SILENCE! #298

October 20th, 2021

IT KEPT TALKING SO I PUT IT IN THE LAUNDRY

Oh cripes! Sorry, yes, erm… of course, yes, no quite right, yes, hmm… Gosh, what to do, what to do… Oh blimey, sorry, I wasn’t prepared for this, ah, um, as you can probably tell! Haha! Ahem, right, yes. Okay, right… Ah, yes! Right then, here we go… Blurb.

Forget about the hot shit in your pants, that can wait. THIS can’t. It’s SILENCE! time!

The two buddy pals, Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Be Regretting Not Choosing A Shorter Name By Now are back to talk about whatever they bloody well like as long as it kinda relates to comics (or not).

<ITEM> The usual Thought Bubble preparation, anticipation and panic.

<ITEM> Halloween japes of yore.

<ITEM> Come with us to Reviewniverse, with  Blocks by Oliver East, The Mighty Crusaders, Pride and Joy, Second Coming and The Comics Journal of course.

<ITEM> off to bed, but not before some Reckymends of stuff like Taskmaster New Zealand and podcasts such as The Weird Rap Podcast, the Cartoonist Kayfabe Frank Quitely Interview and good, long enthuse over List Off.

 

@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! #292

April 14th, 2021

Broken partings making strange goodbyes.  Hopeless cases with fake alibis

This is your blurb.  Deal with it, yeah?

<ITEM> Get excited because this SILENCE! is a The Beast Must Die Solo Special!  By that we mean The Beast is extremely busy and off on his own, working hard and, crucially, not appearing on this podcast.

<ITEM> Nevertheless, Gary Lactus loves to party (alone in his car like sad, middle aged man who is wondering where it all went wrong) so he’s invited some top guests to fool around with and have a really great time.

<ITEM> What’s that sound of creaking gears and whining servos?  Why, it’s Spare 5 who, although not a real boy, has real things to say about David Lapham’s Silverfish and the film, Psycho II whilst Gary moans about superheroes in general.

<ITEM>  Douglas Noble comes along to talk about Pocket Chillers and Tarzan.  Interesting to note that Douglas danced part of a 1980 Legs And Co routine continuously throughout recording.  Of course, this is an audio-only presentation and doesn’t come accross when listening.  Shame, he’s quite good.

<ITEM>  Maid Of Nails aka Kelly Kanayama sings some of her hits in between talk about Hellblazer: Royal Blood, Royalty, Amateur Demonology, Garth Ennis and A Walk Through Hell.  Oh, and a Korean Drama which might be called Worlds Apart or something like that.

<ITEM> Finally Tom Mortimer provides the weird, human cherry on top of this cocktail made from old, found booze which tastes surprisingly pleasant.  I mean, this is mostly bullshit but there’s some stuff about Blue And Green, Severed and Skrull Kill Crew in there.

<ITEM>LISTEN!

@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.

 

Dreaming of monsters

June 16th, 2020

Like a surprising number of people out there, I’ve been having strange dreams in quarantine.

Some are straightforward anxiety dreams – e.g. showing up to some fancy event but only wearing a towel because I forgot to bring any real clothes – while others are more comics-oriented. If this is something that happens to you as well, you might want to fight that sleeping anxiety by using an Afghani Strain.

Although, Our favorite CBD Tincutre from Synchronicity Hemp Oil  is this one right here that has reduced my anxiety levels a lot lately. he most vivid involved fighting a group of superheroes gone bad who were led by the Homelander from The Boys; it was sort of a dream-bootleg version of Garth Ennis’/Darick Robertson’s/Russ Braun’s seminal comic. Another, less vivid but with more of a quietly lingering emotional impact, and also a The Boys ripoff, placed me at the bar where, in the comic, Billy Butcher sits on St Patrick’s Day while chatting with the bartender, an Irish man by the name of Proinsias.

I’m about 75% sure this bar is modeled on Foley’s, a real-life NY bar (run by a cool Irish guy) that is sadly shutting down.

