid-19 on the comics industry, but also a run of weekly link blogs to keep folk up-to-date on what’s going on in this little corner of the world.

Free from any delusions of being thorough, I figured I’d write a short post drawing attention to a few free comics / comics related videos closer to home, and maybe highlight a couple of ways you can help the artists involved along the way if you’ve got the cash to do so.

PART 1 – FREE COMICS!

Lockdown has seen a number of comics artists giving away their work for free, or at a discount.  Here are a few such works that we’ve reviewed before, if you’re stuck in the house and want a sense of what you might want to amuse and enervate yourself without splurging your last few iso-bucks!

Sarah Broadhurst, Jules Scheele and an army of sharp feminist voices – Identity: An Anthology (One Beat Zines, originally reviewed November 2015)

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE HERE

This is not only a truly beautiful object but a useful one too.  From Sabba Khan‘s elegant self-reflections to Alia Wilhelm‘s too-close photography by way of Sammy Boras‘ more traditional use of the comic book form to explore difficult questions of sexuality, Identity always makes intersectional feminism feel as natural as it really is, despite what some commentators might have you believe, arranging all of these disparate voices and means of expression together in one powerful volume.

This might sound like damning with faint praise but it’s meant sincerely.   Seemingly taking its cue from the punchy, “here’s my point and I dare you not to take it” expressiveness of Scheele’s cover design, this collection of comics and essays transforms lived experience into a rallying cry against complacency, against the possibility of mistaking your own experience for the only one worth listening to.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

• If IDENTITY gets you going you can download some other excellent One Beat zines for free right now including their cool, critical Riot Grrrl zine DOUBLE DARE YA and 2015’s most triumphant SLEATER-KINNEY fanzine NOT A NEW WAVE!
• I wrote about some of Jules’ earlier comics here and will find the time to write about their more recent stuff sometime before this lockdown ends, I’m sure.
• There’s lots of good new stuff on offer though, from a free zine about Mapping Your Sexuality that genuinely reconfigured the inside of my head to diary comics about gender and trauma by way of lush mixtape risographs.  That these disparate works are somehow of a piece is a bigger story for another day.
• In the meantime, you can support Jules via Patreon if you fancy.

Douglas Noble – Here Come the Beautiful People (Strip for Me, originally reviewed March 2020)

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE HERE… IF YOU DARE!

Speaking of uncertainty, of a sense of unmooring, we find ourselves back in the company of Mr Douglas Noble, a known confidence man and “psychic” fraud of low character.

Mr Noble may often be found relying on his capacity for mystery and showmanship to part easily influenced comics readers from their money.  As we have already noted, he has chosen to give this comic away for free in what appears to be a fit of unmitigated generosity but which surely masks a purpose too sinister for our easy contemplation.

In Here Come the Beautiful People, a series of short stories set in the Riviera, such mystification has an overtly sinister aim on the spiritual plain as well as the material one: to put it bluntly, the destruction of a humble and noble character.

The first three stories here concerns couple of mysteries that will find resolution of sorts in the fourth.  Missing dogs are given more weight than dead women in these stories, which may tell you something about the low morality of the imagination at work here, or which may be intended as a reflection on the priorities of the world depicted – I am not a Dickens character, so I see no need to be charitable in my readings of the many inky phantoms of the world’s library.

As is often the case in Mr Noble’s experiments, visual information is conveyed to the reader in an elliptical, fragmented way, but careful observers will note that Mr Noble allows one name to be gently slandered in the first three stories. The fourth story is a piece of outright character assassination, in which the lowly and the maligned are re-imagined in a satanic light. Having laid the suggestion of omnipresence in the previous stories, and suggested a certain logical culpability, Mr Noble escalates his victims to the status of Morrisonian author-gods, linking all the world’s miseries to their actions.

We must be careful not to be manipulated, readers.  The wicked Mr Noble has designs on our debit cards and our souls.  He has the skills and the temperament for success.  He must be resisted at every turn.  He is not the only one.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

• If you’ve read the above and decided to give in to the Shadowy Mr Noble’s embraces, you may expose yourself to his “unfriendly romances and geographic terror” in both physical and digital realms.
• Mr Noble also curates a very attractive line of comics via the Strip for Me label on Comixology.  In additions to Mr Noble’s own dark workings you will find great, lively comics by Sean Azzopardi and Paul Jon “Thrill Me” Milne grouped under this header.   Despite previous notices to the contrary, the fact that both of these poor characters have collaborated with Mr Noble on more than one occasion does not constitute evidence of pacts demonic.
• Foul dandy of a man that he is, Mr Noble has made arrangements for you to offer regular support through his Patreon.  Please note that you will be the talk of the village from the first moment you even think about offering this level of support to his cause, and rightly so!
• Finally, if you’re determined to bow all the way down to damnation, then Mr Noble offers an irregular newsletter service through which refined corruption may be broadcast directly into your pocket at any time of the author’s choosing.

