In no particular order

the teaser for the next issue

He doesn’t look much like a zombie, does he, this ressurected Batman? Which surprised me at first because I was convinced, and mildly concerned, that the next issue was going to centre around hackneyed zombie-movie cliches, but now I think the horror will run much deeper than that, because I don’t think there’s been any baiting and switching of cadavers. No my new pet fan-theory is that in this instance what we’ll actually be getting is an EVIL BATMAN, and that’s a reason to be cheerful. Yeah, yeah, owlman…. but Owlman’s only the anti-matter duplicate, not the genuine article. That it’s the real Batman can only have a positive effect on Morrison’s writing, because it’s a bloodchilling prospect isn’t it, that indestructable man, with all of his experience, expertise, intellect, training and resources, and he wants to hurt you?

Why has he turned to the dark side? One can only speculate. Perhaps this Batman is one of the Omega Effect’s latter iterations, a Batman gone sour and septic over time, as in David Uzemari’s excellent post, but not yet refined into Hurt, more savage and primal: ‘the Knight of the Beast’. Aaaah, the Beast, is that another clue?

But, yeah, sure, it’s more likely to be a clone.

Random thing

I’ve been thinking about Hurt. One of the things missing from the commentary surrounding him is the fact that he is a Doctor and the implications of same. ‘We will wound your soul forever and if it is strong it will survive the wound….’ and that’s Hurt’s function, isn’t it? Whether intentionally or not he’s the healer who wounds in order to heal. Inevitably his role in Batman’s development is to destroy Batman in order to raise him up by, literally, battling his inner demons and triumphing.

I love the way Morrison let’s you see all the moving parts of the spell…. and that its work has only just begun.

Old King Cole

If New York has subway piracy, so must London’s underground network. It may not be an original idea, but it’s still a resonant one, and serves King Coal’s thematic undertones well - coal’s natural habitat being under the ground. The burning black heart is powerfully totemic too, representative of a man so evil his soul has carbonated, a heart burning in Hell.

It’s a typical Morrisonian flourish, to take a quaintly corny sounding villain, in this case Old King Cole, and with a flick of the wrist transform him into something slightly nightmarish - shaven Shaggyman, BrRRrrrrrrR! - and he applies this talent deftly here: Cole’s connection to the Church of Crime and the instant and unpleasant depth it provides; the spooky mise-en-scene he generates, haunted mines, ghost miners and, grant’s favourite, secret subway lines and last but not least the resonant symbolism of his emblem and what its symbolism tells us about Cole’s self-image, his psyche, heck even his black spirituality. Shit we haven’t even met the guy but he’s a creepy bastard already, isn’t he?

The Miners

I’m surprised nobody mentioned Scooby Doo. These guys are pure Scooby, not supernatural at all but scaring off the locals with a combination of pre-existing folklore and a touch of luminous paint.

Rendle Colliery situation

On a ley line? Metaphysical fiery energy blazing from the rock. An altogether more interesting take on the idea of ‘coal’. Brilliant. Don’t know if the meaning I take from it was intended and neither do I care.

The Cover

One of my three fave B&R covers so far. I love the way the scary imagery is set off by the cartoony graphics inside. And the tension between it and what’s come before - see the cover to 3 - rocks too.

I can’t wait to see what colour scheme’ll be used for the cover to 8. That’s going to be a beauty too.

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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I suppose at root my concern was about whether anything meaningful could ultimately be said on the back of Lost’s nigh on nonsensical sci-fi dimension, and the more that element was played up the more I worried that the creators would be forced to try to. This might seem strange coming from a fan of Morrison’s work after all he’s ostensibly the go-to guy for crazy science fiction, but in my opinion Morrison’s sci-fi has a metaphorical, allegorical, artistic and poetic strength that Lost’s can’t touch.

Or does it? After last night I’m a lot less sure and happily a lot less worried because I think there are some very clear pointers in that show about where we’re going and how we will ultimately be asked to view Lost’s labyrinthine plot, subplots and mythology, and I think the encounter with Rose and Bernard is the key.

To summarise the scene, Kate, Sawyer and Juliette stumble across Rose and Bernard living happily in the Jungle. The couple have been missing for the last three years (in show) and claim that they have “retired” from all the shenanigans that so preoccupy the stars of the show. When Juliette points out Jack is looking to set off a nuclear bomb and that they will almost certainly die if he isn’t stopped, Rose responds with, “there’s always something with you people”. And that’s the thing, there always is. They are always running around bumping into their own pain, always fighting and screaming and no-one ever knows what’s going on because everyone is too preoccupied with their own concerns to ever consider actually talking to anyone. The crucial point here is that Rose and Bernard are happy and content – the same cannot be said of their guests with their well worn psychological shackles.

Meanwhile Jack is indeed trying to detonate a nuke in an effort to wipe out the current reality and land him and the Losties back in their pre-Lost lives with no memory of anything that’s happened over the last 5 seasons. Whether Jack should or shouldn’t be doing this is a live issue but the show largely leaves it up to the audience to explore the moral and ethical dimensions of his intended course of action. At first this bothered rather a lot given that killing hundreds of people with atomic weaponry is a questionable act no matter how you cut it, but then I realised that Jack’s myopic worldview – that the myopic worldview of all of the central characters – was perhaps supposed to be under the microscope here. That we were just maybe supposed to be asking ourselves, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Because even if there was nothing morally troubling about Jack’s intentions and even if everything went to plan and he got what he wanted, he still would still find screwed up Jack Shepherd waiting for him back in LA.

At the end of the episode a whining tearful Ben asks Jacob “what about me?” and Jacob responds with a pointed “what about you?”. You could read this as callous or as an assessment of Ben’s character or you could add it together with the Rose and Bernard scene, with Jack’s demented plan, with all of the mental behaviour that goes on this island and ask yeah what about any of these people. The question here isn’t about time travel or course correction or monsters or why Ben does what he does or why anyone does anything or who the Others really are or why the statue, it’s about trying to find a better way to live that isn’t about being chained to one’s own ego. So chained that you’ll set off nuclear bombs (Jack), or kill everyone that gets in your way (Ben), or spend your life running away from everything that could make you happy (Kate), or conning people (Sawyer), or searching for status and validation regardless of the cost (Locke).

Lost is about free will vs determinism, yes, but all the fantastical components are just window dressing, in the final analysis just as barmy as all these demented humans running around the Island. Rose and Bernard haven’t just retired from all the crazy activities of the people, they’ve retired from the crazy activities of the Island, from all of it, and in the end I’m sure that’s where the show is headed.

What’s are the answers to the mysteries of the Island? I’m sure we’ll get some but when the show fades to black it might just be who bloody well cares!

Final shot prediction meme: The same one I’ve had in mind for years, Hurley walking across one of the island’s sun drenched beaches, and maybe, just maybe chatting with Charlie.

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In our conversation we talked robots, creation, Kirby and other. LISTEN DAMN YOU!

Download our Paul Collicutt interview

Mindless Ones are proud to offer you the chance to win Paul’s first two books plus a limited edition print…

Here’s the delightful Robot City swag you can bag, presented here nestled on a pure wool rug. All you have to do is listen to the podcast and answer this question: What does Brown Lantern’s phone sound like? Send your answers along with your name and postal address to mindlessones@hotmail.co.uk before the 1st of March 2010.  Winning entries will be pulled out of my helmet and issued forthwith.  We’ve also got prints for runners up.

Here’s Paul’s studio

And here’s the finest goddamn robot penguins you’ll ever see

Thanks for your attention

x Gary Lactus

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Zom: Tan’s a nice chap, some of us around here were quite keen on his work, but if you ask me thank God for Cameron Stewart: Batman & Robin is back at long last. This isn’t my favourite issue and I’ll get into some of the reasons why later, but it’s a bloody good one.

Bob: Don’t forget to check out the excellent annotations of this issue up at Funnybook Babylon - we’ll be covering much of the same ground as them, and throwing our own bent and battered Alfred Pennyworths in too. Rich Johnston has also got a couple of posts up on today’s topic, and Rikdad’s knotty look at it is worth your time too.

Page 1

Bob: To these eyes, this is the best art of Cameron Stewart’s career. It’s clear what he’s up to from this opening splash, on which more later: that’s a Quitely Batman.