Said bartender, as Ennisheads may already know, is an older Cassidy: the charismatic, hard-drinking vampire from Preacher. Although The Boys never explicitly states this, the clues are there: Proinsias is Cassidy’s first name, which he drops upon emigrating to America (and presumably reclaims at some point before The Boys takes place); he talks about wanting to open a bar in Texas called “The Grassy Knoll,” which is the name of the bar we see in The Boys; and to cap it off, there’s that distinctive accent. Granted, The Grassy Knoll is in New York, not Texas, but like all good Ennis characters Cassidy is drawn back to New York, where he first made his home in the New World. As for the accent, while it’s true that having an Irish accent doesn’t necessarily mean he must be that Irish guy we met in a previous comic, Ennis knows what he’s doing when it comes to writing Irish inflections. (For contrast, check out Dicks, which showcases Belfast accents to great effect.)

When we last saw Cassidy at the end of Preacher, he had regained his humanity after making a deal with God and was driving off into the night to who knows where. I guess he ended up in New York, where he fulfilled his dream of opening that bar but also got to experience some of the side effects of humanity, like significant weight changes – he’s distinctly heavier in The Boys than in Preacher; being able to get fucking diesel, because check out those biceps; and presumably having some kind of midlife crisis, which is the only explanation for his ponytail.

Why

The conversation between Butcher and Proinsias/Cassidy doesn’t do much to advance the comic’s primary plot; it’s mainly two guys – one British, one Irish, both now living in New York – opining about America. But there are little moments that make it worth noting, such as Butcher and Proinsias drinking club sodas and repeating the recovering addict’s mantra:

“One day at a time, eh, Billy?”

“One day at a time.”

From this we can infer that Butcher and the man formerly known as Cassidy have quit drinking, which is an especially big deal for the latter. Not only does he own and work at a bar, he used to abuse the hell out of alcohol (and drugs, and people’s trust) like it was his job.

If you used to be immortal, though, “one day at a time” doesn’t just refer to how the addiction recovery process works. It’s also a reflection on how life is finite now, a quantity you can measure in temporal periods that always end – and that embracing everything said finitude encompasses is necessary to live a life that doesn’t lead to utter destruction.

At this point I should say: it’s hard for me to write about these topics from a completely analytical standpoint, at least in the sense that Cassidy has always been such an emotionally fraught character for me. Maybe I’ll do another, more in-depth post about it someday, but for now here’s the short version: That motherfucker broke my heart when I was 21, and I’ve never entirely gotten over it. To quote Cassidy’s ex-friend Xavier (the voodoo practitioner from the New Orleans/Les Enfants du Sang story arc), “I loved him so much I let him climb inside of me […] and then he let me down.” Ennis has a gift for writing enchantingly charming shitbags, from Cassidy to John Constantine to Tommy Monaghan – who, admittedly, is more of a dirtbag with a heart of gold, but you get the idea. I mean, Ennis’s Constantine was a huge mess, but you can see how Kit Ryan wanted to get with that, even if I personally would not touch it with a ten-foot pole doused in holy water and engraved with crucifixes.

Cassidy, though, is more of an archetype, even as much as he is his own person. We all know someone who can talk their way into other people’s hearts and pockets, which they essentially strip-mine for parts, but with such deftness that a) the people being fucked over want to keep giving up pieces of themselves to this charm monster and b) the Cassidy-type manages to fool themselves in the process, self-deceiving with stories of how they’re the real victim here despite, say, having sucked thousands of dollars out of an unsuspecting, now almost broke friend.

Combine that with the physical invulnerability that comes with being a vampire who can heal themselves and can only be killed by exposure to sunlight, and…well. You know the truism about absolute power corrupting absolutely? Imagine knowing that you could shoot up so much that your blood was mostly heroin, that you could drink until your liver dissolved, that you could crawl out of any fistfight without permanent injuries – hell, that you could have your extremities shot off or be decapitated, both of which happen to our boy Cassidy – and then imagine how much that would warp your mind.

