SILENCE! #307

January 21st, 2023

A book is a dream you can hold in your hands
Music is a dream that can be played by bands
Dinner is a dream that goes in your tummy
Drugs are a dream that makes you feel funny
Chickens are a dream that likes to lay eggs
Trousers are a dream that covers your legs
Drawers are a dream you can put things in
Norwich is a dream quite close to Kings Lynn

Here’s a bit of fun. The Beast Must Die has run off the the edge of the planet and is falling through space for all eternity (for charity) so Gary Lactus is joined by Douglas Noble and Tom Oldham, the two halves of Dark And Golden. It is not established which one of them is Dark and which is Golden. What ensues is fun and interesting until Tom’s audio stops recording for some reason so towards the end, dear listener, the podcast decays into judiciously edited scraps before rotting away entirely.

During the 1 hr 33 mins of this podcast we speak of Breakdown Press, Baby, It May Never Happen, Angouleme, Croix-Noire, 2000AD Extreme Editions, Peter Milligan’s The Dead, Meltdown Man, Rainbow Swelling, Billionaire Island: Cult Of Dogs, Catwoman: Lonely City, Power Comics, The Butterfly House, Clair Napier’s The Magic Necklace, Cowboy Picture Library 410 – Buck Jones The Hunter and more.

Some links for you:
https://darkandgolden.bigcartel.com/
https://www.breakdownpress.com/
http://strip-for-me.com/

Some sound for you:

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

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! #261

January 18th, 2019

 

LIFE I LOVE YOU, ALL IS GROOVY

Listen can you do me a favour? I just need to nip out for a bit…no not for long. I’ll be real quick. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s actually really, really important that I go. Yeah. No, I honestly wouldn’t ask unless…y’know. Important, that’s right. You will? Oh mate that’s brilliant…honestly you don’t know what a favour this is. So I just need you to just literally sit here and do nothing till I get back. Yeah, I’ll be so, so quick I promise. Ok, so just like…just sit there, that’s right. Yup, just there. And that’s it! Till I get back. Okay? Ok cool.

..oh wait, there is just one other thing. If anyone turns up asking about a blurb, can you just whip something up? Ok great.

<ITEM>BOOOOOOOOOOM> NEW YEAR NEW DANGER! It’s only Bloody SILENCE! coming up on 2019 like a masked intruder! Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die are here and brimming with new year’s resolve. And you’re going to get it, with barrels. Hot comics pottage, in that wily old SILENCE! fashion. AND IT”S NEARLY THREE HOURS LONG YOU TW@S!!

<ITEM>Bit of post-XMAS admin? Why not. As if anyone gives a rat’s chuff about that anymore! Probably some Dadmin, some sponsorships and a bit of chat about Adventures in the January comics sales.

<ITEM> Big chunk of Sadmin about the recent passing of Mega City One architect Ron Smith.

<ITEM> Gary talks about the Raymond Briggs Snowman exhibition, The Beast wants to tell you all about the Charles Schultz ‘Peanuts’ exhibition at Somerset House, and he also NEEDS to tell you all about Penda’s Fen too, in SILENCE! (Because the Film Has Started).

<ITEM> Have you heard that Gary Lactus Prunes? No, Well listen up…

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse uncurls it’s sticky paw and reveals some top quality chat about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Fantastic Four Wonderful Wonderful Wedding Comix, Klaus: The Crying Snowman, Lodger, DIE, Justice League Europe,  GoBots, Thirteenth Floor and probably some other stuff that both of us have forgotten.

<ITEM> BONUSSSSSS! There’a a meaty chat with Tom Oldham of Breakdown Press, talking about Joe Kessler’s Windowpane, Jon Chandler’s John’s Worth (1-4), Beserker and a whole lot more, including some quality Todd McFarlane chat.

WELL WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR SWEETHEARTS? YOU WANNA LIVE FOREVER???

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

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! #238

October 25th, 2017

Hey Kids – Stop snogging and listen to me!

Silence is back! And it’s smaller, longer and more claustrophobic than ever before! Welcome to The Temple of Lactus where the atoms of reality are comics and batman really is the god of my two fathers.