Page 2

Zom: Ah lovely, a good old fashioned action sequence (as opposed to a fight sequence). You get surprisingly few of these in superhero comics today more’s the pity.

Bob: Panel 1 - That’s Mickey Eye the London Eye - great views of the city and river from the South Bank, the leisurely rotation of the wheel providing  hundreds of slightly differing angles and perspectives as you complete the cycle. It takes about forty minutes to go round, which is nearly enough to notice one phase of the London circadian rhythm begin to roll into the next.

Panel 3 - In London camera phones outnumber people by ten to one. Fact. It’s a battle between them and the rats as to who really runs the show. Interesting that that’s how Dick Grayson chooses to play the role - all over Youtube, none of this shadowy ‘is he an urban legend’ stuff for this bat.

Page 3

Bob: Panel 1 - ‘Enough to wipe W1 right off Google Earth!’ Our cheeky sparrow’s embedded suggestion of how to plot this route online is a total pisstake - do not try to plot this scene on G.E if you value your sanity. (Mindless Ones Dot Com reserve the right to have a go later in the week.)

‘Speedboat chase on the Thames’ is like the perfect, primal scene of action sequences. Morrison last did one briefly in The Invisibles 1:17 featuring Gideon Stargrave and a St. Trinians escapee versus the grey faces of control, or something, soundtracked to ‘Set the Controls’ by Pink Floyd. See also this clip below (starting about 07.30. See here for part two), the greatest scene in any Bond movie, taken from one of the very worst Bond movies. Should have left the cinema when the titles started:

Page 4

Bob: Panel 1 - Off he hops at Westminster Bridge.

Panels 2-6 (second tier): Landing on Del & Rodney’s van, then onto a Black Cab, a white van, and finally on to a Routemaster tour bus.

Zom: Foreign readers might think I’m overstating the case, but take it from a Brit, these vehicles carry immense symbolic charge. The white van is popularly understood as the workhorse of the British working class and brings with it a whole heap of stereotypes and class-based discourses, mainly centred around the “white van man” and the link between the working class and particular manual trades.

The red double-decker bus, particularly for those who live outside London, has connotations of tourism, but perhaps more importantly, the Routemaster, now that it’s being withdrawn taps into discourses around British heritage, about who we are as a nation and how we want to be understood

Del Boy and his younger brother and business partner, Rodney “Dave” Trotter, the central characters of the phenomenally successful TV show Only Fools and Horses belong to that exclusive club of British fictions that are deeply embedded in the national psyche, and that have much to say about the history of social representation, fictional or otherwise, in England.

So what does this all add up to? Well by admitting all this stuff however offhandedly, however playfully, it helps to bring a rich texture to the comic. There’s enough oomph in those four vehicles to power 100 Five Live phone-ins, 1000 newspaper headlines, countless books and telly shows.

But there’s also something very enjoyable about the juxtaposition between Batman and all this British dreamscape. One must remember that despite the best efforts of Barbara Broccoli and Russell T Davis, and unlike Los Angeles and New York, London’s fantasy life isn’t super-charged with raw spectacle. The Trotter’s van and the Routemaster represent fictional and social constructs that are very grounded. Captain Britain and Excalibur notwithstanding, the superhero in London has always felt special and a little bizarre. By having Batman rub against these earthy cultural touchstones these feelings are accentuated, making Batman, to these eyes at least, appear even more exotic and even more incredible (in both senses of the word) than usual.

There’s also the fact that a foreigner abroad, the London Eye, a red bus, a black cab, the Tower of London and a Thames cruiser, London itself bring to mind holidays. Holidays are fun. Batman on holiday is even more fun.

Bob: Panel 8 - The Number 15 doesn’t go this way. It’s only a comic.

Panel 9 - That’s Westminster Abbey in the background, site of a previous Morrison/Stewart caper, ten years ago almost to the day, in The Invisibles 3:3 /3:2. It’s where the Royal Coronation takes place, traditionally, but to any true born Englishman these days the immediate cultural connection is with the final showdown with the alien mutation in Nigel Kneale’s seminal 1953 SF  TV-show The Quatermass Experiment (remade as a movie by Hammer Films in 1955.)

Page 5

Bob: Harridges is an amalgam of Harrods (which the building clearly is modelled on) and Selfridges, neither of which are in that precise area, and, Beryl, taking a shortcut through a building means we really can’t trace you on Google maps, doesn’t it?

It looks like a throwaway reference, but it fits the issue’s theme of monarchical power-struggle like a black glove. Harrods lost their Royal patronage in 2001. Shortly afterwards,  Selfridges received the Royal warrants instead. Harrods’ owner has been waging a one-millionare media war on the Royal family ever since (Di and Dodi, y’know. ) Royal warrants will pop up later in the issue.

Page 6

Bob: Tothill - sounds like a made up street name, doesn’t it? NO.

Page 7

Bob: The Tube scene obviously echoes the subway-pirate territorial wars of All-Beard and No-Beard, in Stewart and Morrison’s Seven Soldiers series Manhattan Guardian.

Old King Coal’s burning coal-black heart adorns the front of his train. What the symbol is about, I just don’t know.

‘I’m cool’ - he fucking is. I’m really starting to like how Dick Grayson plays Batman.

Panel 7 - Smooth Eddie English is dressed in the uniform of a Pearly King. More on them later. Look at hm closely though, beyond the clothes - that’s a Baxendale crook. In an explicit shout to JH Williams III (it becomes quite clear when Batwoman appears at the end of the issue), Stewart is showing that he can do the chameleon thing too. In Seven Soldiers 1, Stewart’s was one of the styles Williams imitated directly; and it was the first Knight & Squire story, also the first Black Glove story, of Morrison’s current Bat-run where Williams started doing spins on several artistic styles at once, sometimes within the same panel.

Stewart doesn’t miss a trick - the English caricatures in this issue are drawn in a style heavily derived from the never-quite-dead weekly British Boys comics like Dandy, Beano and Buster, of which Leo Baxendale is a widely acknowledged and hugely influential master. (Baxendale draws a page in Bryan Talbot’s 2008 Alice In Sunderland, which might be handy for a reference.) (I’m using Baxendale here as a lazy shorthand for ‘DC Thomson house style’.)

As I said earlier, to these eyes Stewart’s Batman, all square shoulders and solid chins, in his opening, introductory splash at least (the echo does diminish throughout the rest of the issue, becoming something more recognisably Stewart-like) is a Frank Quitely figure. When she appears later, Batwoman ’s colouring, the tight flutter of her cape and the clearness of the line all too-closely resemble the baseline style of Williams’ recent run on Detective Comics. Stewart’s throwing his hat in the ring with the greats, and coming out of it looking kind of pretty.

Zom: I wouldn’t go as far as to say that she’s drawn in the Williams’ baseline style, but the vampiric way in which she is holding her cloak certainly suggests that Cameron has taken the right lessons from Williams’ reimagining.

Page 8

Bob: Wow, the Batplane can land anywhere. The Tower of London has been where the rottenest apples have been left to ferment for… what, a thousand years maybe? Tower Bridge in the background.

Panel 2 – Note the Royal Warrant on the prison wall.

That’s The Beefeater, from Justice League Europe. Little known fact: The Beefeater’s battle-cry is ‘Eat My Beef!’

The Beefeater’s roll call of British villainy is exactly the kind of thing we’re really after. Don’t forget to enter the competition!

The Radio Ghost - First thing that comes to mind here is the Ghost Box record label, they of the excellent sleeve design and hauntological music stylings. Their unique vision of a parallel Britain - roughly summed as a vision of what the 21st century would be like from the perspective of an alternative late 1970s/1980s where the flattening cultural imperatives of neo-liberalism never took hold - resonates through this issue, with its updated, backdated and outright skewed versions of traditional caricatures, landscapes and histories.

The Radio Ghost is the DC Lord Haw Haw/Horror, known to the public at large as a steely disembodied voice, hacking into public broadcast networks and transmitting hypnotic drones, fascist propaganda, bowel-breaking infrasound, and pulses of pure sonic cancer to the petrified masses.

