Post-atomic gold: Zilk-Dredd
April 27th, 2012
Quick look at how the trapeze strung out between these two strips is, on balance, making 2000AD the easy-best regularly published, mainstream, Anglophone, you know what I mean, don’t split hairs, comic on the racks today.
SILENCE! #12
April 25th, 2012
UP FROM THE DEEP, THIRTY STORIES HIGH, BREATHING FIRE, HIS HEAD IN THE SKY…
SILENCE!
IT’S SILENCE!!
and SILOOOOOOOOOOOOOKI….
In this 12th anxiety inducing episode of the World’s* Favourite* Podcast* Gary Lactus continues to sit at the table (verily) and The Beast is saddened by the imminent Geoff Johns revamp of his life. There will be blood…
After Lactus reveals his theme for America’s Got Powers, a strongly ethical SILENCE! news follows, before the pugnacious pairsome get all frisky with the latest comics fillies. Under the merciless eye of scrutiny this week…Peter Bagge’s Reset, Matt Kindt’s 3 Story, Garth Ennis’ Shadow (he knows, by the way), the truly exceptional Prophet (with added Dalrymple), King City, and Wonder Woman. But! Then! Gary Lactus reveals that he is the bravest man(god) on earth as he tackles EVERY SINGLE AVX and BATMAN: OWLS crossover issue released last week. And he plans to continue with this foolhardy plan until his eyeballs pop like cherry tomatoes on a griddle… what a guy! There follows a bit of discussion of Wolverine and the X-Men, and crossovers in general, and Lactus rounds things off with a mention of Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse’s Resident Alien.
That is not all, tough you lucky little piglets! The tenacious twofers then spend way too long discussing what kind of music superheroes listen to, before they head off into the sunset like Clint Eastwood and that orangutan in that film about Clint Eastwood and the Orangutan (and wasn’t it weird in that movie the way that when Clint hooked up with a lady, and then they’d go home and bump uglies and then there’d be a fucking orangutan in the mix…how fucking gross would that be having a post coital glow interrupted by a six foot ape wearing denim?????)
So dig yourself in, and await the heavy shelling that is….SILENCE!
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Click below for SILENCE! gallery please!
Diggers & Snatchers: Ghosts of the Cradlegrave Estate
April 22nd, 2012
Being: the third in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.
I know one thing – they’re out there and I’m in here. Or rather, we are. Burrowed into precariously rented homes, needing increasingly mutilated services, awaiting mail that brings nothing but threats and bad news, painfully aware that social participation is as demanding of contacts, salesmanship and resources as much as livable employment, vaguely bewildered at a city that announces NOT FOR YOU from every corner: This is the Condition of the Working Class in Bizarro Town. Occasionally supermarkets, burger bars and pasty chains beckon for our devalued labour; if we can demonstrate the ‘right attitude’ (note: I can’t). Failing that, providers of job-seeking ‘services’ extract their own value promising to train us in the ‘right attitude’ and mandatory salesmanship. Otherwise we can shut the fuck up, get off the streets, and watch TV shows informing us that we’re scum. Or, as far as one’s amour propre can allow, talk to faceless strangers on machines that mine and collect details of every careless utterance. This is how neoliberalism ends: Not with a bang, but whimpering, numbing Dystopian cliche. A design against life.
(Pere Lebrun, A Hungry Gorge)
Mindless Mad Men #4 – Signal 30
April 19th, 2012
Botswana Beast: A lot of folk seem to be wetting themselves about the quality of this episode, which – I mean, I liked it obviously, Pete Campbell being a prime turd and getting an unlikely comeuppance, but it didn’t seem so tightly structured or to have so much of an “aboutness” to it? I guess last ep was maybe – arguably – a bit too on the nose for some of it, this was more about just the characters? (My favourite MM ep is still the first season’s closer, just for frame of reference).
Amypoodle: Oh The Wheel is a very good episode. Very sad, amazing ad pitch, etc. So people are getting excited over this one? I can see that. I mean, I preferred last week’s (despite on the noseness), but that’s a personal thing to do with liking ghost stories/Joan, but Signal 30 was still pretty bloody good. In some ways it was very traditional fare with its alcohol greased dinner party in a suburban dream home and Pete Campbell acting like an ultra dick (which is of course going to be the main focus here, isn’t it?), and it came complete with lots of nods to the past, particularly the first season, so it’s exactly the sort of episode someone who likes Mad Men should like.
But it very definitely was about something: Status. Status and Power.
More on status, power and Pete Campbell’s Don Draper meltdown after the cut!
SILENCE! podcast #11
April 18th, 2012
You can now subscribe from the itunes store. Search the podcasts section for “mindlessones” then you can subscribe, rate and review!!! Then promptly cancel as why would you want anything to do with this guff?
GET OUT OF THE ROAD YOU LITTLE FOOLS!
IN TODAY’S EAR-SCALDING INSTALLMENT: The Beast finds his life has taken on lashings of fully painted Euro-sauce, while Lactus drags his cosmic chassis from the sofa to the table!!! The Beast debuts his paean to internet fuckwittery ‘Steve Dave is Online’. SILENCE! News comes and goes like a ship in the night, but not before the Greatest Jingle of All Time makes an appearance.
Finally the pusillanimous pairsome get onto the important business of comics. They discuss America’s Got Powers from top British TV man, and all round alpha-nerd Jonathan Ross, SAGA no.2 from BKV and Fiona Staples. Lactus talks about Avengers Assemble and Avenging Spiderman and Avenging Avenginators vs X-Avengers (one of those is a fake, eagle-eyes!). Mark Millar and Dave ‘The Rave’ Gibbons’ new spy tale the Secret Service is chewed and digested; Frankenstein Agent of SHADE is a thing, Casey & Fox’s Haunt is too. Saucer County and the Shade – these are the things that little boys are made of… Lactus has a less yellow experience with Fantastic Four and then the Beast tackles the baffling but kinda brilliant Glamourpuss from Dave Sim in You Should Have Known Better.
