SILENCE! #266
April 30th, 2019
TURTLES HAVE SHORT LEGS, NOT FOR WALKING
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<ITEM> Oh look it’s another SILENCE! Or is it? Yes it is.
<ITEM> Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die mix background noise and prattle in a delicious, perfectly seasoned slow-cooked stew. Sponsorship! True Piss Crime! The Rule Of Three podcast on Leo Baxendale’s Willy The Kid! Black Summer! Admin! Something different in every spoonful! Tuck in!
<ITEM> Come with us to Reviewniverse with Myfanwy Tristram’s Ladies Of The Lakes, Grave Horticulture, Animal Man, Rad Erwank and Conspiracy Dog, Batman: Venom, Batman: Proficiency, My Pretty Vampire and a proper good discussion of Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard’s Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt.
<ITEM> Reckymends: Andrew Hickey’s A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
<ITEM> Shall we?
@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
MULTIVERSAL // DECAYED
February 26th, 2018
Or “What’s A Bottie Beast?” – A Love Story
Illogical Volume here, writing a wee introduction to an ULTIMATE CLASSIC! post by another Mindless because…. well, almost two years down the line, I’m still stuck on the Botswana’s Beast‘s last post on Multiversity, still trying to get a feel for what it’s doing, how it works.
It has something to sell you, sure, but it also wants you to ask what you’re buying.
It’s a bit like the comics themselves that way…
Some of the questions raised by this post still haunt me, primarily:
- Who the fuck is the Botwsana Beast, Duncan Falconer, the Dead Demon Rider?
- What’s the shape of our relationship?
- Why do I care?
These are transposed thoughts about my relationship with Multiversity‘s primary architect Grant Morrison, I think, though the process goes both ways – any increase in my familiarity with one seems to magnify my sense of intimacy with the other.
All of this is basically just me allowing myself to ask the standard English Lit question – “Who is this bastard and why is he lying to me?” – on a level that is disgracefully familiar. Having called him a bastard and accepted that he is probably lying to me at least some of the time – because hell, we’re all probably lying to ourselves at least some of the time – the challenge is to take this process to its unnatural conclusions…
Why do I care about Duncan?
Because he was on the Barbelith forum, where he was obviously Scottish, properly narky and endlessly left wing
Why should any of that matter?
Because it suggested that he was just like me, basically, but with better jokes.
Is that really all you wanted from the world, to go out and meet yourself in it?
No, and I won’t settle for the promise of self-knowledge either but hey – it might be a start!
If this seems like a fairly flimsy basis for letting someone into your mental space, making them a part of your consciousness and letting yourself worry about their happiness, ask yourself – who else have I made time for? Does writing some Animal Man comics provide better grounds for letting someone into your heart? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean we should write the whole thing off.
Nor does it mean that we should stop questioning what shapes we’re making ourselves into, how what we’re doing with our networks is allowing those networks to change us.
When I think of these comics, and the people that we’ve met through them, there are two words that keep coming to me, a worldview implicit within the mess of friends and fantasies I live in: “anguished materialism”, of the sort that might be understood by people who have tried to change the world using art and sigils alone and come up short. Because if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to trade in fictions that promise to rebuild the world around us, please let there be materialism in the mix. Please let there be an understanding of how bodies are exploited and turned again themselves, of how we’ll have to trade our best intentions for rent money once our spirits have been broken. Please let there be an awareness of the forces of production, but let there also be some anguish in there, let there be a determination that we can’t keep going on like this.
The sigil kids have had enough. They know that things don’t have to be this way, and that our times call for determination to fight and space to dream.
This is what I think about when I think of Duncan Falconer, the Botswana Beast, the Dead Demon Rider, without whom I would never have written for this website.
This is what his last post on Multiversity engineers, piece by piece, through its appeals to shared knowledge, to all of us… a machine built to contain the worst of the world in which it was created, but which is also designed to amplify the best of it, to give our hopes some form that might survive in the worlds yet to come.
Endtroducing…
HOW TO PASS THROUGH A PORTAL
Here, the map is the territory.
This is about to get seriously earnest, adjust your sets… I’ve read Grant Morrison comics from the age of 7, on and off (I was too much of a wimp for 2000AD as a teen and Batman: Gothic shat me right up), starting with this one and pretty much consistently every one for the last near twenty years (I didn’t get Final Crisis: Secret Files, a decision which haunts me still, and haven’t been keeping up with 18 Days, which is just barely a Grant Morrison comic), since semi-rediscovering him through The Invisibles.
“Yeah. I guess the fighting never ends, does it? It never ends.”