Dai Laffyn - Presumably the Welsh equivalent of The Joker. In the real world, Batman, of course, is Welsh. Scroll to 7.18 on this clip here, for a possible source for the idea of a Welsh version of The Joker.

Big Don Drummond - Not a Morrison original. Obviously based on Bulldog Drummond, a pulp ‘hero’ from the twenties, who no-one except Alan Moore and, apparently, James Robinson, gives a fuck about. It’s been a while, so let’s chuck in a link to his namesake, the real life British supervillain who once, in the post-War period’s single greatest artistic statement, burnt a million quid.

The Morris Men - My Great Uncle was a Morris Dancer. Named Morris. ‘Uncle Morris, Morris Dancer’, it would have said on the business cards, if they’d had them back then. If Morris sides had them today. Morris Men are an effortless choice of Brit supervillain, almost too obvious. Like the clowns they resemble and remind us of, everyone is a bit scared of Morris dancers. Although they are still far from being a rare thing (though members are reputedly in steep decline from their whenever-it-was heyday), you’ll see them at fairs and fetes throughout the summer, in the cities as much as the shires. Despite the familiarity, there is, and to my memory always has been, even to someone with a family connection, a distinct feeling of the unheimlich, the un-homely or uncanny about them. They are inescapably creepy – this widely recognised feeling has something to do with the way their dress and dance is so ritualised – even though you do not know what the common signifiers mean, except for bells to ward off spirits, vague harvest-fertility ritual associations, it is clear even to children that their treasured accoutrements and mannered, over-rehearsed and curiously arrhythmic movements are intended to carry meanings readable only by other Morrises, and the darkling gods of yesteryear themselves.

Watching Morris Men is unsettling like being spoken to in a language you have no hope of understanding. (The dread they evoke is communicated quite adequately in the original movie version of The Wicker Man.) As representatives of a diminishing tradition aping the modes of a lost tradition, signalling their weird semantics to you all the while, they are the living undead, revelling beerily toward the grave with their sinister, jingling zombie dances. Their ossified yearning for a lost, or probably entirely invented and phantasmic Merrie Englande, also feeds in to discourses about cultural conservatism, purity and superiority that personally makes me feel uncomfortable in a very concrete  and political way.

The Highwayman – the most famous example of this breed is Dick Turpin, though, ask Adam Ant, the coolest Highwayman was Sixteen String Jack (a local boy). The Highwayman is a fixture of British folk-history, roughly on a par in the schoolchild’s imagination with King Arthur and Robin Hood. Of the three forms, the Highwayman is the only one to date remaining thoroughly unrehabilitated, denied the glory of a Saturday night family-friendly action drama in his or her honour.  Adored in their day, one suspects for their mobility as much as their rebellion, with their apparent, short-lived freedom contrasting romantically with the often village-bound lives of so many people, it’s difficult to make them work as virtuous paragons these days. At least, without getting into the thorny issue of Class War, which our betters have decided is strictly not something the proles may now discuss.

The 21st Century British are such a road-bound, moaning mass, the state of the hopelessly outmoded road infrastructure being a constant antagonist and subject of conversations in the pubs and dining rooms the length and breadth of the island. To revive the figure of the Highwayman as a modern villain is totally necessary, almost a natural, impersonal act of vacuum filling, rather than a personal act of (re)creation.  This Highwayman is a  Ballardian beast of the motorways: carjacker, carswapper, dogger, the archetypal phantom hitchhiker – stalking the traffic jams and the car parks and the service stations, with the endless reaches of the central reservation as his own criminal fiefdom.  His first crime - two in the back of Richard The Hamster Hammond’s head. Knight & Squire vow to bring him to justice for this foul deed by… next week maybe, week after? Just whenever alright? No rush.

Metalek the Xenoformer - Morrison refs this Constructicon-looking gent all the way back in JLA Classified 2, in the arc that had the very first appearance of the modern Squire, and relaunched the Morrison micro-continuity which had lain dormant in the DCU post his original JLA run. Looking to all the world like an alien, gatling-gunning Scoop from Bob the Builder

As Botswana Beast remarks elsewhere, Metalek is Zoidsy and Transformersy enough to be claimed as a British native. Under the pens of young lunatics like Morrison and the oft-eulogised Simon Furman, these eminently disposable Japanamerican franchises were given a compellingly violent dramatic charge in the Marvel UK comic books that remains unmatched in toy-ad/funnybook history. If you think the stormy horrorist dread of Final Crisis was something, you are going to love The Black Zoid. (Question for interviewers to put to Morrison: What the hell was going to happen with Sgt. Sclater?)

Panel 4 - Batman can’t get a word in edgeways. Funny, Beefeater does bang on.

Page 9

On Saturday, when I bought this issue, I was waiting for a long overdue visit from honorary Mindless Brother Yawn. His train was delayed by two hours by a fatality on the track. At Purley.

Pearly Kings & Queens, like Morrisers, are a familiar but inexplicable  figure on the cultural landscape. Here’s some having a piss against a wall. It’s a well known fact that Pearly Queens piss standing up:

A definitely and defiantly London tradition, even country boys like me will be unable to remember a time when they weren’t aware of Pearly Kings. There’s always one or two knocking about the fringes of folky festivals, around Bonfire Night perhaps, even far out into the countryside. The polished buttons gleaming on their costumes wink at you soulessly, implying an accusation: why are you so confused? What are you afraid of ? Why are you afraid of me, me old china? Their outfits are pure coded language, and if you haven’t the wit to decipher them, they are simply alien, a total threat to the stability of a child’s world.

Zom: Don’t think they’ve ever elicited that sort of reaction from me, but they are strange. It’s all very well pointing out that their roots lie in charity, but most people almost certainly have no idea about any of that. They’re curiosities, anachronisms, a bit of colour to spruce up local news stories, and as such they’re better left unexplained and slightly mysterious, to do otherwise would be to rob them of their appeal. Remove their true history*, which the majority of us have no choice but to do given that we know bugger all about it in the first place, and like Bobsy says you’re left with the weird language of their outfits, and a plethora of odd and ill fitting connotations.

*Thinking about it, like morris men, in many ways like the iconography of Bonfire Night (hey, come to my local, Lewes Bonfire, and tell me that it’s all about Guy Fawkes or the 17 Protestant Matyrs, for that matter), the strength of the Pearly image overwhelms any factual account of their origins.

Bob: Pearly has previously been glimpsed in the shadows back in Bulleteer. He’s still in the shadows now, but we get to know him quite well. He’s playing dominoes, but surely he’s not The Domino Guy -  it’s too soon for that reveal, got to be…

His cell is one of several silly visual gags in the issue - it’s pretty cramped, but for all that it’s basically a Cockney paradise. He’s got a compendium of board games, a dartboard, an old joanna (piano), and even a tank full of eels ready for the jellying (jn the wild, cockneys survive on a diet of jellied eels, cockles, whelks, weak tea and cheap gin).

Pages 10-11

The echoes here with Batman’s interrogation of the Joker on the nature of the Black Glove in DC Universe #0 are pretty clear, and this scene also goes out of its way, starting with the boot-level view on page 9, to make explicit parallels to the interrogation scene in The Killing Joke, which by now is like the ur-scene of Batman/Joker sit-down pow-wows. The battle of All-Beard and No-Beard continues, but it isn’t really a battle.

Pearly’s speech in panel 1 is pure self-mythologising bullshit,  traditionally unappealing trait of the London criminal classes. For competing royalties, read feuding underworld empires, simple as that.

The watermark on the bottom of Pearly’s mug is a potential saga in itself. Is it simply branded prison issue? If not, is a chunky big mug like that the sort of design favoured by Royal appointed potters? Or is it Pearly’s own Royal crest? Is his family’s power a bit more well established than one suspects? Is his rhetoric in fact true?

Zom: Considering that the royal crest is used as the HM Prison logo I’m going with not a pottery seal pottery, but it does resonate nicely with his claim to the royal line.

Bob: If Pearly is using the Royal crest to signal to Batman where the mine is, then it would probably be one of the famous Northern pottery companies.