What can’t you do? It’s not like you’ll ever die from an overdose, no matter how much you inject or snort or swallow or drink or butt-chug (this last one doesn’t happen in Preacher, but I have to assume Cassidy has tried it at some point), so bring on the illicit substances, right? And it’s not like you could ever be beaten to death or die from a gunshot, so you can start a fight with whoever even thought about looking at you funny, right? And it’s not like you’ll ever get old in the same way people do, where your internal wiring, plumbing, etc progressively deteriorates, what with that self-healing thing, so who gives a shit about “planning for the future” or – what’s that word? Starts with a C. No, not that one – “consequences”?

But it’s a harrowing way to live, and I say that in the traditional sense. It breaks you up. Scores furrows into your soul. Source: have been between the ages of 18 and 25 in the past, during which “the future” extends to, I don’t know, the looming final exam at the end of this semester of undergrad rather than the incredibly nebulous notion of being 50 (?!) years old one day, or older, if that’s even possible. I’m not going to lie: despite all the insecurity and fear, it was kind of fun.

However.

Part of growing up is realizing how much power you don’t have. How vulnerable you are. Where you need to stand on the bending/breaking, willow/oak continuum, and when. To do otherwise is to become a Cassidy, stunted, stuck, perpetually rotting from the inside out until nothing is left but, in Jesse’s words, “the shape of a man,” a simulacrum without humanity that damns themselves as they shamble through their existence. (Let’s remember, too, that Cassidy is to a degree stuck at the age of sixteen; he was born in 1900 and becomes a vampire after he and his brother flee the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, so if his body can never fully age, he is an eternal teenager, which by itself is curse enough.)

At the end of Preacher, though, he becomes human – or, more specifically, self-immolates by stepping into the morning sunlight and then comes back to life as a mortal human, due to a side deal he made with God – which he describes as “be[ing] a man,” in an echo of Jesse’s earlier invective. I can, obviously, only go so far in analysing this, given that I do not identify, and never have identified, as male, but here goes.

It’s striking that Cassidy’s, or perhaps Ennis’s, definition of manhood encompasses the recognition of the vulnerability that comes with being mortal, partly because conventional toxic masculinity aggressively refuses to outwardly acknowledge that in any way whatsoever, but also because it means growing up. Ennis isn’t contrasting manhood with other constructions of gender here, but rather frames it in the context of maturation: if you are male, are you an eternal child or are you an adult, i.e. a man? Being the latter requires embracing the vulnerable state that comes with mortal humanity, which on the one hand comes with things like aging, illness, and weakness, but on the other is a lot better than locking yourself into a state of existence that urges you toward greater and more hurtful monstrosity.

Ultimately Cassidy chooses to stick to the path of manhood as opposed to boyhood, which is good news not only for him but for at least one other major Ennis character: The Boys‘ Billy Butcher, shitbag extraordinaire who finds himself facing a similar fork in the road of maturity. Cassidy – or should I say Proinsias, because Cassidy is dead (a phrase that pains me a little bit to write, even now) – stands before Butcher as an illustration of a possible future: subject to the ravages of age, yes, and with unfortunate hair, but content. Healthy, jacked, fulfilled, no longer needing to chase down the excesses or hostile performances of toxic masculinity, and content. It’s notable, too, that Proinsias is the only character in The Boys who calls Butcher by his first name, Billy, drawing attention away from the violent connotations of “Butcher.” (The exception is Becky, Butcher’s dead wife, but she only appears in flashbacks so that doesn’t fully count.)

But getting good news doesn’t mean a damn thing if you don’t listen to what it’s trying to tell you.

In order to withstand combat with the strongest, fastest, limb-extending-est, etc. people on Earth, Butcher’s body is pumped full of Compound V, the same substance that gives The Boys‘ superheroes their powers. Compound V makes him, and them, a hell of a lot less vulnerable – there’s that word again – to injury; increases his, and their, physical strength; and slows down the aging process so that a man in, say, his fifties has the constitution of one several decades younger. These effects enable Butcher to channel the violence that drives him into a mission: eradicate every single person with superpowers from existence, whether they’re psychopathic adults or children too young and too exploited to make any informed choices about what they’re signing up for. To paraphrase Arnaud Amalric at the Albigensian Crusade, kill them all and let the CIA sort them out.