All this and the second coming of Tupac Shakur? Surely not (don’t call me Shirley) I didn’t I said ‘surely’ (Oh. my mistake) That’s okay Shirley.
Don’t forget to click below for the SILENCE! gallery…
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Diggers & Snatchers: Staring Through Her Mother’s Eyes
April 16th, 2012
Being: the second in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.
If you’re going to talk about Cradlegrave, you’ve pretty much got to face up to this image at some point:
Stripped of context it’s just a doll, just a tired horror-movie prop, a signifier of terror rather than something actually terrifying. In context however, this dull prop seems far more potent:
The sense of surprise, that feeling of “what the fuck is that face doing in the middle of this conversation?”, is enough to give the image some fresh charge here. The last panel of the sequence hints at the answer, but for the duration of the two panels before it you could be forgiven for thinking you were in another, more Lynchian kind of horror story.
Still, even the most bewildering emanations in Cradlegrave trace back to fleshy, non-Lynchian sources, so it’s just as well that there’s more to the this sequence than lifeless eyes and startling incongruity.
Mindless Mad Men #3 – Mystery Date
April 12th, 2012
Amy: This episode wrapped its themes around itself so tightly the drama could have suffocated, but in the end it never got so arch that it failed to pack a punch even though as a construction it was pretty close to immaculate and, so, highly conspicuous.
Ad: Absolutely. It was testimony to the fact that Mad Men is only superficially realistic – realism is never so overtly self-conscious of its themes, or given to blurring the lines between dream and reality, for that matter.
Amy: It’s enjoyable to watch Weiner and co unpacking the theme of change in all these different ways, isn’t it? In Mystery Date it was all about the intrusion of an unknown element into the characters’ lives – a date with someone they didn’t know, a situation they couldn’t plan for. Basically they’re all Cinderella in Michael’s commercial, aren’t they, turning round to confront the stranger? We could break it down every which way, but that’s just a bit too anal for me. I think we should just play it by ear and discuss the threads we liked most.
Your date with mysterious mindlesses continues after this jump
SILENCE! podcast #10
April 11th, 2012
SILENCE! #10 IS NOW BACK UP. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, LOYAL FANS!
We are 10 today! That’s right SILENCE! Has reached double figures…look at it! Ahhh! Look at it’s cute little face….ahhhh…
Okay, enough.
In this episode Lactus continues to monitor the South Coast from his swinging cosmo-lounge, while the Beast reveals the details of his new Prestige Life. Not only that but Lactus unearths an extremely rare Booster Gold promotional item! (with thanks to big bad Bob Ferrie for sourcing it) Following that the dyspeptic duo barrel straight into the SILENCE! News, covering such cultural hot potatoes as Shaky Kane’s pop art act of terrorism and the re-colouring of Flex Mentallo.
With nary a thought for their, or your, safety the turgid twosome somersault into the week’s reviews covering Daredevil 10.1 (gah!), Action Comics (featuring the debut of Shit-eating Superman), the final issue of OMAC (One Man Actually Cares), Freedom, Avengers Vs X-Men (omigodtotallypsyched) Animal Man and Sweet Tooth, and Alan Moore’s Supreme. Not in that order.
Then the prosaic pair have a lovely long chat about Urasawa’a masterful Pluto, and the Beast takes us synth-rockin’ all the way back to the 80’s with the sublimely ridiculous Slash Maraud in the Beast’s Bargain Basement. In addition they fizz and pop with enthusiasm about Community in Notcomics before the show slides into gibberish for the Coming Attractions. All this and perhaps just a little bit more in the comics podcast that stands gills and flippers above all others, SILENCE!
What a show. What a world. What.
Remember these colossally egotistical man-tards need love to keep going. Please submit feedback, questions, erotic fan-mail and abuse to mindlessones@hotmail.com.
Click below for the SILENCE! gallery…
Whatever Happened to the Mentallium Man of Tomorrow?
April 10th, 2012
Or Flex Mentallo: A Moonrock Murder Mystery!!!!
Okay, as you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo is a very good comic by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, a four issue Dennis Potter style drama in which a young man who [may or may not] have taken an overdose of paracetamol looks back at this life through the lens of superhero comics.
As you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo hadn’t been reprinted until now because of various preposterous legal issues.
Now it’s finally been reprinted in a very handsome hardcover package, you [may or may not] be aware that it’s been the victim of a strange recolouring job, the sort of recolouring that transforms Flex Mentallo’s greatest foe The Mentallium Man from a Jolly Rancher nightmare…
…into the grayest daydream you never had:
Now, I’ll throw a couple of kind words in the direction new colourist Peter Doherty in a minute, but it has to be said that anyone who thinks that a character called the Mentallium Man, who is an exaggerated parody of an old-fashioned comic book villain, needs to look all clean and boring like that is just plain wrong.
Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that anyone who prefers this new incarnation of the character needs blasted with all five types of Flex’s own Kryptonite-derivative “Mentallium” at once:
Sadly we never find out what the fifth type of Mentalium, “Lamb and Turkey”, does to The Hero of the Beach, but I think we can take a guess and that our guesses will all be equally delicious.
Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1973
April 10th, 2012
Steven Moffat once said of Doctor Who that it “was a great idea that happened to the wrong people”. Some might think that this says more about Moffat than about Who (in my experience writers who think of ideas as ‘happening’ to other writers, rather than being produced by those other writers, tend not to have very many ideas of their own) but in some cases one can see what he means. The Three Doctors, and in general all the work of writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, tends to be a case in point.
