SILENCE! #24
July 31st, 2012
WE ARE THE DICK MILLER APPRECIATION SOCIETY…
Firstly, apologies if you are having trouble downloading this week’s SILENCE! Gary and The Beast are currently reaching their monthly bandwidth limit with their pod lords. It should be back to normal (at least for a while) on the 4th of August. At the moment they cannot afford to upgrade our account so perhaps they’ll set up some way of letting listeners chip in a bit of financial support in the near future but what do I know? I’m just a disembodied voice which magically appears here to tell you about the contents of the podcast…
Secondly – forget about all that whiny cry-baby sh*t! Let’s get some face time with the latest and greatest edition of SILENCE! – the show that snuggles up to you and looks awful cute, but one look into those cold black shark eyes tells you…this podcast is not your friend.
The Beast and Lactus get things up and running (then falling over) with the SILENCE! News, before taking a roll in the clover with some of this week’s very floppiest of floppies, including:
Axe Cop, Tank Girl from Martin and Mahfood, Eternity, Haunt, Prophet and JL: Dark. Lactus bites down on the belt strap and mainlines some more medicine in Man Vs Comics, taking on all sorts of unwanted AVX business in Wolverine and The X-Men, X-Men Legacy and AVX: The Avengers. There are probably more in there too. Beast also likes some of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete.
The two get another celebrity quizzler in The Silent Question (and the answers involve Booster Gold and Jason Todd). Lactus continues his crusade to bring exposure to lost Brit comics savant Barry M Freeman, and The Beast unveils his Knightquest, as he dips into the Complete Batman: Knightfall. Oh, and Lactus unveils his headpourings on the ‘recent’ Amazing Spiderman film.
All wrapped up in an hour and a half of well proportioned comics fun. And look at the winning smile on the little blighter! So gather round and listen to Pappy as he turns up the radio on…SILENCE! no.24!
THE NEGATIVE ZONE: Saga #1
July 30th, 2012
The ‘S’ you may have seen is silent, actually, so we’re just going to call it by its True Name, Aga.
Welcome to the Star Wars comic where every character is Jar Jar Binks.
SILENCE! #23
July 25th, 2012
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT
Of course it isn’t silly! It’s a gaping entrance! An entrance into the world of SILENCE!!!
In this episode the pair who go together like strawberries and cream, millionaires and wards, and ‘interesting’ facial hair and threats of violence get down on their knees and pray for a rain of comics…and they get it!
After a heartfelt piece of Dylan-esque balladry about Man-Thing from The Beast, and a baggy edition of the SILENCE! news, there’s a twelve car pile-up of comics foolchat, covering:
the revamped Glory, Peter Bagge’s Reset, Paul Chadwick’s Concrete (and ‘Moving A Big Rock’), Saga (both the comic and the pensioner’s holiday scheme), Hanging with DB Cooper from Brian Churillo, Mind MGMT, Hellblazer and the recent hilarious Inkstuds Biz interview, Daredevil, The Shadow, JLA and an Infernal Man-Thing freestyle… oh, and Lactus takes on all the AVX related bizzo, in Man Vs Comics.
But let’s not forget the brand new feature The Silent Question in which the pair answer a Celebrity! Question! The Beast talks up Hookjaw and Lactus takes on Chester Brown and Canadian masturbation in general…
And there’s an appreciation of lost Brit comics genius Barry M Freeman.
Dear me, I’ve just wet me knickers! It’s all too much…let’s hope your undercrackers can handle the truth! It’s all wrapped up in the brain-burp that is…SILENCE!
And don’t forget to check below as well for the Silence Gallery…
I hope you’ll forgive me a little bit of Mindless Self Indulgence here since we’ve already covered the comic in question in some detail, but just try to imagine my surprise when after reading pages and pages full of brilliant, moving stuff about growing older in a world that is indifferent to your bewildered perspective in LoEG Century, I came face-to-face with the young Antichrist and discovered that he was me.
Of course, he was also Harry Potter and Will Stanton and Kevin the Teenager, but as he peeled his way out of the page…
…and started rambling away at our heroes in that deadened voice of his, I began to feel like I was watching myself rip my way through the comic. A spoiled young man raging against the story he’s grown up in?
Fuck! Yeah, okay – guilty as charged!
Mmmmmyesss! Click here to initiate contact with a Mindless antichrist!
The End of Time: Mister Attack vs. Transformers Regeneration One
July 20th, 2012
This review was fuckin’ tough to write. I mean that. I don’t mean just the usual typing and re-typing a section as you try to nuance a gag or make a point, although that was certainly part of it. No, what it entailed was something of a personal whirlwind akin to the opening of Apocalypse Now, but with less booze and more crying. Sometimes I would pause to reflect on how the fuck I got myself into this state over something so simple, because, really, the actual review was a breeze to write. It was what followed that was the problem.
When Simon Furman and Andrew Wildman announced their desire to resume the story of the Marvel Transformers comic, I have to confess I was curious, but I wasn’t burning to have it with never-ending desire. It did seem odd. Bin Generation 2? That odd beast of a comic with 75% more violent death and one of the most intriguing additions to Furman’s version of the mythology? Also, I’d not long finished catching up with Furman’s IDW run. A decidedly mixed bag that almost dips a toe into becoming brutally sublime when the cancellation kicks in and the steadily increasing pace that marked each limited series suddenly sees the last two issues ramp up into a fucking furious pace. Plot points not so much nailed as roadkilled. A tenuous reminder of the energies of past. Maybe he had the old ways in him, but I for one wasn’t sure.