The reference to Arthur and the cauldron of rebirth brings to mind stern Tom Eliot’s famous Modernist Grail epic The Waste Land, which Morrison can never go for long without nodding to. It mentions ‘Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks‘ which could provide a clue to the nature and identity of King Coal’s formidable wife; refers to an underground pool, has the words ‘those were pearls that were his eyes‘ (twice); and contains the famous lines:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over Westminster Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

[emphasis added*]

Zom: The cauldron of rebirth combined with Pearly’s talk of Donna might add up to an obtuse reference to the Waste Land, but what it definitely does is add more fuel to the Arthurian fire. Wait a minute, didn’t Grant Morrison once visit the DCU’s Arthurian period..? More of that lovely Morrisonian private-continuity stuff.

Pages 12-13

Bob: Talia’s money is so good she can apparently hire doctors who live an entire universe away… Or do AIM have a universe-next-door franchise too? I guess if anyone’s going to, it’s them.

Page 14

Panel 1 - So it’s December 21st-22nd when this takes place, an auspicious date in Morrison comics, going all the way back to The Invisibles again. (The lack of Christmas decorations in the London scenes is a little odd though.)

Panel 2 - That Ley node is hilarious - ‘Yeah mate, follow the standing stones to the old abandoned mine shaft, take a left, past the barrow and on to the church. Can’t miss it.’ They’re not normally that easy to spot.

‘Rendle Colliery’ - That’s got to be a reference to the Rendlesham Incident. This helps us a bit with the location too - If the mine is in northern pottery country, King Coal’s territory (where he does what he wants), then there’s no way you could get there from London by Whirly-Bat. If it’s in the county of Suffolk though, just a little way north-east of the capital, then it works a lot better. As well as having Rendlesham, Suffolk is also the spiritual home of British hauntology …

‘Mrs Thatcher’ - King Coal was one of the press’ nicknames for Arthur Scargill, leader of the miner’s union at the time of the Miners Strike c.1984 and Mrs. T.’s archenemy (one of several). Please note: pro-Thatcher comments left on this thread will result in the author being banned from posting on Mindless Ones Dot Com for ever and ever.

Zom: Add together a (haunted) coal mine, an oblique reference to Arthur Scargill, and Pearly’s warring tribes of Britain, and you can’t help but evoke memories of the Miners’ Strike in British readers. Not that I think Morrison has anything particularly political to say here, or if he does I don’t think he has said it yet, just that by gesturing towards the Miners’ Strike he’s borrowing some of its ominous energy. People died; families were destroyed, torn apart from without and within; communities - whole towns - lost; the dream of a different kind of Britain was thrown into a deep dark pit and the Thatcher-Blair era ushered in.

There sure as hell are ghosts down there in the dark, as Morrison well knows.

Page 15

Bob: Beryl’s line here feeds into the strange justification that Dick has for his plan, more on which in a minute.

Luminous miners. See, if the National Union of Miners had been able to show that kind of ingenious adaptability then they wouldn’t have got shut down, would they?

Page 17

Get in there Cyril! I think this is the first time we’ve seen The Knight get his hands properly dirty.

‘Mad Mental on Magic Mushrooms‘ indeed.

Hammer again. Uncle Amicus would be a good name for a British supervillain with a dodgy regional accent, btw.

Zom: Amicus being in this instance not a trade union but Hammer House of Horror’s rival film company

Page 18

Welcome Batwoman, the JH Williams III/Alex Sinclair version.

Page 19 I

Is there a marked simplicity of line on Beryl and Cyril’s mugs that gives off a very strong DC Thomson vibe? Am I looking into it too much? Thomson were Morrison’s first professional comics employers, of course.

Panel 3 - You know you’ve probably been reading too many Grant Morrison comics when you look at at a panel like this and, instead of assuming a technical error, decide that there has probably been a dimensional jump since the last panel, or a demonic bodyswap, something like that. Serendipity is at work in this panel - with the speech balloons where they are, this micro-scene takes on a new psychedelic unreality, recalling the Batman-Batwoman alien space drug flashback from the first issue of the Batman/Final Crisis interlude:

Where am I ?
I’m the new Batman.

Zom: Lulz!

Panel 4 - Speaking of which - the Bruce’s body question:  it’s just one of Mokkari & Simyan’s clones, from the Bludhaven bunker, that somehow got into a Bat costume, isn’t it?

Pages 20-21

Batwoman’s argument is right, at least within our normal human logic - the resurrection of zombruce is a bad idea. But in superhero logic, it’s necessary. Dick has been doing this since he was a child, and knows better than anyone how it works. Superheroes personify their troubles and hit them with their fists until they’re gone. Traps must be sprung, and bad ideas must sometimes be seen through to their grisly conclusions. In the logic of the superhero, the inevitable confrontation between Batmans new and old must be hastened. The psychodrama cannot be evaded, but must be worked through - battled with, risk and all, in order to achieve healthy reconciliation.

Beryl knows what’s what - see her pointed remark as she and Dick get into the mine elevator - this is the secret reason why Dick has brought her and Cyril along- it will be good exorcise for them too to go toe-to-toe with the Batman-sire, helping Cyril come to terms with his father’s tragedy, and Beryl more meaningfully wriggle her way into the broken Squire role that Cyril in his distress left behind.

This helpfully fanwanks away the ‘hypocrisy’ charge, re: when Dick fought Tim Drake to stop him resurrecting his parents. Dick knew then that the real issue at stake wasn’t Tim’s parental loss, which he had to work out for himself, but was Robin vs. Nightwing, how each would cope with their legacies and destinies, working out their own anxieties of superherodom in the only way that makes sense - it just hadda happen, because X demanded it.

Page 20 panel 4 - ‘Wouldn’t You?’ Largely contradicting what I’ve said above, Dick invokes the dark magic of the classic Burroughsian curse.

Page 21 panel 4 - Nice Bat-knuckles.

Zom: Hypocrisy might concern others but not I. Morrison’s comics always pick and choose their continuity. It’s all about his vision and what makes the floppy on your lap fun to read (Grant often seems to privilege the experience of reading a monthly comic over the logic of the story arc - should write a post about that one day but it would take research and I struggle to be arsed). Anyway, Bob’s intriguing fanwank aside, I think Dick’s justification works just fine on a psychological level. People define themselves by what they do, and Dick has always been Bruce’s little monkey wrench (to quote the Tank), always there to get him out of the tightest of spots. It’s who he is, and it’s one of the pillars of their relationship.

Last page

Zom: These ‘next time on Batman and Robin’ bits are good fun. They have the intense energy of any good trailer, reinforced by the all deadly all the time red on black colour scheme.

Only problem is that they spoil! Which brings me to the only problem I has with this comic. I knew Batwoman was going to show; I knew that there was very likely going to be a Lazarus Pit and an attempt to ressurect Batman. I would rather not have known these things, especially the latter.

Bob: How can something in the comic be a spoiler?

*This is a lie of course. the line is ‘flowed over London Bridge‘, which is a mile or so east of where Dick Grayson does his car-hopping trapeze act. It’s only comics. Maybe in the DCU version of The Waste Land, it is Westminster bridge.. it’s literally umpossible to know for sure…

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The enduring popularity of the A-Z Handbook of the X?X Universe books are a testament to this - the costume, the name, the paraphernalia, the ‘vital statistics’ (so porno), and the stripped-back plot recaps that the Handbook-style entries offer are the pure flavour, the total hot- drug effect, of the strongman funnybook. The superhero, a figure without a background, exists perfectly well, separate to the superfluous storytelling and other dimensions the comicbook medium affords. After all, if it’s all about wish fulfilment and fantasy-projection, the other stuff just gets in the way - just show me, in crazy colours and moody lighting, the bare (oo-er) image of the proud superthing, standing erect, and let me do the rest of the work myself (stop!) All that you need is a cool, tight image and a few terse syllables of context (of which the name, both descriptive and directive in its ideal form, is the concentrate). and you  can have that uncanny charge the trueborn superhero fanman is always chasing.

Which is to say…

In honour of the Dark Knight Detective’s visit to our fair isle, and directly inspired by the following line from this interview -

‘a bunch of new British villains we haven’t seen before, all with ridiculous regional dialects‘

These words are basically manna to us Mindless Ones, and so we thought that we would have a competition in celebration of #7, the most spunkworthy Batman & Robin comic yet dreamt (I haven’t read it yet, btw, but y’know, I have faith.)

