Mindless Ones

And so we continue.

All the As can be found here, along with an explanation of what the billy-o I’m doing

Bane

Amy’s already done this one and it can’t be bettered. All that’s left to be said is that Amygdala and the rest of those muscle men live permanently in Bane’s liefeldian shadow. If Bane is leader of the cult of bulk then they can only ever be his disciples; Sweaty, raging, flesh machines lost in the stink of his meat locker come gymnasium.

Black Mask

Dirty. Nasty. Fucker.

Start with the mask: you’ve got dehumanisation and the death of identity. This guy’s face isn’t just a black skull, these days it’s a black skull with red eyes – that’s demonic evil straight outta the 80s. There’s also something specifically horrific about a skull wearing a suit, it brings to mind the triumph of the material, modern monsters like the denizens of Hostel, and Patrick Bateman, terms like slasher and torture porn.

The character’s origin is begging to be jeuged up into a full blown Giallo nightmare. After murdering his parents for interfering with his love life, Roman Sionis takes control of their business and markets a cosmetic that hideously scars thousands of women. You’ve got brutality, misogyny, matricide and patricide, operatic vileness. Dirty. Dirty. Dirty. People who care about boring shit will be quick to point out here that Roman didn’t know what the product would do, but I like to think of Sionis spending his nights “market testing”, and fucking his lover, Circe, over the same desk where he makes the phone calls, has the meetings, and deliberately and methodically works to ensure that his facial treatment will do the maximum damage possible.

While we’re feeling gratuitous, perhaps it would be good to work an oedipal subtext into his background: maybe his mother, a woman who wore a disturbing amount of make-up, loved him just a bit too much, maybe his Father hated him for it, maybe that’s why they tried to destroy Roman and Circe’s burgeoning romance.

As a paid up member of the misogyny can fuck off club, and someone who isn’t particularly interested in seeing the Bat-franchise rub more grime n grit into its spandex I’m not very keen on Black Mask’s torture happy ways. I could do without a villain who lives to stuff women into refrigerators, but I’m happy to concede that he readily gives himself to the kind of voyeuristic violence and horror so popular with today’s audiences. So I say go with it, have him be all that stuff that the crime lord incarnation of the Penguin couldn’t hope to be. Have him be one hell of a nasty bastard.

Play up the monstrous verging on supernatural slasher angle by having his masked henchmen simply be an extension of him – think you’ve killed the fucker? Guess again, kid – and forget all that cultist stuff. The false-face gang aren’t his minions, they’re his claw. Have him kill and kill and kill, give him an ebony room with an operating table, and casino where the patrons can bet against the lives of their enemies’ children. Have him make Catwoman’s sister watch while her husband is tortured to death and then force her to eat him.

Hang on, he’s already done that…

Or maybe just bin the horrible git.

Blockbuster

There’s two sorts of Blockbuster and they’re both more than a little yawn inducing.

1. The chap who drank the science potion and got strong and dumb and was exploited by his criminal brother. He’s a bit like the green Hulk.

2. The chap who got strong and then did a deal with the devil so that he could also be clever. He’s a bit like the grey Hulk but with a bigger head.

The first has the whole tragic monster thing going, which certainly fits with the kind of story that some people like to tell with Batman but I couldn’t give a monkey’s about, mainly because it’s been done to death in Batman and elsewhere (the Hulk, Frankenstein, why am I bothering to list these?, etc…). The second is just… well… it isn’t really anything. Big strong criminal = so what? I suppose you could do something with the hackneyed Faustian bargain bit but I wouldn’t want to.

Whatever, see the Bane entry.

Andrew and Steven are away and I Am Pig has come to play.

A strip by Bob Ferrie

In the grand tradition of our Rogue’s Reviews and inspired by Zak Sabbath’s Alphabetical Monster thing, his attempt at reviewing each and every entry in the D&D Monster Manual, I’ve decided to take on all the Bat-villains, starting with…

Can you guess? He’s a bit shit!

THIS IS HOW IT’S GOING TO WORK. Plenty blather in recent weeks about the reactionary impulses at work in DC’s decision to get rid of all its Bronze (I call it ‘Early Dark’ but ‘whatever, Steve Trevor’)/Dark/Prismatic Age legacy heroes and replace them with the resurrected Silver Age versions, in a bid to placate the SEETHING, ever-chubbier fanman and his desire for everything to be just like it was when he was a child.

(Minus the constant stream of free electronic NUDITY, I’m guessing.)

[Please note we fully accept the non-existence of the Legion of EviL Fan-Men stereotype. With the cultural dominance of the superhero over the early 21st century very well secure, these arguments, these embarrassments, are very much a relic of another age, and performed here very much in the spirit of a historical battle re-enactment society (and don’t get me started on those losers, with their ‘going outside’ and ‘hanging around with other people’ and ‘getting some fun and healthy exercise’). The caricature is being deployed in the current post merely for cosmic effect, a convenient and pitiful rhetorical ghost to lazily lob some poor jokes and manufactured anger at. To reiterate: It’s just a bit of fun. I am as ill-shaven and portly as anyone, and as will become all too apparent my opinions on superheroes are both delinquently partial and barely worth the (very) spare calorie it takes to type them. With those caveats safely in place, read on, if you’ve got the arse for it.]

