Mindless Ones

Group B in this draw is made up of mythic, godly or otherwise pre-existing fictionistic baddy types. Some good, and not so good candidios in this round, so lets crack on…

Suspect 1: SATAN!

Thanks to the comments on the last post, most of the explainful bits of this one are done already – thanks folks. As a possible, Satan, or ‘Stan’ as my keyboard keeps calling him, lines up quite nicely with the extra-textual stuff Morrison’s been dropping in interviews and stuff lately, as well as with his past form in the Batlands, so I reckon it’s not a bad bet. You know who we’re talking about here, right? We’re talking about Satan, The Devil, Old Nick, Abaddon, The Accuser, The God of This World, The Father of Lies, The Great Dragon, The Enemy, The Evil One, The Old One, The Prince That Shall Come, Lucifer, Beelzebub, The Tempter, The Proud One, The Son of Perdition. You know – this guy:

Don’t laugh! He’ll stick a toasting fork in your bum forever if you laugh! He will!

More after the jump

Click for more Termini

Written by G. Willow Wilson
Drawn by M.K. Perker
Published by Vertigo

The Yellow Eye comes to G. Willow Wilson entirely fresh, having not read Cairo or any of her other work, which in one way is liberating, in that I have no preconceived notions about her output, and in another is limiting, in that some context can be an aid to critical thinking. Fortunately Air is nothing if not a generous text – there’s a lot here that’s immediately recognisable. The well worn plot holds very little in the way of surprises – a larger world, complete with conflicts in need of resolution, opens up when a mysterious stranger comes to town. What is unusual however, and, judging by the title of the book, what the Vertigo Willow axis think gives the book a distinct identity, is the setting: planes, airports, departure lounges, the sky.

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BOY + ≠

Remember when you were going to be a superhero? I sure do. I was 9 years old and Amypoodle (who happens to be my brother) had decided to take up the mantle of the Spiderman. He had a spidersense that he could recharge by warming himself on our wall-mounted radiators, and he was going to marry the Black Cat, or do other stuff with her. Stuff that made him feel weird.

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Welcome weary travellers. Come rest yourselves a while in the basement. Mind that mildewed copy of Razzle and that box of broken Transformers. Sit yourselves down between that crate of warped vinyl (can I interest anyone in some vintage James Galway? Or maybe a copy of Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’?), and that decomposing Garfield, and I’ll delight you with some recent treasures from the Beast’s Bargain Basement…

In order to overcome the trauma of shelling out £2/$3 for a new comic (but wow, ain’t it just worth it with all the time and money they’ve put into that turd-polishing computer colour!?!), I have recently returned to the blessed womb of cheap-as-fuck back issues, and it’s got to be said, found some true gems. And some shite. But it’s cheap shite, and that’s what counts.

More after the jump

Click for more Termini

Mustn’t let like the finest issue of Batman in years come out and not do a bit about it. Maybe some annotations, but honestly there’s a few good people doing that so I’m a bit annotated-out.

So we’re just going to have the big question and answer it, right before your eyes, with perfect accuracy. How this works is, we’re going to run through my favouriite suspects and ask the I-Ching who The Black Glove is, and then we’ll know. A couple of posts back Savage reminded me of the same Storm Shadow 6 page story story Morrison wrote for Marvel UK’s Action Force Monthly about twenty years ago, which was my earliest memory of anything at all I-Chingy. Genuine comics knowledge, one of those genuine four-colour epiphanies – that pedagogic element they always talk about. That was how I learnt of the I-Ching. The man himself has appeared in Morrison’s Batman’s run too, remember, so it all somehow seems appropriate. I don’t do the I-Ching much (going to call it Yijing from now on, I think that’s more proper nowadays), because Yijing is never wrong, and always eerily accurate. That’s a bit freaky, and raises a few questions I rarely have time to mull over these days, so I tend to leave it alone. But in all my experience of using it, it’s never wrong, and that means it’s sometimes been often useful, like now.

Hold tight!

More after the jump

Yes, that’s not the poster – I’m not sure British television in the 80s did posters. Especially not for a series as outright miserable and cheap as Day of the Triffids. Instead what we got were real suburban streets, sets hungover from the seventies, and parochial British accents. The show was so bloody scary because the world it inhabited looked and sounded so depressingly like our own. The triffids were like some vile full stop on the end of contemporary British life – we were defined by the moment of our extinction and we turned out to be parochial, small, insignificant and suffering. The fact that mankind was to meet its fate blind (after a freak meteorological event) just served to underline the point that the universe is merciless, uncaring, uncompromising, and alien to all human feeling. What better monster to take on the role of apocalyptic deathbringer than one which has no anthropomorphic qualities: that skitters along on it’s roots, and feeds on blood, that, as a consequence of its inhuman nature, negates the value of culture, thought and emotion?

Fuck yeah, triffids are nasty.

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