The way to play is so easy even an X-Men fan could understand it. Simply write in, either via the comments below, or to mindlessones@hotmail.co.uk you’re the private type, with your idea for a new British Batman villain we haven’t seen before, with a ridiculous regional accent. Points will be awarded for originality, silliness, scariness and humour, and extra magick bonus points if your villain somehow ends up bearing a passing resemblance to one of the ones that actually appears in B&R issues 7, 8 or 9. Provide a visual reference if you can, along with a name, catchphrase, a neat summation of the character’s powers anbd high-concept. Try to supply some dialogue, written in phonetic accent-ish. Reach deep into those stereotypes. Make us believe in them. Make us want to read stories of them punching, and in turn being punched, through a drystone wall.

We were bored and excited earlier, so we came up with a few of our own, to give you an idea of the special kind of nonsense that we’re looking for, and because it pleased us greatly so to do:

The Wurzel
He’s from round my way. That’s all you need to know.

Harridan
Like the Scots-Man’s wife from Samurai Jack. Deadlier than a deep-fried Mars bar addiction, her poisonous ways incurable even by the marvellous restorative powers of Buckfast’s famnous Tonic Wine.

The Dobber, and his sidekicks, Jakey and Ned
More above-the-border maniacs. Ever wondered what’s slowing Quitely down? This says it all:

Hessian
Clad in jute, the most terrifying person on earth. Impossibly ancient, she claims to be responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

Tea Leaf
The bad boy of Bow. The real John Constantine.

Scallywag
Liam Gallagher gone Killer Croc.

We’ve shown you ours - now show us yours!

Oh yeah, THE PRIZE! We’re not quite sure about this to be honest, though we do know that it will be two-fold: 1) We will send you a Grant Morrison bit of tat rarity that only the very hippest nerdotrons would have in their collections; and 2) Our very own Zom will, based on no more than your prompt, bang out a few-hundred word Rogue’s Review of your new pet, detailing just why your brilliant idea is quite so awesome, how he fits into the Bat mythos, and why we are so lucky to have this new addition to the greatest Rogue’s Gallery in all comicdom.

Is that it?  Oh yeah, closing date - get your entries to us by the Sunday after the Wednesday that Batman & Robin #9 comes out. Though bear in mind that earlier entries successfully predicting the stereotypes that will appear in the story arc will, of course, stand a better chance of winning.

Good luck, and when you are bad, may you be very, very bad.

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Starman #81 by James Robinson, Fernando Dagnino, Bill Sienkewicz & Matt Hollingsworth

First up, art sentence: the art looks fucking doss, because it’s drawn - inked, but whatever (no-one survives a Sink-ink, except John Paul Leon) - by Bill Sienkewicz and therefore looks like Bill Sienkewicz, which is fucking doss, and also Matt Hollingsworth colours it and he is the best colourist, especially at the murkier end of the palette.

(Seriously, if you want to say a Bill Sink comic, any one of them - if you want to say “hhm, not sure about the art” or, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, fact is: if you want to say something like that you are making a dick of yourself.)

Right! Comic-reviewing credentials, I think you’ll agree, well established this is a pretty interesting one; I pre-reviewed it as “James Robinson pisses his final chips, probably”. The chips being his credibility as a once-capable, fan-favourite writer. The chips being a casino metaphor. The chips being how I - in my opinion which is valueless (beyond or beneath, you the reader may interact and decide, it’s the new format) - how I feel about James Robinson. As a human being. What his worth. To me.

Is?

And actually, to my surprise, James Robinson did not piss his final chips but instead turned in a thoroughly decent comic for probably the first time since he last wrote an issue of Starman, eight-and-a-half years ago. I say probably, I’ve not read all of them - six or so, it felt like infinity, of the most time-dilatingly dull Superman comics of all time, which considering the average standard of dullness in Superman comic [fucking dull, broseph] is likely an achievement of some moment and an eight-issue run on Batman as a lead-in to Morrison taking over the title, something I hyped myself into believing was half-decent due to overexcitement, and then I quite reasonably stopped reading them, the James Robinson comics, but man o! Some people read them for me. Others showed me pictures. And I don’t want to, look - I’ll be out the door before we turn into scans_daily or you can put me in the crosshair, aim-for-the-heart - I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to take things out of context and rudely and roundly condemn, but I’m pretty certain nothing else in the latter Justice League issue could conceivably make up for murky-depthy chats with Zombie Doctor Rapelight. It would take a bit of doing, over several comics, to redress that little soulquake.

So, but this is okay, this comic? It’s pretty okay, I would give it three to three-and-a-half brains; yeah, call it a 3.5er for the art. It is, it transpires, a welcome return to Opal City, it got me to reread Starman #80 for research (Research! You must always do research if you wish to be a critic on the comics blogosphere) and that was… I totally loved doing that. That hit just about every right note that a DC superhero comic should or could upon closing, it has a touching tribute to Archie Goodwin in the back, it’s really quite an emotional experience, I got quite Mist-y. This ain’t colour-of-nostalgia speaking; I was quite bloody miserable in 2001, and understandably concerned the years might have taken a sheen off somewhat, but not excessively, treasured memories of Starman, the original series, sections of which had already proven trialsome to go back and reread. Batman/Hellboy/Starman - you’d be right to expect that to rule, how could it conceivably not, but it’s bollocks.

This issue (whose contents I am going to discuss not at all, except to say for a more authentic feel there should have been a lot more misplaced boldface stresses) proved that, to some degree, James Dale Robinson can still write a comic. So why isn’t he? I think he - and bear in mind, if it need be said, that this is wholly supposition, I know not how a sausage is made nor the sausagemakers - like Brian Azzarello writing Doctor Thirteen, was not really a fan of - not in love with - superhero comics, but rather of the past and of antiquities, and like Azz utilising obscure, pointless bands that he loved anyway to write obscure, pointless superheroes that someone presumably feels likewise about… basically that was what that was about, Starman. That was an actual asset, not to be in love. The past, its ochre, its eternally dissipating hue, and it worked for the most part; it was was informed by this, there was its foundation. With the other DC books, it’s like - there’s no ‘there’ there, as they say, nothing underlies them, and they read like editorial-driven shitfests, they really did. As if script-notes have come back saying “make more odious“/”not enough tedium“/”I didn’t feel ruined as a person by this experience, can you juice up the miasm of despair a bit?“, etc. It’s a confluence of knowing popular American comics are writer-driven at the top-end and a desperate drive to continually rebrand the subsidiary’s sole assets that’s led to this end; it isn’t working in this case, just as it never does with Peter Milligan, who can at least turn in a half-decent, no more, no less, Batman comic. James Robinson wrote Leave it to Chance. James Robinson wrote London’s Dark. I can only imagine he is doing a lot better out of comics these days, and this issue just about earned it for the first time in a long time. (BB)

Amazing Spider-Man #618 by Dan Slott, Marcos Martin & Javier Rodriguez

When does a comic stop dealing in long standing conventions and veer headlong into a brickwall made of pastiche? That’s the question I found myself pondering after reading Amazing Spider-Man #618.

I’ve enjoyed much of what I’ve read of the new Spider-line, but I have to question whether it’s appeal is particularly healthy. The focus on new new villains and new old villains, the bubbly soap-operatics, the densely packed panels and incident filled issues. The spider-quips, love triangles, the Daily Bugle and Aunt May in peril. That right there is Spider-Man, and I’m absolutely certain that that’s what the line’s heavily editorially controlled creators want me to think.

In #618 we get a slew of baddies, multiple-returns from the dead including the return of two classic villains, evil Aunt May, yep that ever trusty love triangle (that includes the Black Cat), and more angst tha you could shake a stick at. Not only that but the art team treat us to Ditko-esque layouts, panel constructions, and line work, topped off with a sombre pastel colour scheme not entirely unreminiscent of the late sixties colour palette.

It’s true to say that none of this amounts to full-blown pastiche. A heavily diluted modern sensibility informs the book and provides much of the humour, but it does so at the expense of the verisimilitude. The book as a whole is just too knowing, too aware of the conventions on which it is built to be truly entertaining. There’s a fun of a sort to be had in recognising how the traditions of the spider-comic are being deployed and toyed with here, but it’s, if anything, a guilty kind of fun.