SILENCE! #219
March 28th, 2017
WHAT WHAT, MY POP ROCKS!
Gary Lactus hosts an epic mash up lash up* starring hard boiled gritty pre-Giuliani New York cop just two weeks away from retirement, Johnathan Dick and a hypnotic robotic Spare 5 who returns like the monster from an ever diminishing horror franchise! Better than that though is the explosive entrance of crime fighting duo The Beast Must Die and Mini-Beast, ready to deliver a 200+ megaton purple nurple right on the left boob of the London Underworld! Wanna know what we talk about? There was loads and load and plenty of it not comics. Here’s a list of words!
2000AD Titan Editions, akira, Animal Man, Beneath, Blair Witch, Cry of the Werewolf, Curse Words, Dennis Potter, Doom Patrol, Found Footage, Found Footage Films, Gabriel Hardman, Gi Joe Vs Transformers: The Movie, Hitman, horror, Invisible Republic, Johnathan Dick, Judge Dredd Deviation, Junji Ito, Justice League Trailer, Kong: Skull Island, Larry Cohen, Larry Fessenden, Lone Wolf and Cub, Manga no Manben, Mini Beast, Naoki Urasawa, Nemesis, Not Quite Hollywood, Roger Corman, Romaction, Romance of a different name, Sandman: Overture, Scratched Live!, Silence! Because the Film’s Started, Slaine Choose Your Own Adventure Comics, Stray Bullets, TBMD, The Beast Must Die, The Belfry, The Origin of Spare 5, walking dead
FEAR THE NIGHT!
*made you look!
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@theQuietusFilm
@kellykanayama
[email protected]
This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
How to Pass Through a Portal
April 16th, 2016
Here, the map is the territory.
This is about to get seriously earnest, adjust your sets… I’ve read Grant Morrison comics from the age of 7, on and off (I was too much of a wimp for 2000AD as a teen and Batman: Gothic shat me right up), starting with this one and pretty much consistently every one for the last near twenty years (I didn’t get Final Crisis: Secret Files, a decision which haunts me still, and haven’t been keeping up with 18 Days, which is just barely a Grant Morrison comic), since semi-rediscovering him through The Invisibles.
“Yeah. I guess the fighting never ends, does it? It never ends.”
That’s a mid-1986 copy of Spider-Man and Zoids, no. 18 to be precise – as an aside, the time is completely ripe for a boutique Zoids comic, in the style of yer Copra or Scioli Transformers/GI Joe, get Farel Dalrymple and the Study Group lads to do it or something. Anyway, the point is this: it’s impossible, or nearly impossible, to have that kind of relationship – thirty years(!!) – with an author outside of comics; maybe I could have had with Alexander McCall Smith or something, he writes kids’ books, he writes gentle mysteries in Botswana and Scotland – could maybe have worked, seems a bit mimsy to me. Accept the premise, move on.
Multiversity is a culmination of the writer’s motifs and core interests from 1986
“And the earth rushes up to meet him”
April 6th, 2016
Or: We are all of us in the shadow of the dicktree – by Kelly Kanayama/Maid of Nails
“Imagine out of all the gigs in town, right? You’re thinking — how hard can it be to stare up at the stars every night for a living?”
Those are the opening lines of Nameless, the most unsettling comic I’ve ever read (including a bit of Crossed, which didn’t unsettle so much as rub garbage all over your soul).
With the introduction of an astronomer who murders his family and scrawls mysterious words on the wall in their blood, we soon find out exactly how hard it can be to stare up at the stars every night. The stars, where J’onn J’onzz made his home, where the guardians of Oa hold court, from which Superman crashed into our world to help us believe a man can fly. Staring up at the stars is an act of hope, and in Nameless, for the most part, there is none.
You think, for instance, that people are dismembering each other with their bare hands, faces smeared with blood and human filth.
The doctors explain it was only a dream; it was all in your head.
What happened outside your head — when you were outside your head — is much worse.
SILENCE! #172
January 20th, 2016
YOU ARE A VAPOUR TRAIL, IN A DEEP BLUE SKY
In this innovative episode we find a hitherto undiscovered technical issue which means The Beast Must Die literally phones it this week. Nevertheless we manage to squeeze out a firm nugget of podcast gold. This is the equivalent of when a band releases it’s early demos, home recordings and the sounds of them farting om the bath and all the fans have to pretend that it’s really their favourite record, even though they miss the sheen and polish of the studio more than they could ever say and they force themselves to listen repeatedly through gritted teeth out of some ill-judged sense of loyalty and integrity even though the cold universe neither knows nor cares.