It’s a World Cup of superheroes old and new, minus the tournament aspect, or any relation to football. Still, using the words World Cup in a post has got to be OK for the Google rankings at the moment, eh readers?

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

TERMINUS BOOK 2: HOW DID I GET HERE

NEW IN STORE OVER AT WWW.MILKTHECAT.WORDPRESS.COM/THESHOP!!

16 more full colour TERMINI for your pleasure and purchase for just £4.00.

Just follow the link to THE SHOP over at www.milkthecat.wordpress.com to purchase…Limited stocks so act fast.

Shield 2 by Jonathan Hickman & Michael Angelo

I was very headwrong when reading SHIELD 2 and my memory of the first issue had been totally erased. I thought it was great, the height of pointless shouting and cosmo-drama in the Mighty Marvel Manner. It made no sense whatsoever to me but the scope of the action and the renaissance era Kirby design, all worked very well to leave me thrilled and confused. It was well mental though. A more sober reread last night made the whole thing seem a bit boring and studied. The NY kid was no longer a translucent standin for the universal recipient freak radioactive accident that used to empower us so, but a Parker clone (not literally) whose dad did something awful and amazing once. I remembered that the MIBs were Tony Stark and Reed Richards’ dads, which is crap (whatever happened to the Mighty Marvel Meritocracy? Why am I reading about aristocratic lineages? It’s un-American, da mit!)

Nemesis 2 by Millar & McNiven

I take back my recent sniffiness on this one. The action scenes were basically perfect, the straightforward stacks of widescreen panels hiding an octopoidal magpie at the heart of the story, reaching out from the panel borders into movies and manga to snag and squeeze their best bits dry. I still think the seam of ‘politico/economic consequences of the president’s kidnap’ would be a good thing to work into it – ‘Nemesis brings world to its knees’ kinda thing… A few screaming headlines or talky-head TV screens would ground it all a bit more, though in turn they might distract from the guilty, gleeful joy that this comic runs on – the bits with the main characters going ’Aha, I fooled you!/’No, I fooled you/’No, I foooooo’ etc., the tacit acknowledgement and disregard for the manufactured falseness of these narratalogical shifts, were priceless. I am already thinking of an excuse to drag the wife to watch Nemesis at the movies, and am already thinking about what I will say when the credits roll. ‘The action was a lot tighter in the comic…’

Pnshrmx 9 by Aaron & Dillon

Panmox was good – no fight, no big fight anyway, but it does have a nice dramatic pace nevertheless, and the plotting is so freaky and over-the-top that the pages almost seem to turn themselves. Good, tense scenes of Frank going too far, the Kingpin battling his deadliest enemy, and a never-better Bullseye messing with the freaky violence mojo (it looks likes like he’s kind of inviting the Punisher-spirit from Born to take up residence, which is probably not a smart move on his part.) The feeling is beginning to seep in that Aaron’s wilder, splattery grindhouse sensibility could amount to a Bold New Way to do the Punisher, somewhere free of the Ennis ghost, different to his successful comedic and ultrablack incarnations, but equally legitimate. The NY rooftops and shrill tone keep making me think of Larry Cohen, with the Kingpin, Bulls and my man Frank all battling to be the winged serpent…

Irredeemable 14 by Waid & Someone

The sense of menace, of bad decisions being made and of the consequences piling up in the future like a dozen car crashes, really sustains this comic. Even if they win, they lose, and they’re probably not even going to win. You can see bits of the past start to leak in – the Angel character has cut his own wings off, and you can see everyone thinking ‘Some razor sharp metal ones would probably help with this awful new age we seem to be stuck in’. The tarnish is all but come off the silver age shine, and the characters are consciously registering the shifts in their lives. It’s strangely touching, seeing these poor, small fictions, their made-up memories and selfless selves, visibly buckle under the stress of the sharp and nasty story Waid has plugged them into. These are our heroes, and they are dying off. Despite its costy pedigree and often deceptive packaging (Krause’s stiff but fitting art now slowly morphing in other guy’s hands into some steroidal, Liefeldian nightmare) Irredeemable is a bleak and bitter book, and every few issues a page or two snikts at you and cuts you on the eyelid to remind you of the pain it’s in.

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

A quick preambulatory moan:

Oh the art, the art was as ever a big problem. I’ll let the lovely chaps over at Comics Alliance fill you in on the specifics, all you really need to know is that the central aspects of the issue’s locked room mystery – when the Prof was killed and who did the killing – were obscured by an art error that should have been spotted by the editorial team, or, you know, someone. It’s just not okay that something like that was allowed to slip through, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of relationship Morrison has with the editorial staff, let alone his artists. Maybe they were just in a big rush, although it’s hard to imagine why given the lead in to this issue.

That aside, I enjoyed 700 in a bitty way, but wasn’t too keen on the book as a whole. The segmented structure helped to legitimise the former response in my mind however, and consequently I feel no shame in taking the annocomment approach. Seems appropriate.

More from me after the jump