Mindless Ones

Okay, it’s finally done – 44 pages of comics goodness, featuring everyone’s favourite angry little girl and her dog!

£3.50 (+p&P) – head over to the Shop at Milk The Cat to purchase:

GO BUY IT

Please note – tt’s available (along with all my other stuff) to overseas readers too – check out the postage  details  over at Milk The Cat

Features the stories Cindy & Biscuit and the Secrets of Summer, Biscuit Beyond (as seen right here), the epic 18 page Cindy vs The Sea, Cindy & Biscuit and the Snowman and Excerpts from Cindy’s Diary.

I really am super-pleased with this. It’s the best comics work I’ve ever done and ,after the great reception the first issue got, I’m hoping you’re going to love it too.

Click below for some teaser images…

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In the fourth heart-wrenchingly dramatic episode of SILENCE! Gary Lactus debuts his awesome, thought-provoking Fantastic Four super ballad… The Beast reveals his new job… and the sex life of the FF is discussed with real intellect and insight. Then!! the two rogues proceed to discuss a plethora of last weeks comics including Fantastic Four 603 (moments!), Shavid Hane and Daky Kine’s Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred no.2 (jazz!), Prophet no. 2 (no alien vagay-jay’s this time!), Wolverine and the X-Men (corporate enthusiasm!) and sort of talk about Red Lanterns and JL: DARK (nee Nowhere) . Then (because they are erudite and broad-minded) they talk about the artwork of Marc Hempel, the recent quasi-superheroic film Limitless and in true Mindless fashion ham-fistedly make their way through this week’s upcoming releases!

IS IT MORE THAN YOU CAN TAKE?!!?

(soft answer: yes)

(MINDLESS ANSWER: HELL YES! TAKE ME TO IT!)

 

P.S Listeners are encouraged to send us drawings inspired by Gary’s song for inclusion in the SILENCE! Gallery to [email protected]

NSFW

Part 1
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence004a.mp3]
Click to download

Part 2
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence004b.mp3]
Click to download

This is the first in what will probably -HAHAHAHAHAHAHA – be a series of regular, if shortish posts about good, scary moments in superhero books.

This week:

From Dante’s Inferno and Fungus the Bogeyman to the much maligned, because capriciously fatal, Chasms of Malice the megadungeon has, for me, an eternal appeal. But because I’ve always found it such a comforting fictional environment, films like 127 Hours and Touching The Void really fuck with my head. They take the safe, endlessly sheltered, endlessly contained and controlled space and aggressively insist it’s anything but. The endless shelter, the roofing, becomes nothing but a granite sky as uncaring, if not moreso, than the one in the stock quote. Because unlike the sky above us it can cave in, trap arms, pulverise shins. Can go on forever…. until it tapers into a little hole where the star of The Descent is still trapped, alone, left to rot and go mad in the dark. Dungeons jostle about like this in all our minds, I think. Humans seek refuge. We instantly anthropomorphise enclosed spaces. Potential homes. But they may resist us. Perhaps they *are* homes – but not ours. Filled with… things.

Or perhaps they’re not homes at all.

In this third awe-inducing installment, the Beast risks life and limb to broadcast live from a Mega City 1 Iso-cube, while a tired and slightly hungover Lactus lounges on his inter-galactic sofa high above the statosphere!

In a dodgy English accents spectacular, discussion ranges from Azzarello’s Xena, warri…sorry Wonder Woman, Batman (Owls!), Daredevil, Byrne’s FF, James Sturm’s Unstable Molecules and we have a long chat about John ‘Blimey Guv’ Constantine and Hellbla..sorry HECKblazer. More importantly The Beast unveils his theme tune to a proposed Hellblazer TV show!

Can you stand it? Do you dare listen??

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence003.mp3]

Click to download

And so we get the start of a new show, which for some reason has the same title as that old programme Doctor Who.

In the second scintillating episode, The Beast broadcasts live from Alan Moore’s beard, while Lactus continues his lonely (yet chatty) vigil orbiting above the South Coast of England in his galactic treehouse… Topics include the many Jason Aaron’s (or at least the ones who write Wolverine and The X-Men and PunisherMaxExtremeZero), Prophet (in which Lactus does a very horrid alien vagina impression) Casey & Fox’s lurid Haunt, superhero comics ‘ending’, Adventure Time, and the possibility of forcing children to review comics. And it all gets very romantic at the end, in this pulse-pounding Valentines episode…

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence002.mp3]

Click to download

SPECIAL “LOVE UND ROMANCE” EDITION

As you’ve probably noticed, it’s Valentines Day, and since we’ve already established that FEELINGS ABOUT COMICS ARE THE ONLY TRUE FEELINGS, I thought that it might be a good time to get a bit soppy about some of the comics I’ve read recently…

It’s been hard to think loving thoughts about comics in the past week or so (because: WA2CHMEN, Gary Friedrich), but I’m a trooper, and I’ve got my good buddy Mister Attack (aka The Boy Fae the Heed, aka The Beast o’the Bar-G) to keep me company, so here it goes!

Winter Solider #1, by Ed Brubker, Butch Guice and Bettie Breitweiser

Fatale #2, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

It’s a bit awkward to read these two comics back-to-back, and to find yourself preferring the one that’s built on the soiled dreams of Jack Kirby, but it’s also hard to pretend that clean hands make for good art when you’re not a teenage boy.  The first two issues of Brubaker and Phillips’ latest collaboration have proceeded exactly as expected – this is the sort of work (solid, well-crafted, “ugly things in the darkness/worse things in store”) that makes it easy to under-appreciate one of corporate comics’ best partnerships.

It’s perfect pulp, in other words, but at their best these guys can suggest a whole city’s worth of stories in one panel…

…and there’s been nothing in the first couple of issues of Fatale that’s hinted at that sort of imaginative depth. Winter Soldier #1 meanwhile, is absolutely full of potent images. Despite having a truly ugly, gurning cover – despite looking like a superhero book, basically – it’s a sneakily great wee comic, all slick superspy action and unexpected quietness. This panel has caught the attention of a few other commentators…

…and rightly so.  Butch Guice’s art here has a softness too it (and not just in the sense that it contains – ugh! – kissing) that couldn’t stand out more in context if it radiated ethical integrity (ooh, burn – take that, comics!). If I was looking to get all thematic on your ass I’d point you in the direction of Clive Barker’s comment that comics aren’t good at making room for love, but I’m not feeling particularly clever today, so instead I’ll  just note that while most individual images will yield lots of strange, abstract patterns if you crop them artfully enough, this image gives itself more readily to this treatment than most:

Look, I don’t want to make too much of a prat of myself this early in the post, but there’s something beautiful about the way that the boundaries between the two characters in this panel seem to have been gently and willingly collapsed, isn’t there?

Yeah… there definitely is. Click here to watch me search for love in all the wrong places, like a character in a story with a blunt moral!

Full disclosure: I was asked to review this book by the author’s husband, Kip Manley, a lovely man, author of City of Roses, which is a smashing book I’d recommend to fans of Jonathan Carroll or that mid-1990s Vertigo vintage, so take that as you will. I’m sort of flailing with my critical armoire (contents: glibness, cruelty) and my comics readership, which includes basically no webcomics (which Dicebox originated as), bar Achewood, and certainly very little like this.

read on for an ambulatory reading, spoilers: the subtitle is certainly an accurate summation

It was the end…but the moment had been prepared for.

Far more than The Tenth Planet, The War Games was the end not just of a Doctor, but of Doctor Who itself as it had been known up to that point.