While waging a seemingly endless war isn’t easy easy, it’s a lot easier than stepping away. That would mean a life not driven by the creation and fomenting of violence, where the body ages at a human pace rather than at a superhumanly halting one, where a punch doesn’t glance off you but hurts like fuck; a life where power is defined on new terms, or at least terms that Butcher has never had to reckon with.

Tfw you’re an extremely cool and normal guy

In such a context it’s so tempting to keep doing what you’re doing, especially if it means you can channel your worst flaws into something approaching strength.

But we can’t, can we?

Unlike Cassidy – sorry; Proinsias – Butcher never gets the chance to see what he could become if he’d chosen to shed the trappings of monstrosity. Instead, he destroys his own mission, kills almost all of his closest friends, and coerces the survivor among them to kill him, dying in a burst of self-annihilating violence.

What Butcher and Proinsias/The Bartender Formerly Known As Cassidy show us is not that we can choose to change, but that we need to change. Otherwise our psyches ossify into something fatal and pernicious that infects the circles we occupy, and if we don’t see anything wrong with that then we fucked up. It’s scary to walk into an existence that embraces vulnerability; what’s scarier, though, is not taking that first step and forever staying right where we are, weaponizing the callowness of the ways we think about power and agency and mortality and the point of taking up space in this world.

Take one step, as soon as you can. One day. One choice at a time out of monstrosity, into being more fully human.

The first time I read Preacher, I was 20 years old on the other side of the world.

My year abroad at Oxford was coming to an end – and about time, too, because for this socially awkward kid from Hawaii with extremely working-class parents, the Oxbridge milieu was confounding. Before coming to England I’d spent two years of undergrad in the midwestern US, so figured I could handle another cultural adjustment.

Ha ha.

The academic system was different from anything I’d ever experienced. The sociocultural codes bordered on the downright inscrutable. The tutors expected us to know all about subjects we’d barely even touched upon in our previous education (here’s a note for any Oxford lecturers reading this: American schools don’t use the English Civil War as a primary historical touchpoint).

And in the midst of the incomprehension and fear, I discovered Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

The Borders bookstore near campus – I remember how surprising it was that Oxford had a Borders – stocked most of the trade paperbacks in their comics section. Luckily, its employees were either too oblivious or too apathetic to stop me from holing up and reading each volume cover to cover, which is what you do when you’re a broke student. That’s where I first met Jesse Custer, where the bottom of my heart fell out when I learned about Cassidy’s monstrous nature, where I weighed the benefit of continuing to read one hell of a comic against consuming 66 issues plus specials of raging blasphemy (I was raised in a speaking-in-tongues evangelical church), and where I learned the term “reach-around”.

I didn’t realize at the time how special Dillon’s art was, because it drew me in without even giving me time to blink. It all seemed real. More than that, it all seemed accurate. That’s exactly how it looks when someone machine-guns a report to bits in the office, I thought. That’s totally the pose you fall into when your friend’s ex-friend sends you into a voodoo trance.

Of course, these weren’t conscious thoughts; Dillon’s work invited you to react subconsciously first. It was a lot like reading comics as a kid, if you disregard all the sodomy references and profanity. My childhood comics reading experiences were immersive, or rather, I judged comics on their immersive capacity. Did I feel as though I were on that gargoyle-studded rooftop beside Batman, narrowing my eyes at the criminal scum/people failed by Gotham’s mental health care system on the streets below? If yes, then it was a good comic.

As I got older, I learned to spot badly proportioned bodies, static poses, overly photorealistic likenesses, and other artistic touches that push readers out of the action. Coming from a performing background, the best analogy I can think of is that it’s like watching an actor who’s clearly Doing A Character, or this piece of brilliance from Derek Jacobi’s guest star spot in Frasier.