Cursing silver, Das Biest Muss Sterben drags his bloody pelt through the wilds of the black forest gateau and has NO TIME FOR PODCASTING, LOSERS. This means: homely, hirsute but dutiful farmer’s daughter Bobsy is kidnapped from his cosy homestead and forced into the servitude of the Spacelord and his menagerie of wives (x1) sons (x1) and cats (x2).

They strip down to their essentials and get down to business. Their business is comic book reviews and business is in no particular order –

Magpie 1&2, Triskelion 5 – Kathryn Briggs
The Cleaner 4 – Fraser Geesin
Rok of the Reds 1-3 – Wagner, Grant and Cornwell
Reads 4 – Avery Hill Publishing
Berserker 1 – Breakdown Press
Battle Action Force – Major Black
Here come the beautiful people and Counting Stones – Douglas Noble
Prismatik Man 1 – Stathis Tsemberlidis
Stone Focus and Propagation of… – Lando
STEELBLADE 1 by Steven Steelblade
Into the Black by Benjy Goldsmith and Cicy Reay
Generation Gone 1-3 – Ales Kot and Andre Lima Araujo
What is Left – Rosmary V-O
Mr. Higgins Comes Home – Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell
Kid Lobotomy – Peter Milligan and Tess Fowler

@silencepod

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@kellykanayama
[email protected]

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! #236

August 31st, 2017

 

MY NAME IS CHIP AND I’M DIFFERENT

Bit of a change of pace here dear listenoids. While Gary Lactus tutors Little Barry Lactus in the ways of cosmic righteousness, The Beast takes a solo sojourn into the 4-colour wastelands outside your window, till he finds himself knee deep in the comics slurry. There he encounters none other than Tom Oldham, of Breakdown Press and Gosh Comics.

The two proceed to have a nice long chat about the origins of Breakdown Press, and their newest release, the long awaited Good News Bible: The Complete Deadline Strips of Shaky Kane. It’s a rambling, yet laser-focused conversation taking in Deadline, 2000AD, Brett Ewins, Nick Abadzis, Bulletproof Coffin, Connor Willumsen, Fort Thunder, Michel DeForge, Steve Cook, music and comics, Beserker Magazine, Jonathan Chandler, Antoine Cosse, the comics virus, David Quantick, Richard Short, David Hine, Crossed, Worthing and a whole heap more.

It’s two hours of high qualidee chad, and you know you want it.

WARNING: Contains no discussion of My Two Dads

@silencepod

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@kellykanayama
[email protected]

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.

I might have come away from the Thought Bubble comics convention with a terrible hangover and an overwhelming desire to have a proper rummage through the back issue bins, but I can’t say that I came back short of good zines, great comics and better memories.

Here are five of the most exciting books I picked up last weekend…

1. Jonathan Chandler – Another Blue World (Breakdown Press, 2015)

At last Saturday’s SILENCE! x Breakdown Press interview panel, Jonathan Chandler was discussed as an artist who had staked out territory similar to that which Brian Chippendale had occupied but who had got there before it became a trendy holiday destination for art house cartoonists.

I’m not familiar enough with the man’s work to debate these claims, but reading Another Blue World what struck me was how important Chandler’s elusive sense of space is to communicating this particular set of hostile environments:

It’s not so much that Chandler is limiting what the reader can see to a few tufts of grass or a short stretch of water around his characters that makes his work stand out, more that he seemingly feels no pressure to fill up blank space on the page.

In a Brian Chippendale comic we might find ourselves feeling overwhelmed by the amount of detail, struggling to distinguish signal from noise whether we’re faced with the tiny cramped panels of Maggots or the wider canvases of If’n Oof or Ninja. In Prison Pit we are confronted blocky horror after blocky horror, but we know that this grim escalation will follow proceed through the sort of absurd escalations that are Johnny Ryan’s speciality.

Reading Chandler’s work, meanwhile, we are confronted with an eerie silence. All around us, we find unreadable white space, all of it primed with danger. Forms approach, assaults are perpetrated, sex is weaponised, but we can never be sure whether things are going to get worse or just sort of hang there:

I might crave for something beyond this harsh replication of animalistic imperatives, but there’s no denying that Another Blue World makes them painfully vivid.