But despite these gripes they’re is something undeniably refreshing about this comic. Some of the cliched storytelling techniques on display couldn’t be more at odds with Marvel’s current focus on pseudo-realist psychology and emphasis on plot over incident. Soap opera and melodrama aren’t without their faults but they’re not without their pleasures either, and the sheer imaginative brio embodied by the line’s spider-foes is commendable in and of itself.

So while this line of books and the hoary cliches on which it is built could teach other Marvel titles a thing or two about entertainment ultimately its role certainly isn’t pedagogical, and it’s hard to imagine reading something this beholden to its past on a regular basis. (Z)

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It came out yesterday, and comics never come my way before Saturday evening. But the interviews with mister words and the terrifically mouthy mister pics have been greedily consumed like soylent green for aging ex-Vertigo kidz, so there is some pre-knowledge on my part - there’s enough around concerning the general concept (Gormenghast as done by Amblin/Dreamworks, interiors animated through the fever dreams of a sick kid) and future issues of JtB to be able to take a good guess at what is going on in the pages that so incensed the CBR reviewer. He hates them because they’re decompressed, because they take too long to tell too little, and because they’re ‘lazy’, but mainly because they are empty. They carry no information. He brandishes Scot McCloud’s Understanding Comics (a book much less read than it is found upon waking, open at page15, on the chest - apologies if the rest of this post is a little boring, by the way) before himself to deflect criticism of the basic chumpishness of his analysis, but…

Looking at the pictures he quotes as an example (quoting pictures - only in comics), it’s interesting to note how dense they, how pregnant with possible meaning and narrative propulsion. How articulate, and how wordless. Ultimately, how poor a choice of material to try to build that complaint around. Say it louder: Only in comics (and only on the internet):

Murphy’s deft use of the visual language of the funnybook is as fluent as it is witty. Start, of course, with the cheekily helpful arrow at the bottom left, which guides the eye up via its dust trails to the departing school bus, which looks like it’s about to be ground up by the town’s teeth before being swallowed by the ominous break between the clouds. The perspective on the elevated cables, even though in-scene they are plunging downwards,  towards the distant convergence point in the centre of the page, actually guides the eye in the opposite direction, back up to the top of the page.  The arm of the street light, an embedded, less obvious but no less effective arrow than the one we began with, slides the gaze neatly across to the left of the page, forming a bridge with the tree branches, that slopes us gently down onto our object.

The house, glowering and alive with camouflaged signifiers, tightens the focus of the eye, via the chimney onto Joe, our hero. Gathered up into the psychic territory of the house by the cradling but heavily insistent arm of the outer brick wall, the panel, even at this close curl of the spiral looks into its own and Joe’s future, showing us with the line of the handrail, the direction he will take along the porch, and on into the house.

Onto the next page and the added element of multiple panels, the open front door starts us on the right hand side of the page and across to the left. Gratuitous manga references here aren’t necessary, but the implication of a phase shift, a destabilisation in the concrete norms of the comic-reading process (form and structure matching theme and plot), are clear.  This simultaneously, and pardoxically, neatly balances a sense of verite, keeping the perspective as Joe would experience it, taking the leftwards turn from the veranda into the house, as we saw from the previous page. As the eye catches up with Joe in panel one, half way across the living room floor, it is guided into the centre of the page, where it will hover for a moment before dropping straight downwards into the stacked tier of panels which forms the rest of the page.

The reader is being told, in quite direct terms, about Joe and his house. Joe has left the door open - he’s not quite with us at the moment. His home is huge, but the furnishings are not modern.

Panel two shows us another room in the house and Joe’s continuing journey onward. The occlusion of his head, and the panels strange POV, is again telling. Joe’s head is somewhere else. So who is the mysterious subject, the bodiless consciousness, who lives in the corner of the kitchen ceiling?

Panel 3, further and further. The message here couldn’t be more simple in expression or implication: there is darkness in the basement. Murk in the subconscious. Joe’s cautious glance toward it suggests his awareness, on some level, of this darkness,  and that it is at least partly generated by Joe’s head. We are learning that the house’s interior, the scene of our rapidly unfolding drama, is ideo-plastic - it responds physically and energetically to the thoughts of those in it.

Count the planes, the dimensional thresholds, occurring simultaneously in panel 4, the panels-in-the-panel. We have (1) the paper boundary of the page itself; (2) the frame of the front door; (3) the second door frame leading into the transitional space of the corridor; (4) the third door frame leading again into another transitional space, this time the stairwell (following the line of which should mean that the reading direction of the next page starts in the upper-left corner, a return to a level of normality which one suspects will not be echoed in the fabric of the issue, and Joe’s poor head, for long. Four separate ontological categories in one handy scene.

Comics is a visual medium. It has them at its disposal of course, but it does not need words to signal its meanings. The image, the picture, the panel, is always everywhere. It’s tempting to try posit the comic-spaces that aren’t visual, that occur in a state that is dominated by the verbal side of the words-and-pictures bilateral equation that we tell ourselves comics are made of. Is even the space inside the captions and dialogue balloons purely verbal space, or does the fact that even the design of the font will carry its own aesthetic charge and semantic implications; and the placement of the bubble in-panel instantly renders it subject to relation via the interior time, space and logic of the image? Examples of comic pages without words are abundant, examples of comics pages without pictures much less so. Because the merest line of panel guttering instantly turns a page into a picture, one has to think of Gull in the bardo becoming god; Dane McGowan seeing his reflection in a blank mirror; Tristram Shandy homages. Even then, the page is subsumed by the language of the  comic, becomes a single, large, panel-less panel, a splash page, bleached by an excess or dimmed by a shortage of light.

Even when they don’t have words in them, comicbook pages still have to be read.

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Neonomicon Hornbook by Alan Moore, Jacen Burrows, Avatar

New Moore, but is it MOAR Moore? Seeing as this is a 9 page preview (plus script) you’d hope that it was. It would be failing somewhat in its job if it wasn’t, eh? So the good news is that yes I wanted MOAR but only because Al’ is so good at this stuff. His (spoilers) set up could have been phoned in: two FBI agents - an uptight plain Jane and a handsome go-getter - visit the looniest of murderous loonies who is currently imprisoned in a maximum security blah blah to get his insights into blah blah horribleness. This being the sequel to Moore’s The Courtyard (a prose story previously given the oxygen of publication by Avatar) the Cthulhu Mythos has been carefully kneaded into the mix, but that will come as no surprise to any of the readership.

This being Moore it shines just bright enough in the details to pique your interest, and we are left with the distinct impression that Alan’s take on the Cthulhu Mythos probably will be at least half as fun as we’d expect it to be which is considerably more fun than most comics littering the racks. I don’t want to speak much more about the specifics because, given the slightness of this demi-issue, to do would spoil absolutely everything for you.

Art paras: Jacen Burrows is currently the darling of Avatar and one of the go-to guys if you’ve got horror in mind. His work here is fine, just expressive enough to handle the dialogue heavy script, and the pivotal interview with the maniac, and on the strength of his work on Ennis’s Crossed we know that his gore cred has been earned, but at heart I suspect Burrows is strictly a body horror kind of guy. I certainly haven’t seen any work of his that would suggest his range stretches far past naturalism and stock monsterous forms, and that worries me because ideally I’d want to see an artist tackle the Outer Gods who was just as at home with the abstract as the everyday. Someone who could take visions of the hackneyed Cthulhu mythos to new and surprising places.

Perhaps I’m underestimating Burrows, and if there was a ever a creative partner who had it in him to stretch a guy it’s Moore. Unfortunately another possible outcome is an artist overwhelmed by the talent of his collaborator. Certainly the current lack of synergy between the inking and the digital colouring isn’t working in Jacen’s favour. We’ll just have to wait - 8 months - and see how it turns out.

My go.