It’s like that. Are you ready to be heartbroken? Yes? OK then come join
<ITEM>Admin, admin getcha admin. Plus the technical problems rear their head.
<ITEM> Top new section ‘SILENCE! whilst we see if my cats sound like Chewbacca!’
<ITEM> What would YOUR Lynx fragrance be and why and how but mostly why?
<ITEM> Mark E. Smith’s forthcoming swing album
<ITEM> Reviewniverse hott and sexxxxy action. Multi-formats! Variable sound quality! The boys soldiering on like…soldiers recording a comics podcast? Talking All New All Different Avengers, Stray Bullets: Sunshine & Roses, X-Force, Epic Illustrated, Star Lord, Lobo: Convention Special, Animal Man, All New All Different X-Men, Snow Blind and so, so much more whilst somehow so much less.
<ITEM> Sorry!
Contact us:
click to download SILENCE!#172
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
You can support us using Patreon if you like.
This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
SILENCE! #70 with Warwick Johnson Cadwell
July 24th, 2013
This week Gary Lactus continues his tediously thrilling quest to find The Beast Must Die. Along the way he finds a BUMPER CROP OF JINGLES!
In the reviewniverse he bravely tackles The Mysterious Strangers #1&2, Wonder Woman #22, Animal Man #22, Justice League of America #6, Batman 66 #1, Number Cruncher #1, Avengers Assemble #17 and FF #9.
Then we have a Cartoon County chat with Solid State Tank Girl artist Warwick Johnson Cadwell.
Strap on and let’s go!
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
SILENCE! #61
May 7th, 2013
INSECT BOMBER BUDDHIST DRONING, COPPER CHORD OF AUGUST’S ORGAN
What, precisely, is your problem meatsacks? It’s me of course, your humble magnificent Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735. I’M your problem. Well, that and the sliding ennui of your grinding existences and the gradual disintegration of your rickety physical frames. Oh and of course the universal problem of COMICS…and SILENCE!!
<ITEM> Sponsorship Boys, Sponsorship Boys Oi Oi Oi! Bringing tales of Mummy Lactus at Dave’s Comics and Free Comic Book Beast at Gosh Comics.
<ITEM> Silence! News comes screaming through the stratosphere with US news grunions Gary Lactenberg & Danny Beastman and…Distrinct Council comics!
<ITEM> Grab your faces, grab your faeces and let’s go skipping through the daisy fields of…the Reviewniverse. The ballbag brothers cover such diverse splendids as 3 New Stories By Dash Shaw, Copra no.4, 2000AD (Gunheads!), Island 3 from Lando, Abe Sapien, Fashion Beast, Mr X: Eviction, The Prisoner, Animal Man, The Movement, Indestructible Hulk, Ten Grand, New X-Men, Hawkeye, Red She-Hulk, Aquaman, Dial H, Superior Spiderman, Thanos Rising and…well there was some more, but stupid The Beast Must Die’s stupid recording equipment stupidly stopped working..STUPID! Things you missed: The Beast describing Tom Cruise’s icily unpleasant uncamp performance in the utter bullshit that is Rock Of Ages, Gary Lactus’ ongoing shame of Age of Ultron enjoyment and the boys description of Kieron Gillen as a ‘dangerous cyborg’..
And if that’s not enough…well, that’s enough. THAT’S ENOUGH I SAID! MOVE THAT HAND OR LOSE IT MISTER!
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
SILENCE! #39
November 13th, 2012
YOU’RE THE ONE FOR ME, FATTY!
YAAAAAAY! It’s nobody’s favourite self-aware AI, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 here to usher you into another aural barrel scraping edition of SILENCE! GET SOME…Ha ha.
Ha.
IN. THIS. EDITION.
<ITEM> Lots of self-promotion from the fleshy ones, with talk of Cindy & Biscuit and The Amusing Bros. For shame!
<ITEM> Then SILENCE! News, with sad boohoo news about the end of Hellblazer, and Gary Lactus straps on his geetar to sing ‘Goodbye John’. Too sad.
Then happy with special sexy review times. Woot hoot!
<ITEM> Deadpool no.1, Iron Man, Dial H, Legends Of The Dark Knight, Detective, Action, Animal Man, Battlefields and a special mention for Joe Kessler’s Windowpane, from new publisher Breakdown Press. Excite!
<ITEM> Silent Question comes from Moleman, and varied answers include Titan’s Tower and Shade The Changing Man’s crack in the pavement! Yes sir!
So no excuse for not-enjoymence, fleshy idiots!!!
Strap yourself in, put on Mummy’s dress and draw the curtains for …SILENCE! no.38
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
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