Mindless Ones

A, B

Over to Bobsy for the first one, a lost gem of a bat-ghoul.

Cadaver

Think like Dr. Phibes or ‘the Price of Fear’, Vincent Price’s radio series of horror tales that he would front and narrate. Cadaver is like a behind the scenes mastermind, crafting these little theatrical events for unwitting but ironically-deserving Gothamites to get caught and come to a grisly end in. This would be like The Game or traditional long-cons, but low key and intricate, involving doppelgangers, stooges, switches, hi-tech surveillance, all painstakingly researched and executed, and performed with an unusual amount of stagey flair, blood, and medieval death motifs.

Cadaver worships death – not as one worships a god, as one worships a favourite matinee idol, and seeks to flatter her with wonderfully inventive murders.

He should have a beautiful assistant: Who is that mysterious, alluring, new secretary who is tempting this average joe into a dizzying series of betrayals that results in him dying nob-first through the office shredder? That kind of thing. Batman is called into the bizarre crime scene by a baffled Gordon, and painstakingly reconstructs the chain of events leading up to it. Cadaver is crap in a fight of course (but his assistant isn’t) and there are always loads of death traps in his hideout (usually abandoned art deco hotels, mausoleums or churches). Cadaver spends a lot of time pacing about wearing cloaks and Phantom of the opera masks, quoting the bloody bits from obscure Jacobean dramas.

The autopsies continue after the jump

Andrew and Steven are away so here’s the ever popular I Am Pig.

A strip by Bob Ferrie

IS HOT SEX

In Batman 700 Morrison threw out a particularly juicy idea, that the bat-foes of 50s and 60s were pop-criminals. Morrison being Morrison he didn’t explain the concept any further so here’s a few of my thoughts

• What is popcrime? Clownish capers,  catty conundrums, fowl felonies. Catwoman stealing the giant emerald eyes of Bast, the Penguin besieging the city with hundreds of robot umbrellas, those are examples of pop-crime.
• Popcrime is inherently ostentatious and showy, the grander the better. It’s made for alliterative headlines, and for minimum casualties. It’s popular, fun, sensational and most importantly carnivalesque in the original sense of the term: dates in the Christian calendar when social norms were turned on their heads and nonsense reigned
• Amy recently suggested to me that successful superheroes, and one assumes the supervillains, lug around permanent autonomous zones. Follow the link if you haven’t heard the term before, but the idea, very simply, is that certain spaces largely operate outside the control structures of the wider culture and generate their own form and function from within. I’m not hugely into Hakim Bey, the chap who came up with the idea, but I think that it could be a fruitful way to approach the concept of the superhero, and I’m particularly interested in the parallels between the supervillain as popcriminal and the supervillain as PAZ. Bobsy tells me that Bey was heavily into the idea of spaces and communities so perhaps the straightforward situationism is more what I’m after here, but either way we’re on the same track. The Joker is always on, and even those whose costumes aren’t acid etched into their skin are very rarely halfway committed when they take on their superidentity. Back in the popcrime days Batman might have occasionally caught a glimpse of Edward Nigma, but 99% of the time the fella was all Riddler and the world had to make room.
• I’m thinking that the popcrime Catwoman is more like a contemporary artist than a crook. She isn’t motivated by money or by greed in a straightforward sense, nor is she hugely invested in vengeance or a lust for violence, although these things could well have their place within the popcriminal schema. It’s the raw outsiderness, the absurdity, the virtuosity and the immensity of pop-crime that’s the attraction. Turning the city into a crazy feline themed amusement park, featuring live action battles with Batman and Robin is what pop-crime is about – it’s the thing itself.
• Popcriminals don’t have to be mad. Going back to the Catwoman example, she doesn’t purr all the time because she’s insane, and she’s not obsessed by cats in the clinical sense, and she doesn’t try to claw out Batman’s eyes because she hallucinates paws where palms should be. The pop-crime Catwoman is all about becoming, an attempt to inhabit a role, to get lost in it, a psychologically necessary part of the pop-crime edifice. Committing cat-themed crimes wouldn’t be half as enjoyable or half as successful if she didn’t given herself utterly to the experience.
• Popcriminals make me think of mods and punks and late 80s ravers. Youth movements are all about adopting larger than life identities. Pop-criminals just do it bigger and better. It’s super-fashion.
• I miss popcrime. Let’s face it, while there’s some reasonably sophisticated superhero comics around these days, the actual criminal activities of supervillains are seldom very interesting. I’m bored of seeing blokes dressed up like cobras being reduced to purely physical threats, only ever good for a fight scene or two or the odd heinous crime. I can get fights and heinous crimes any old place – can’t say the same for popcrime. Can’t get popcrime for love nor money.

Popcrime: discuss, my lovelies.

Note how reassuring Wonder Woman is trying to be here. Unfortunately, as a royal demigoddess, she always trouble staying this side of patronising, and her apparently innocuous choice of words betrays the concern she’s trying so hard not to burden the room with. All the ‘Black Alert… End of Time… Resourceful Batman’ stuff is common enough for Monday night around the Justice League dinner table, but certain words give you an indication as to the social subtext of this meeting. Everything from her serious eyebrows to her deliberate use of reassuring, gently authoritative keywords (‘Officially… Naturally We Don’t Want To Alarm Anyone… But We All Know… We’ll Have To Assume…’) says one thing: Don’t let the children think they’re in charge.

Because honestly, these days Tim ‘Henman*’ Drake is the kind of guy it’s impossible not to patronise.

*See what I did there with the ‘Henman’ thing? It’s double clever of me, because obviously there’s the Tim Henman: Famous English Tennis Loser connection, but also Hen-Man, which is an appropriately stupid name for a spurned ex-sidekick needily clinging to pointless avian themes for his choice of grown-up supername, unintentionally demonstrating just how unsuccessfully he’s ‘moved on’ from the whole, y’know, ‘abandonment thing‘ thing…

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

This week’s strip was hurriedly cut, pasted and posted from a Weatherspoons pub in Winchester.  Sorry.

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