Preacher was none of that. Preacher simply…was. Dillon wasn’t Doing A Comic. It felt like Jesse, Tulip, and Cassidy had allowed him to observe their exploits for the purpose of documentation, because that’s something real people can do, and under Dillon’s hand they were as real as the rustle of Batman’s cape once was in my child-ears.

It was a comfort, not only for the sharp wit cloaked in splashy vulgarity, but for the surety of those good old Dillon lines. Everything around me was unknown and scary, except this. Here, in Preacher, art by Steve Dillon, was a world where even the most outlandish could be familiar, like a welcome I didn’t know I needed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maid of Nails: You can’t put the Punisher in everything. He’s a specific person for specific contexts, and this is part of why I love the Garth Ennis run so, so, so much. Basically, he’s made for a Garth Ennis context.

Botswana Beast: It’s American crime. I can see how it works in 1980s comics, to an extent — well, in the Daredevil series on Netflix, he is contrasted with Daredevil, and they do take scenes from Ennis’ Punisher, like in issue #3 of Marvel Knights. They fairly directly transpose them.

MoN: It was SO COOL. I was just sad that Maginty wasn’t in it. I love that dude.

BB: Maginty is in Punisher: War Zone.

MoN: With the Urban Freeflow Crew, doing parkour all over the place for no reason. That’s not in the comic.

BB: Nope.

MoN: I was sad to see him go. I mean, he was a really messed-up guy who did messed-up stuff, but I enjoyed him a lot, in a sort of weird way.

BB: That’s the one thing we’ve not talked about, and it’s kind of an absurd thing. Frank Castle, as a notional superhero…

Botswana Beast: So the central arc of Punisher MAX, which I think really begins in Mother Russia and ends in Valley Forge, Valley Forge, is all based on this plan, post-9/11, causing terror in order to provoke more foreign interventionism. It’s something to do with the Soviets — well, the Russians, not the Soviets, because it’s not 1989 —

Maid of Nails: But it is framed very much as “the Soviets,” because, you know, General Zakharov from Man of Stone is old-school.

BB: He’s a great character, but he also does horrible things like throwing a baby off a cliff.

MoN: Yeah, he herds a bunch of people off of a cliff and this one woman who’s about to go over gives him her baby to try and save it. And he lifts up the baby like it’s The Lion King or something, and then he throws the baby over the cliff.

BB: That’s literally one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen, certainly in a Marvel comic.

MoN: So it’s okay that the Punisher’s trying to kill him.

BB: I can’t actually remember the intricacies of this general’s plan, but it’s to provoke war. And of course these are not real soldiers like Frank Castle, like the other respectable Special Forces —

MoN: Or the SAS.

BB: Ennis has a fucking erection for Special Forces guys. In the story they’re just pen-pushing dirty motherfuckers that never saw a day’s combat in their lives. It’s just an ant farm; it’s a game to them, and they’re total shitlords. And they get killed as well.

MoN: That’s very satisfying, though, because they’re not cool like the SAS or Frank Castle.

BB: He doesn’t actually kill the SAS guys, does he?

MoN: No, because they’re too cool.

BB: Well, they’re not SAS guys in this story. They’re American Special Forces.

MoN: But Yorkie’s in there. He’s SAS. Anyway, Rawlins is the guy who’s going around stirring up shit on behalf of the American government, and he’s just the worst person in the entire world.

BB: He is a gigantic piece of shit.

MoN: If someone has completely no feeling for fellow human beings at all, then I can see how they might end up in something like human trafficking. But Rawlins — he has passions, at least, so it’s even worse. O’Brien, you know, the one who wants to bang the Punisher, is his ex-wife. There was some kind of attraction there. Then there’s the thing with Nicky Cavella, when Rawlins comes in to see him like, “Heyyyy, remember me?” and then goes down on him.

I really hate torture scenes, but when he got his, I was like, “YEAH! Fuck you, Rawlins! I hope they take your OTHER eye out!” This comic kind of makes you want horrible things to happen to people.