Speaking of moving beyond, here’s Lando, back with another bleak, arid and yet undeniably stylish science fiction story!

SILENCE! #118

October 13th, 2014

RULE NUMBER ONE, PHASERS ON STUN!

Oh hi there! You caught me with my hand in the pickled onion jar! Welcome back DEAR LISTENERS, to this very special* technical-hitch FREE episode of SILENCE! With a rejuvenated The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus, freshly back from judging the 3rd Annual Electroplegic Bodyshunting Competition. Slipping off their ceremonial robes, the pusillanimous pairsome are hot cocked, and ready to rot! Let’s get podcarousing!

<ITEM> Sponsorshines, Breakdown Press, Thought Bubble…you know the drizzle. And Gary reveals his nefarious plans to sexually entrap all the DEAR LISTENERS!! Who let the dogs in?

<ITEM> Like a perfectly launched stone skipping across a still pond, the two enter the Reviewniverse, a song in their hearts, and their hearts on their sleeves (and their sleeves tucked into their undercrackers). And what a week it’s been. Vivisected this week: Punks, Ed Pinsent, Inkstuds, Rob Liefield, Batgirl, Gotham’s Brooklyn, Gotham Academy, Axis/6xis, Pickled Onions, Sex Criminals, Astro City, Mark Bell RIP, Masterplasty from James Harvey, Courtney Love, Sinestro, and the terrifying Earth 2 weekly challenge!

<ITEM> How could we forget – a guest star studded edition of SILENCE! Because My Mouth Is Full of Delicious Food! The real reason you all came.

Now get out of here before my husband gets home.

Click to download SILENCE!#118

Contact us:

[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.

Windowpane #1, by Joe Kessler 

 

There’s a point early on in this comic where you realise that you’re not so much watching characters describe a landscape as watching the landscape try work out how to describe itself. This might seem counter-intuitive but from the end of the first story onward the pattern repeats itself – Joe Kessler’s garish, pastel-hued compositions either  break down into their constituent lines after exhaustive exploration or sit there seemingly unaffected by the words and actions that have passed through them.

The best example of the latter category involves a wet-dream about a pig in a dress, whose fall through the night sky is contrasted against an unflinching cityscape with a moment-by-moment precision that does far better justice to the pithy punchline than this description:

In the former category, the Invisible Cities-derived third strip is as close to definitive as Windowpane gets.  The way it links its characters shared status as splashes of ink and colour on the page with their philosophising about the interconnected nature of reality — “…a cluster of atoms resembles a cluster of galaxies.”/”Well they’re both clusters” — might seem trite in isolation, but the surrounding stories make these philosophical observations feel more like a little bit of texture on a varied landscape.

All of this might  sound a bit chilly and distant, but Kessler’s human figures are depicted with a deceptive sort of ease, as a series of curving lines whose relationships to each other is nevertheless very carefully observed and delineated:

 

Still, in keeping with Kessler’s paradoxical thematic schemata it’s the backgrounds that are the focus here, existing as they do on the precise point where detail blurs into abstraction.  The interaction between text and territory here has a sly kinshsip with Dylan Horrocks writing on maps and comics, and perhaps also with Kevin Huizenga’s conception of the comics page as a place for exploration and discovery, but Kessler’s backgrounds have a forcefulness to them that resists his characters attempts at attaching meaning as much as it encourages them.

This is tricky relationship is most clearly explored in the final two strips.  In  the penultimate entry, words shrink on the page as Kessler depicts his precarious human figures parachuting in to kindle-worthy hillscape:

Thought and language here are reduced to a form of quaint annotation, one that is far less effective at providing a guide to this hazardous landscape than the blocky symbols that line these panels.

The final story focuses on a burned lover who – uh, *SPOILERS* – tries to find solace in the freak resemblance between a man and a decapitated bull.  It plays out like a sneaky assurance that the process of muck sitting up, looking itself and trying to figure itself out isn’t totally meaningless. It’s also the sort of assurance that’s both underlined and undermined by the fact that,  unlike any given sunset, you know this resemblance was put there to be noticed.

Click here to read about more gud comics on the site that just can’t seem to quit you, no matter how many resolutions it makes!

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

click to download SILENCE!#39

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

Click below for the SILENCE! Gallery…

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