PunisherMAX 3
by Jason Aaron & Steve Dillon

The last two issues of this had been really quite good – a superhero plot cleverly thrown into naturalistic lighting, a big fat threat coming up strong, while Frank goes about his dreary business, killing for the Kingpin without really realising it. The art was cool and controlled, seeming to promise an imminent break from its self-imposed limitations, like it was itching to get some blood in the ink as soon as the story would let it. Wise heads seemed to be in control. The odd rapey Millarism aside, all was going great guns. Was this title actually going to get back to its former glory?

It should have been so straightforward. Straight as a laser, the plot of the Punmax’s first (and ideally, only) Kingpin story should have been very simple indeed – four and a half issues of Wilson Fisk’s terrifying ascent to the top of the gangster tree, with Frank, largely absent,  slowly circling closer while realising the enormity - lets not be coy: the fatness of what he’s dealing with. Half way through issue five they come face to face, and the next issue and a half is Manhattan in flames as they go at each other, finally getting down to a fists-and-teeth fight to the finish in Fisk’s office penthouse. Just as Frank has finally won and is about to cap the deal, Fisk is all like, if anything happens to me then my men will kill three innocent families etc., so Frank begrudgingly lets him live, just, in his ivory tower. ‘This ain’t over, Kingpin…’

So obviously, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and just because I am a simple man yearning for simple comics to reflect simple times. The introduction of The Mennonite (which is a cool name for a super assassin) was, though I live to be proved wrong on these things,  an unnecessary fork in the road. The past two issues have successfully established big Willy Fisk as a force to be reckoned with, the great white shark of the underworld kingdom. That would have been enough really – the remainder of the plot could have been carried along under that momentum, the PunMax equivalent of the game-changing moment in Gyo where the shark heads into the beach and does-not-stop. The dramatic tension should have just built and built onto itself, stretching the readers nerves to snapping point. Instead, The Mennonite’s arrival deflects the tension – ‘You thought the Kingpin was scary? Wait til you meet this guy!!’ No. tell me more abot the Kingpin. ‘Killer Amish’ is a fine idea on its own, I guess, but it can wait for another day. Tell me more about the Kingpin. Tell me more about why his existence is such an affront to Frank’s history.

This seems like such a clear point, such an obvious narrative mis-step, that it does incline me to think that there may be a very clever plan at work here, and that’s enough to keep me reading for now, to see if that suspicion is borne out. The uncertainty surrounding The Mennonite, whether he will be gunning for Frank or Fisk, puts the former into an interesting position. Can he kill The Mennonite without becoming the thing he hates most? But again, are these not issues that the Kingpin’s family would have made Frank confront equally well? Why the doubling up, the waste? This comic is about steel, not butter.  The Mennonite feels like a good character, on any other day, anywhere else, but here it’s threatening going to overstuff the compellingly lean narrative that had been established earlier. Never forget - MAX whatever, but this is still Marvel Comics, where rubbish things can and do happen without a whisper of warning…

In this issue, sadly, some rubbish things definitely did happen, even aside from the questionable, if intriguing, introduction of a new Big Bad. Frank and Fisk come face to face (you would normally say ‘finally come face to face’, if the episode wasn’t so thoughtlessly structured) in a scene that is completely undercut by some really ill-timed and juvenile, faintly misogynistic ‘humour’. It’s the sort of gag that Ennis does sometimes, though never in this title, and in that regard it is probably supposed to be a homage of some kind, but it falls completely flat, sacrificing the tension of the scene itself and retroactively reaching back into the previous two issues and deflating their impact as well. The two main players then do a bit of stagey, knockabout fighting that completely doesn’t get across how lethal they are, and generally the main line of the entire plot is sacrificed, with all of the effort and interest in the issue going into the maybe-significant arrival of the previously completely untelegraphed The Mennonite. (The Mennonite is a very satisfying thing both to type and to say over in your head – I really hope that’s not why he’s suddenly the most important character in the Punisher book.)

Art Para: A naked centenarian. A fat bloke. A crazy old vet. Some other stuff. None of it connects. Dude who did this art used to be the best in the game when it came to meat and impact, but it all feels a bit like sacks of spuds strapped onto dodgems. The word ‘meh’ was invented for art like this.

It’s almost like… mmm, not sure where I’m going with this… but by introducing the Kingpin and opening the Max Punisher up to influences from the mainstream Marvel U (it had been its own hermetically sealed universe herotofore, with Nick Fury being the only other pre-existing character to follow Frank in the leap between universes, though even that was the Ennis-verse Fury Fury, not the traditional 616 version), it’s almost as if the PMXU can’t survive on its own logic any more, and extra elements are required, shipped in from across the galaxies, to make the internal logic of the comic balance. Hands up who wasn’t thinking ‘Daredevil’ when they saw The Mennonite originally (tough, Christian-conflicted, family pressures, ginger)? The Kingpin graft tore a Murdock-shaped hole in the story, and this is how you fill it. Didn’t the scenes with his wife in her sickbed make you think of Matt in the convent in Born Again?  Rationally, and if handled with care, there’s no reason that the MAXiverse shouldn’t be able to support its own weight, even if we are going to have mainstream guest stars. Is there the craft here for it, though? Do people think this book is about naked grannies with shotguns, that that was all there was to it? This is after all Punisher MAX we’re talking about. This book matters. With this issue it took another step towards making itself irrelevant, again.

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Great to have him back.

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Hellboy – The Bride of Hell
by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben, Dark Horse

Is this really the first Hellboy comic that’s been called The Bride of Hell? Doesn’t that seem a bit odd? Anyway, it’s the first ‘Mignolaverse’ (ouch) book I’ve picked up I a loooong time. I gather I’ve been ‘missing out’, which, while regrettable on some level, is a state today’s comics fan, living in a glutton’s paradise, a market more saturated than a deep fried butter bomb with hot-choc sauce, should just get used to. Too much of that funnybook shit will give you a heart attack, especially if your lard-laden arse tries to chase down every last scrap of elusive four colour protein.

I’m not sure why this deceptively unhefty though slick little package found its way into my hands (actually I do - they placed it near the counter, and the fact that you know about these crude, unabashed selling techniques does little in my experience to defuse their potency). I’m glad it did, though not because the issue was uch of a revelation. Its swerves and rhythms were exactly those that I remember, and remember loving, when I first got my Hellboy taste on five or six years ago. The lack of innovation on display didn’t disappoint – rather it fixed Hellboy, even more than two movies, a library full of graphic novels and a hundred spin-offs have, as something of a permanent fixture, in my mind, in the ether, on my shelves, and out there in the misty regions of this funny business we call comic. Hellboy is just always there, like Superman. The bit where he whacks the demon with his stupid big fist is as familiar, as real and embedded in the cultural stuff-o-verse as meek Clark Kent, spinning around the revolving door to emerge as something like a god.

So The Devil’s Handshandy, or whatever this one is called, is exactly like a Hellboy comic, and that’s no bad thing. Hellboy, as it all came back to me, is basically about storytelling, about the sheer overwhelming profusion of myth and legend that clever, baldy little monkey called man has plastered all over the landscape of his fine, faltering planet. Mignola’s wholly democratic plundering, and reworking, of the world’s store of cool and creepy ghost stories (so that’s what religions were for! How many of us, I wonder, are then devotees of the church of MR James?) results in another unique and modern gem, mashing the legend of Saint Hagan, airport novel Templar legend and the story of Solomon’s taming of Asmodeus*, with a nod to the mystery of the rock-cutting worm. Hellboy, as usual, sits and listens like a good attentive little antichrist before going out and punching a demon’s head in. As a snapshot of what this comic is about, of what it does, of what it’s for, it’s more or less perfect.

[*Asmodueus is one of those ancient ‘forgotten’ demons who seems to get a cameo in a comic or somewhere almost every week. His appearance here seems to be in deliberate dialogue with the issue of Promethea that he popped- up in. The lesson there was, approach a demon like a gentleman and he will appear to you as such. Hellboy, whose mission is to normalise the abnormal and humanise the abhuman, approaches Asmodeus like a decent if wayward aristocrat, and gets a novel, deceptively careful story about the impossibility of being evil, and the sacrifices a society will make to sustain itself across the  millennia. And then he kicks his fucking head in.]