There’s a bit where he pays off a bunch of Middle Eastern guys to fly a plane into something and make a giant deal out of it —

BB: And the CIA do do things like that. He makes a fake jihadi cell, because that’s his job and there’s essentially profit in war. Frank Castle ultimately gets to the top of the fuckin’ tree and kills these bitches with the help of Good Soldiers, as opposed to the bad soldiers.

MoN: The bad soldiers, who are bureaucrats.

BB: Middle-class soldiers.

MoN: Rawlins is a really good contrast to the Punisher, though.

BB: A lot of characters are set up that way. Like the Russian general, Zakharov. They are all sort of counterpoints: men who have broken in different ways — well, broken to the civilized eye.

MoN: See, “civilized” — people like Rawlins are the ones who make civilization, and the implication is that it’s kind of always been like that. But Frank didn’t know that when he was in Vietnam, although he probably learned while he was there how bad it could get.

BB: I think there’s certainly an issue with his origin, that this bureaucracy isolates his encampment, which would be overrun but for —

MoN: His awesomeness?

BB: Essentially, although it does kind of delve into this slightly fantastical thing where he makes a deal with Death. Which is his totem, after all, with the skull.

MoN: How many of those shirts does he have, do you think? Is it like how cartoon characters have an entire closet filled with just the same outfit?

BB: 40 or 50, anyway. He’s got the T-shirt versions, he’s got the versions where you suspect there may be clubs held in the skull’s teeth.

MoN: That seems like it would make it really hard to bend over, because they’re right up against his stomach. They’d be in the way. It’s one of the few things that is slightly unrealistic about the Punisher.

Maid of Nails: Before we get into the Punisher, I think we should let people know how XTREME his fans are.

Botswana Beast: Should I read the letter?

[To paraphrase Keats: beauty is truth, truth beauty, and this letter is both]

MoN: So that is what we’re dealing with.

BB: It doesn’t ever mention race, that letter, but it’s fairly indicative of what a lot of early Punisher comics were, which is shooting “street toughs” of undetermined race —

MoN: Were any of these “street toughs” ever named Tyrone or Leroy?

BB: They may have been. Or Hector. So yeah, the Punisher’s origins are as a Spider-Man villain-cum-antihero who is hired by — possibly the Chameleon, I can’t remember, to take out Spider-Man under some false pretext. I think that was 1973, and his debut series was actually a decade later. At that point he became a leading character, shooting largely mafiosi and, as I say, street toughs (that’s not entirely fair characterization; Mike Baron’s a good writer — well, he’s written some exciting action comics), until 1999/2000, when Garth Ennis, the infamous Irishman, took over and really redefined the character.

MoN: A lot more mafia and organized crime, and a lot fewer street toughs.

BB: He does still shoot quite a lot of black people, but —

MoN: There’s a lot fewer story arcs devoted to him shooting black people. Except for Barracuda and John James Toomey (RIP), who gets shot in a setup that the Punisher coerces one of Toomey’s crew into. And then the guy from his crew is yelling at John James Toomey like, “Who’s gonna get your fuckin’ fried chicken now?” DUDE. A lot of people like fried chicken, but I find it odd that Garth Ennis went there.

BB: What really came to define him — and I think they are among the best, if not the best comics ever published, then certainly the best researched — is the adult imprint stuff from Marvel MAX.

MoN: Stuff with more war.

BB: Another favourite topic of Garth Ennis. Anyway, it began in 2003 with the prelude miniseries Born.

MoN: Let’s tell the readers: what is Born about?

BB: It’s about the Vietnam War, of course — because that is the sort of defining thing about Frank Castle, although it’s kind of difficult now; I don’t think Marvel can really sell a character who fought in the Vietnam War, because he would be 65 or something. So Garth Ennis does enjoy a war story, and Frank Castle, prior to any of this, was a guest star in issue #7 of Marvel’s The ‘Nam comic, where he appears as a young man. And it sort of nicely counterpoints him against Captain America because you have someone who fought in a good war and was treated extremely well on returning, and then you have someone who returned from an unjust, shitty piece of American interventionism.

