Mindless Ones

SOMEONE’S IN MY FRUIT CELLAR!

 

Click to download SILENCE!#120

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.

TWIST AWAY…NOW TWIST AND SHOUT

<ITEM> Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die are joined by very special winkiemate BOBSY! for this two-hour plus mega epic.

<ITEM> Gladmin, radmin anything to stop you being sadmin! Disney Marathons, dubbed franco-japanese cartoons, a musical life, Sponsorshunt, and hot sexy all the times more!

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse faces a triple harmonium-breach! Three happy boys taking in this mighty meaty stack: Multiversity, God is Dead, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore sitting in a tree Giant Haystacks Vs Big Daddy, Sandman: Overture, Goodnight Batman Good Night Gaiman, Stray Bullets, Sin City 2, Frank Miller, Big Guy & Rusty The Boy Robot, Geoff Darrow, Robocop Vs Terminator, Batman: The Cult, Give Me Liberty, Ann Raynd, Frank The Tank, Seven Soldiers, Sabretooth Swordsman, Brendan McCarthy, Dream Kings, DHP, Death In Oaxca, Ms Marvel, Haunted Comic, YOU the reader, Wicked & The Divine, White Bearded Babymen, Avengers Analogues, Kieron Gillen, Usagi Yojimbo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and comics, Hip Hop Family Tree, and the Cliff Richard/Hip-Hop Connection,

<ITEM>Gary Races Through The Rest: Daredevil, Mighty Avengers, Borrow or Nah, Secret Avengers, Batman Eternal, Justice Inc, The Saviors, and The Fade Out

<ITEM> Special bo-nutz feature: Bobsy’s Film Corner taking in the ageing flesh-mass that is The Expendables 3!

Three times the danger! Three times the thrills! Three times the smell of raw, rugged testosterone…it can only be SILENCE! 

Can I go now?

Click to download SILENCE!#112

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.

With Grant Morrison’s Multiversity finally on the (candyfloss)horizon, he’s been doing some interviews in support of the book on The Comics Internet. You remember The Comics Internet, right? That place you used to go to discuss comics after you got sick of chopping up old issues of Wizard and randomly inserting snippets of inane commentary underneath pictures of classic (#classic) alt comics in TCJ, but before you resorted to gnomic twitter commentary and/or listening to a seemingly endless supply of podcasts while wanking/doing your housework/riding the bus?

The topic of the Prismatic Age of comics came up during one of these press adventures, with only a little bit of prompting from the interviewer from Comics Alliance:

Grant Morrison: Unlike Seven Soldiers… that was a lot more modular. This one is more of relay race, that was the structure we built because each universe is reading the comic books from the previous universe, and that’s how they learn about the threat, basically. It’s more like a chain. It doesn’t have the same intricate jigsaw pattern as Seven Soldiers. It’s quite linear, this one. I wanted to do something quite linear and simple and everyone could “get” this time. This one is for people who’ve never read DC before but want to get into this gigantic maelstrom of characters and versions of characters; the prismatic world of DC.

Comics Alliance: They call it the “prismatic age.”

GM: Yeah!

As long time Mindless readers will already know, this term originated in a couple of posts by our own Botswana Beast.  Good little virus that it is, the idea of The Prismatic Age has infected comics fans and academics alike, and if you’ve so far managed to avoid contagion, I’d recommend you do what all the cool kids were doing six years ago and expose yourself to the Bottie Beast!

Here’s a pre-amble, in which BB talks useless taxonomy in A Hall of Mirrors!

And here’s the main event, in which The Prismatic Age is… well, if not born, then at least recognised for what it was!

A tasty wee taster, just to get you started:

The ideology of the Prismatic Age, what it insistently moves toward, is that all parts are active, all of the time. While not necessarily visible monthly, nor are they hidden or overwritten – this was the notion of Hypertime, never fully realised but approached in the much-loathed-for-rule-breaking Kingdom. Summary of all incarnations, a distillate. This is partly what I find so terribly aggravating about the PopMatters piece that set me on this path many moons ago, apart from its attempts to cloak in inscrutable terminology a daft enthusiasm for two largely consequenceless and really quite markedly shit event-books from last year, is the lack of understanding of either superheroes or, really, the postmodernism it touts. Postmodernism is largely about (oh-ho-ho, I am going to tell you what postmodernism is “largely about” on a comics blog,) textually, shifting loci on a subject, a lack of definitiveness in portrayals and readings – to read Civil War(!!) as somehow having achieved a permanent destabilisation of the superhero archetype because it wasn’t about a binary black & white bone of contention?! No: that ship had long since sailed, it was a pirate ship in a comic read by an African-American child beside a fire hydrant, and the sole difference was that it was big duopoly franchise comic events that were dealing, ham-fistedly of course, with the supposed issues: none of which were terribly worldly, one of which was sort of, if you squinted, slightly topical. Boring, kneejerk Dark Age scions, really – Civil War literally ordains the Keene Act, for Rao’s sake! The spirit of this age seems to me throughout to have been essentially one of recapitulation and of remixing, in this case 2006 remixed 1986 badly – but this is also how you end up with Batmite as a Jungian portent of impending demise.

Check back tomorrow from more Multiversity pre-amble, because apparently I quite like The Comics Internet, when I remember that it still exists!

That’s what I wanted to call Andrew Hickey’s new Seven Soldiers reader, The Miser’s Coat, but he’d only gawn an’ bleedin’ had another idea for the title of his own work first, so. An Incomprehensible Condition should be available from finer internet shops by the time you read this; and he’s only gawn an’ bleedin’ joined the Mindless Ones for his pop-culture critic hat, we’re over the bloody moon to have him, so this interview serves a twofold purpose: to promote and discuss the book and to welcome him to our plated bosom.

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Special “Repeat after me fuck queen and country!” edition – UPDATED WITH A RIGHT ROYAL REWARD FOR ALL OUR LOYAL READERS!

It’s been a while since the Mindless did some linkblogging, but it’s a sunny Friday morning and I’ve been working away like a good little republican (Best not mention the fact that you’re taking a day off in lieu eh? – Ed), so here we go!

Every time you click this link a hero dies!