Mindless Ones

Being an irregular series wherein I spotlight some particularly beautiful cover runs, from some comics you might have forgotten about, or never seen before. Up this time, the forgotten classic Martian Manhunter: American Secrets mini series from 1992 by Gerard Jones and the sadly missed Eduardo Barreto.

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BRAND NEW!!!!!!

It’s the great new Skype chat show where The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus talk to each other! About comics no less.

In this episode:

Whilst Lactus floats in his spaceship above the Earth (specifically above Brighton, East Sussex), the Beast is holed up in his brand new luxury swank pad inside a Sentinel’s head. The two Mighty Mindless’ conversation soon turns to comics, and they discuss Steve Ditko’s DC work, Pete Milligan and Brett Ewin’s Bad Company, Fatale, The Twelve, WA2CHMEN (totally psyched!!), and Action Comics amongst others, and in a truly interactive moment The Beast watches the Avengers trailer…LIVE!

Strap yourself in for two bite-size chunks of Mindless Poddery, and then join us back here next week for more. Or throw your headset down in disgust and punch your computer. THE CHOICE IS YOURS!

Try SILENCE! #1 part 1
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence001a.mp3]
Click to download SILENCE! # 1 part 1

Not enough for you? Here’s part 2
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence001b.mp3]
Click to download SILENCE! # 1 part 2

January’s Cartoon County meeting was lucky enough to play host to Chris Weston, artist for The Filth, 2000AD, The Twelve and lots more. Listen now as Chris talks of his apprenticeship with Trigan Empire’s Don Lawrence to working on films such as Akira and The Book Of Eli and his shamanic meeting with Bizarro.

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/chris-weston.mp3]
Click to download

Cartoon County is an association of over 100 cartoonists and comic artists in the Sussex area. Our regular meetings are usually on the last Monday of every month at The Cricketers, Black Lion St, Brighton, from 6 til late. If you’re a cartoonist or a comic artist, or use those particular styles of drawing in your work as an illustrator, animator or storyboard artist, you are very welcome to join us.

1. Endtroducing

Flashback to 2011 and the world is ending. Again. The signs are easy to interpret now, when they require any interpreting at all: a news anchor blathers away on TV,  building up so much expectation that the large hadron collider, suffering from a fit of performance anxiety, unravels and takes reality with it; meanwhile, under the sea in a parallel Earth, an archaic supervillain announces that he has “hung a deadly necklace of deadly meta-bombs around the world like precious pearls“; on the internet, or rather in a dated parody of cyberspace that resembles nothing so much as X-Box live for “edgy” business folk, a rapidly mutating program tries to take over everything.

Responses to this are equally typical: standing in a futile crowd beside a fatbalding awkwardman, a disinterested woman holds up a sign informing everyone that “THE END is NIGH!“; a bloodied hero crawls forward, trying to save the world again, knowing that all he has to do is push a button, but that even this might be to much for him now; elsewhere, tough men decide to make tough decisions with predictable results.

I’m talking about Batman Incorporated and Indigo Prime here, because they were the two garish fantasies that played best for my (semi-informed, heavily solipsistic) sense of panic throughout 2011, that end of season finale of a year.

After all, if you feel like everything’s falling apart, sometimes it helps to be able dress these feelings up in twisted words and garish costumes instead of focusing on the garbled socio-economic truth.

Spacetime becomes jelly.

The walls of reality buckle and fold.

Higher Dimensions intrude into the supersymmetry.

Dark Matter condenses as worlds collide.

Mmmmm, yeah, that’s the stuff.

Come down with me.

Sometimes the best creative work comes from having to work within restrictions imposed from outside. The Mind Robber is a perfect example of this. The story before, The Dominators, was originally meant to be a six-parter, but had to be cut down to five (thankfully, as it’s the most awful mess imaginable from every possible standpoint).

For some reason the scene above is a favourite of straight men, but few others…

Yesterday, DC finally got around to breaking the news that was already broken: Yes they were going to publish Watchmen prequels, and yes, they had managed to find a group of creators dumb enough to work on them! Huzzah!

Now obviously The Comics Internet has already had a pretty good go at covering this topic. Hell, we covered this announcement in one of our Christmas podcasts before it even happened!

Still, even assuming you’ve already read Newsarama’s I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT SATIRE take and David Brothers’ elegant evisceration of the same, we figure you’ve still probably got room in that multiversal brain of yours for a very Mindless take on these announcements.

If so, rest easy True Believers. Here’s how it begins…

Bobsy: Someone said on the radio this morning that it’s the 50th anniversary of the smiley face. not sure how that fits with the ‘facts’ here, but it made me grimly reflect that if anything could turn that smile upside down then the Watchmen 2 announcement yesterday was surely it. The people in the shop were going crazy about the news, never been in there amid such animated chatter on a single topic before. Everyone basically positive too, saying they were going to buy it, looking forward to reading the characters again.

I can’t believe that we’re seriously supposed to think that the Kubert brothers are an adequate shadow of Gibbons, or that Azzarello, Cooke or (jesus christ) Len Wein are going to be able to produce anything that favourably compares with the original. I don’t even like Watchmen that much, but to go back to it seems to justify everything that Alan Moore has been saying for years about creative and cultural exhaustion.

I realise it’s a bit Canutian of me to wish for a different world, but the expansion into the Watchmen property strikes me as being a victory for capitalism’s oozing tentacles only, hence a defeat for the rest of us.

Find out why this announcement was pretty much DC’s way of saying Watchmen would be doing anal now, under the cut!