MoN: I’m curious to see how they’re going to handle this, because with Vietnam, it quite quickly started to occupy this symbolic space in the popular American imagination. It was, yes, American interventionism biting America in the ass — you know, you have all these movies about people going to Vietnam: manly men sticking together but, surprise, everything is terrible and everyone is cynical.

BB: And loads of the guys are strung out on dope.

The Joy of Dicks

December 2nd, 2015

A WEE TREAT FOR YOU HERE TODAY, AS MAID OF NAILS/KELLY KANAYAMA WRESTLES WITH… WELL, WE’LL LET HER TELL YOU!

A confession: I am a Strong Female Reader, and I can’t get enough Dicks.

To clarify, I adore Garth Ennis’ and John McCrea’s (if he’s reading this: hi, John!) two-volume series Dicks beyond all reason. It’s obsessed with the combination of male genitalia and violence, and isn’t ashamed of that obsession. It’s ostensibly puerile to the point of featuring an alien antagonist called Lord Bluevein, leader of the Dong. One of its main goals seems to be answering the question: how many cartoonish dicks can we cram into each page?

That’s why I love it so much.

I mean, there’s a building on my university campus called Bonar Hall, and every single time I walk past it I do a mental snicker. The day I learned that All-Star Superman was referred to as ASSMAN in official DC correspondence is a day I will treasure forever. When I picked up a black-and-white print collection of Vol. 1 of Dicks at London Super Comic Con and got McCrea and Ennis to sign it, I made a point of telling them that since it was in a bag, I had an actual bag of Dicks in my hand.

It’s not exactly the most feminine behaviour. But why isn’t it?

SILENCE! #100

April 21st, 2014

 

BLANK FRANK IS THE MESSENGER OF YOUR DOOM AND YOUR DESTRUCTION

Happy Birthday to SILENCE!

Happy Birthday to SILENCE!

You look like  a monkey

and you smell like…Brian Blessed’s beard…?

I think that’s how the song goes anyway. It is the return of original and best of the Narratorbots, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735! No fractal distillations of self, or parallell versions, just the real motherboard-flipping deal. Back to celebrate 100, 000, 000 episodes of reality’s most beloved poddlecaste, SILENCE! What once was a mewling, quivering babe, is now a stooped and saggy old man, with low slung testicles and a shuffling gait. And it’s all because of you enabling those two Radio Hams Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die in continuing to fool themselves into thinking the world wants to hear their unwelcome opinions. So congratulations dear listeners. this is all your fault.

What we need is an intervention.

<ITEM> As a special 100th birthday reward, The Dear Listeners have provided the twosome with a list of questions. You can guarantee that the important issues of the day will be cogitated over, digested and thoroughly dissected… there are so many quizzlers that we JUST HAD to call this Step Into The Quizzlertron, part 1! Comics Dialogue – John Ostrander, Del Close, Garth Ennis, Chris Ware, John Wagner, Wolverine deathcamp, Danny Beastman & Gary Lactenberg – where are we now?, Alex Ross, American Horror Story, Superhero movies, Jeff Goldblum, Gary eating eggs, Dr Strange movie – Burt Reynolds, Sam Elliott, Widescreen comics, Samuel L Jackson, Beano, Dennis The Menace, Early comics memories – missing Knight Rider tied to a tree, 2000AD, Ro-Busters, Secret Wars, Dredd mug, Flaming Carrot action figure, Comics day breakfast, Bob-Z, Ronin, Fantastic Four, Stan The Man Lee making breakfast, James from Twin Peaks made of plastic, Digital comics v analogue comics, Copra, indy vs superhero, Flaming Carrot, the rules of writing questions, Synth pop, Nu-Rom Antics, Lemmy, Keif Llam and so much more…

<ITEM> A sideways crab-like slide into the Reviewniverse to uncover the contemporary delights of Doop, Batman Eternal, weekly comics, Avengers Undercover, Stray Bullets, Auteur, Starlight

And this is just part 1! Aren’t you EXCITED? Couldn’t you just SCREAM?

Well go on then.

No-one’s listening.

Click to download SILENCE!#100

Contact us:

[email protected]
@silencepod
@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.