Art paragraph: The transitions between a few of the panels are a little awkward and all over the place, something that I remember Mignola’s pencils would do a lot too – except, the sheer manic energy of them would make the choppy, twisting ride seem completely smooth and natural, a trait which Corben’s stiffer, zombieface stipple effects do not quite manage to replicate. His unique personal evocation of pulchritude, medieval violence and high weirdness existing side-by-side otherwise fits the comic very well indeed.

Overall, I give this comic book four brains out of five.

What did you read this week Zom ol’ pal?

Siege 1 (of 4)
by Bendy Bendis and Olivier Copiel, Marvel

A lot’s been written about it by now, of course. It’s the latest big thing from Marvel, blah, blah, blah, Bendis, Coipel, blah. It’s the latest installment in the mega epic that Bendis has been telling for last five years or whatever, all part of the plan, etc… I don’t believe that at all. I don’t think Marvel should or would even consider planning their stories that far in advance and I think they’re probably smart enough to know that. What is true is that Bendis does a very good job of making it look like it all fits together, and what’s even more true is that for wide screen superhero comicbook action you can’t do much better than this.

Art paragraph: Coipel and the rest of the art team do an excellent job rendering both epic scale and close up action and Bendis supplies just enough believable and compelling plotting and dialogue to hang the whole absurd evil Avengers lay siege to Asgard over the American plains high-concept on.

There isn’t really much more to say about a comic like this. It doesn’t have anything to say, it doesn’t give you anything to think about (no, really, you at the back, it actually doesn’t), like 99% of superhero comics it’s hard to understand why you would even want to read a review of it, let alone write one, so it’s a good thing this isn’t one then. If you’ve seen the hype and you’ve read Marvel in the last few years you know what this is and you know whether you’d want to read it.

How many brains? I’d say it was a no-brainer. Hyuk.

Over now to our man who can, it’s the Bots’wana Beast…

Sweet Tooth #5
by Jeff Lemire, Vertigo

Yeah, the team cut. Coming in on the back, a man can’t help but have mixed feelings on the Kanyeezy rôle: it’s like, always welcome on a Jay record (”and I’m beasting off the Riesling/plus my n***** just made it out the precinct” is, primarily for the dessert wine boasting, clearly couplet of 2009) but my own shit ain’t so hot right now, with the vocoders. Daft Punk/Akira fixation, just slightly off-point.

Comics fans! Do you know, in addition to being named after Mark Waid’s (fairly turgid, I thought, but likeable enough in its ‘daft old cunt’ sort of way) Kingdom Come, the title-track on this - underrated, if you ask me, the pushback starts here - recent Jay-Z album is in fact entirely about your favourite superheroes? America! Your pop culture has become gratingly, achingly familiar as it colloids with every aspect of the present Now. I don’t listen to anyone except Jay anymore, because I want to know what the Illuminati’s thinking.

The post-catastrophe wasteland, for which I blame troubled Antisemites Eliot and Pound, case in point, is rehoving into focus on the popculture viewscreen; it never really went away, but there’s no-one left bar the creatively-panted to do any damage in the old sense. The expensively-panted, however…

Well, we’ll see. The best wasteland story ever was, is or will be is the MAX: Punisher - The End comic; that was as lacquer-black - Blacquer? I am going to try and make this happen as the post-noir term. You know that black liquid they sometimes have in expensively shot hip-hop videos? That’s all I’m into right now, lurid pulp, runny ink. Crossed is pretty that, too. I mean, basically a story of - they’re both like stories which seem to decide other end-of-the-world tales are, still, a bit soft-headed, a bit nice, let’s-not-fuck-around. Garth Ennis: a synonym for hard, like a boot in the puss from a granite-faced Aberdonian. They just seemed more realistic, man, to me.

Sweet Tooth’s first arc ended this last week with #5 and is basically relevant to my present interests, I believe the saying goes. I refuse to capitalise it. Capitalising is annoying. My comics grading is, as follows: great/good/okay/annoying/shit, you’ll need to know. These are equivalent to today’s rating system of brains, from five-to-one.

It’s pretty alright, this; I maybe wasn’t so hot initially, it’s very expansive, rustic and it - I think it’s reasonably-priced, actually, the trade will probably be quite cheap, I am about to recommend it to you. Consider Mindless Ones the Which? magazine, the independent consumer-choice web-publisher, of the comics blogosphere. “…a competitive hobbyist, Mindless Ones recommends the following items…” We should get paid for this.

So, it’s slow, but I find it evocative, pastoral and occasionally quite violent and inventive. It has quite the most pathetic, winsome protagonist I can think of… in popular fiction? Scooby-Doo was a coward, certainly. #5, and I haven’t checked the prior issues before this short review, does a job emplacing the reader quite firmly into its first person - hold up -

ART PARAGRAPH: through various frameworks, essentially narrative choices made by cartoonist Jeff Lemire; simplistic enough, anyone with a small vocabulary in comics reading will be familiar with them - the panel chronology drifting into disparate timeframes, most effectively, signifying unconsciousness during whirlwind action, an actual dream sequence something rarely utilised in all the comics I presently read. Astral plane all the time, obvs. I don’t read many comics by cartoonists, you know; it’s hard to separate pictures-from-narrative here, which is almost as though it’s how comics always should be. That said, I don’t tend to buy into auteur theory, because I like team sports and Socialism best, and therefore when I say “factory comic” it isn’t with a disparaging sneer for the workers. Necessarily. What I particularly like about Lemire’s cartooning is how it’s-sort-of-obviously-good-without-being-kind-of-a-dick-or-a-prima-donna-about-it, yeah? It’s slightly ugly, in the way that Paul Pope’s for example, isn’t. Paul Pope is the LCD Soundsystem of cartooning, Jeff Lemire is… ah, fuck. Mountain Goats? I don’t know about the modern music that much. Yeah, that’s an okay analogy. ART PARAGRAPH ENDS.

Half the fun of apocalypses is finding out how they started, and I’m certainly going to continue trying to find that out - it definitely seems to me, at this juncture, like this will be a better hinterland than Y: the Last Man, which was quite popular.

Good and four brains out of five (the fourth is behind the 4-grounded one, do you understand space, no you do not:)

Oh! Also a worried face, because what happens to Gus “Sweet Tooth”, at the end is quite worrying and they have a preview of the next arc, and it all seems quite concerning to me, the reader, and perhaps you also if you find out about this comic. The preview is an excellent idea, who says you can’t learn anything from Geoff Johns, by the way, I only got it today but Blackest Night #6 was totally brilliant, or root 26-out-of-five branes. I don’t think it matters if he knows he’s writing high-camp, who after all can divine the intent of the author, “if you knew everything about me, you’d be me” saith Miles Davis, I just totally loved it and would like to see it on stage performed by either retired Florida couples or really weird kids, such as the one in 16 Candles who looks exactly like me when I was 15, half a lifetime ago.

(far right)

I haven’t decided that yet. But it is tee-riffic

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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• If you spend all day on your hands and knees with no one to talk to then a good podcast can really perk you up.  In particularly dire situations an amusing man may even save your life.   Paul Foot has amused me greatly of late since his Resonance FM show has been made available in podcast form.  His mode of address is charming, like he’s being constantly distracted by his own head until a gush of comedy concept pours fourth.  He look a bit like a Roxy era Brian Eno too! (gl)

• 

  Not pranksters. Serious men

  After watching the Coen’s latest film A Serious Man, I found myself dwelling upon the fact that many, many film critics simply aren’t up to doing their job. Far from being the architects of empty cathedrals of meaning - a description of their work that is heavily implied if not outright stated in far too many positive and negative reviews - the Coen’s movies are and perhaps always have been very concerned with tackling deep and important issues. The fact that there are paid critics out there who don’t understand that A Serious Man, amongst other worthwhile things, poses difficult questions, troubles me immensely, but thankfully notable pundit Matt Zoller Seitz isn’t amongst them. Even better, he’s written an essay (one of ten on the best film makers of the decade) that attempts to undermine the popular and specious view outlined above. Personally I don’t think his analysis goes deep enough in that he seems to miss the point that much of the Coen’s work is explicitly philosophical - I doubt that anyone who knows anything about the studies of epistemology and intentionality would fail to see that A Serious Man has Serious things to say on those subjects. (z)

• Sesame Street + Phillip Glass + the geometry of circles = wonderful (z)

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