SILENCE! #22
July 18th, 2012
I AM GODZILLA! YOU ARE JAPAN!
Hello SILENCERS, it’s your old pal the omniscient smartarse narrator, back once again to remind you to bend over, grab you r shoelaces and await the cosmic shunting that is SILENCE! no.22. Praise be to Jinkies!
In this cerebellum fondling episode, cosmic man-child Gary Lactus returns from his honeymoon to reap galactic vengence on his former partner, after last week’s anomalous high quality episode. But fear not – the Butch and Sundance of the comicopinionsphere are soon back to their merry ways, and Lactus reveals his new career as a fantasy prose writer, unveiling his meisterwork ‘Time of Crowns’ on an ill-prepared but Michael Bay-directed Beast.
The SILENCE! News has all the hottttt gozzip from this year’s San Diego Con that you can fit on the head of a pin, then it’s onwards, ever onwards into the howling maelstrom that is last week’s comics…
AND SO….there’s talk of Sean Murphy’s Punk Rock Jesus, the final Bulletproof Coffin from serial comics abusers Shave Hike and Daky Kine, the wonderful Tales Designed to Thrizzle, forgotten British curio Gutted, Alan Davis’ Fantastic Four annual, Space: Punisher (with a nerdcore digression into Earth 616) Dinosaurs Vs Aliens from Sir Grant, Wolverine & The X-Men (fukk off crossover!), Batman and the Owl pellets, Walking Dead 100 (in which Beast inadvertently suggests some dubious things about himself) Sin City: That Yellow Bastard, the relaunched Eerie, and finally Robert Loren Fleming and Keith Giffen’s adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Hell On Earth (check the gallery for some stunning images from that) in The Beast’s Bargain Basement.
All this and not much more in the podcast that routinely fails to rise to the occasion…SILENCE!
(Thanks to James Stokoe for the awesome SILENCE! banner)
Click below for the SILENCE! gallery…
SILENCE! #21
July 13th, 2012
HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!!!!!
Welcome then, gentle listen-folk, to the Twilight Zone….where anything can happen. Such as Gary Lactus NOT appearing on this week’s edition of the internet’s favourite aural-comics affairs-cast SILENCE! Fear not though, stepping into his large cosmic brogues comes sprightly upstart BOBSY! He and tired old deck-hand The Beast Must Die just couldn’t bare to think of a week without pointless comics frippery, so they’ve teamed up to bring you SILENCE no.21!!
And what a fist they make of it. In a whopping two and a quarter hours they cause merry havoc discussing 2000AD, Judge Dredd, middle-class Quantam Leap, Rocketeer Adventures, Superman 3 (ie the best one), Fury MAX, Earth 2, Robert Downey Jr’s gradual transformation into David Gest, Ron Perlman (aka the Monster Don), Thief of Thieves, The Reckoning, Marvel NOW!, Ozymandias (aka Between Watchmen), AVX, Haunt, Dial H, Action Comics, Castle Waiting…plus a typically rambling digression into Steve Gerber’s wonderful Infernal Man-Thing. Oh god but that’s just the tip of the iceberg…well, actually it’s more like the main part of the iceberg, but the real cream of the iceberg (what?) is the sparkling interraction between two broken mammals who can’t think of anything better to do than talk about comics (while Rome burns)!
Phew! Just when you thought 2012 couldn’t get any HOTTTERRRR!!!!???
CINDY and THE FEVER
July 11th, 2012
Andrew: Something I noticed while looking for a reference for something else — that anarchy/heart symbol we were wondering about is the symbol of the superhero flying out of the page in the blazing world section of The Black Dossier. Checking in with Nevins’ annotations of same (reading his annotations for this book before we’ve finished would be cheating, but the old books are fair game), we find that it’s the logo of Ace Hart (a British superhero, not the dog detective), which we all should have known as he appears in Zenith Phase III.
Adam: I like that I couldn’t link it back to a specific superhero, actually. I enjoyed having the space to meditate on how and why it might fit into the kind of space O’Neil and Moore were interested in constructing rather than just see it as a dry reference. So fanwank, yes, but not without purpose. Although the name ‘Ace Hart’ would probably just have added fuel to my reverie’s fire. I imagine Moore would have fun with the symbolic charge there.
Andrew: And one point I don’t think we made before, when discussing to what extent Moore is able to comment on the culture of 2009 as opposed to earlier decades, is just how few characters from 21st century fiction actually appear here. We’ve got the odd background character who doesn’t say or do anything, but in the whole book the only character with a speaking role to have been created in the decade in which the comic is supposedly set is Malcolm Tucker, who’s just a talking head on a TV. Even the Potter characters (none of whom except Potter have more than one line) were created in the mid-1990s — and other than them, there’s not a speaking character in the comic that originated post-1976.
This is a huge change from all the other League volumes, which mixed and matched eras, obviously, but showed a real in-depth knowledge of their time’s popular culture.
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