PART 2 – FREE COMICS RELATED VIDEOS!

If you’ve got kids in need of distraction or if you fancy getting yr art on yrself, our pal Kathryn Briggs has been doing online art classes since her regular gig has been wiped out by the lockdown.

This one’s about monsters, a subject that I’m sure is close to all of our hearts:

Fair to say that one of the monsters that Kathryn comes up with in this session, The Overthinker, will be familiar to many a friend of Team Mindless.

Anyway, in addition to being one of the best comics artists of her generation and a witchy role model for both the living and the dead to aspire to, Briggs is also a freelance art educator so these videos are an official good use of whatever time you find yourself looking to spend right now.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

• You can toss a coin to your teacher here or make regular contributions via Patreon.
• Briggs is also selling comics and original art through her webstore, including her collection of short comics Magpie, which “present(s) a picture of the artist as a young formalist, keen to demonstrate the thousand ways they’ve just discovered to make the comic book page contain the world.”
• You can buy Triskelion on that page too, if you fancy reading a comic that “applies the full range of Briggs’ talent to a long-form story about what it’s like to be a women in a world that won’t stop telling you what it is to be a woman”.   I wrote a critical essay for the collected edition and in a rare fit of self-confidence I’m going to declare it to be… good.

Speaking of things that are good – the art of Dan McDaid!

McDaid’s been doing these “Dan McDraw” videos for the past month and a bit and I’ve been finding them very soothing.  If your’re into art process and feel like you’d enjoy seeing familiar faces recreated in front of your own eyes, batter in!

I’ve always found McDaid’s complete pages and character sketches very immediate – there’s something about the pointillist dynamism of his line work that puts me in the scene without giving me much time to think about how I got there – so it’s been a rare treat to see his characters take shape, and to experience the verbal and physical thought process that gets them along the way.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

• You can order Dan’s collaboration with Tze Chun and Mike Weiss, The Fearsome Doctor Fang,  from TKO right now.  It comes in either trade paperback or box set form, depending on how swanky you want your pulp thrills to feel today!
• Dan’s work on the recent Greg Pak-scripted Firefly comic is also worth your time.  McDaid captures the likeness of the characters well while subtly tweaking their looks so they can blow freely around the comic book page – a job that’s not as easy as he makes it look, as you’ll know if you’ve squinted in disbelief at other TV adaptations!
• If you really fancy going out to sea with the man, McDaid has  been drawing a back up strip for DC’s Hill House horror line.  Written by Joe Hull (that was a typo but fuck it, it’s staying in!) Sea Dogs is a story that “takes place on the high seas where a fledgling American government uses werewolves in its fight to gain independence from the British” and it runs across the following titles – Basketful of Heads, The Dollhouse Family, Plunge, Daphne Byrne and The Low, Low Woods.

EPILOGUE

Of course, if you’ve got a few quid to spare you could always throw them at your beloved Mindless!

• Ad, Amypoodle and Bobsy are all working under the Diane umbrella, where they put out the best Twin Peaks analysis on the net with Sister Rosie.  Rosie and Bob also host a show called The Shadow Trap, which is well worht your time cot it’ll teach you more about monsters than anything this side of an internship at Tory HQ.  subscribers to the Diane Patreon will know the delight of Extra Content, including Brother Bobsy’s excellent ramble through some comic called The Invisibles.
• Right now Andre Whickey is focussing on A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, a podcast with a title so clear it demands no further explanation.  You might think the subject matter doesn’t need any further elaboration at this point either but the show will prove you on that eveyr time.  No one knows how he has learned so much, except – somewhat predictably – Andrew himself.  As the most helpful Mindless, Andrew has already put together a page explaining different ways you can support his work.
• Maid of Nails is writing a book on Garth Ennis.  You can fund her exploration of the dark arts (no John, not Guinness!) here.
• Last but by no means least, there’s Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die, the lords of SILENCE! and all who shudder in her.  Why wait?  Join C-Unit today!

Thank you and good night.

Thoodknight.