SILENCE! #28
August 28th, 2012
DO NOT FEED THIS PODCAST AFTER MIDNIGHT!
What so never feed it at all?
It’s always after midnight!
Who feeds podcasts anyway you chump?
WELL???
Hi there, and welcome to the sole justification for electricity, SILENCE no.28! And what a time you chose to stop by. It’s a veritable cornucopia of comics bull$hit! A very poorly Beast and Lactus drag themselves from their sickbeds to deliver a particularly rambling SILENCE! News, covering super-smoochies and the return of Dr Who. Then it’s a hop, skip and jump into the weekly comics, includifying Batman Inc no.3, Dan The Unharmable (with a stomach churning digression into The Walking Dead 100 in which the pair compare injuries like that scene in Jaws – no, not the one with Roy Scheider and the kid you moron!), Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom from Waid ‘n’ Samnee, the sad end of the line for Dave Sim’s Glamourpuss, AVX: Uncanny X-Men, and the 50th anniversary of Amazing Spiderman. Booyah.
There’s a SILENT question from no-one’s favourite Robin, Tim Drake, and the answers include Power Pack and Hobbes (and the Beast manages to criticise charity comics, the mean-spirited, heartless bastard) Then he takes us wading into the recesses of the Beast’s Bargain Basement with a retrospective of lost 1970’s horror publishers Skywald. Add in a recommendation to check out Joe Dante’s wonderful Trailers From Hell website for notcomics and you have a plucky edition of SILENCE! that manages to overcome adversity and become a champion in it’s field. Go SILENCE! Don’t forget to check below for some lovely Skywald images in the SILENCE Gallery….
(As always, thanks to James Stokoe for his wonderful SILENCE! banner)
Tygers and Lambs #2 – Wild Children
August 25th, 2012
What a joy it is to dance and sing…
…or so I seem to remember anyway. This bloggy vessel has now entered the fourth decade of its journey towards oblivion, so you can look forward to it trying out its new “all whinging, all the time” persona as its mechanics starts to fail and its withered captain feels the need to overcompensate in a tragic bid for immortality.
From New X-Men: Riot at Xaviers, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
But before I lose myself to that delightful journey, there’s Ales Kot and Riley Rossmo‘s Wild Children, a comic book that couldn’t feel more like a jolt from the nineties if it had come wrapped in a pair of novelty Spice Girls underpants and been delivered by a reformed Lee and Herring. Except that it’s actually a lot more specific than that, because what Wild Chilren feels like is a a jolt from my nineties – if you can imagine a version of Grant Morrison and Philip Bond’s Kill Yr Boyfriend that tries to encompass all of The Invisibles, you’ll probably be imagining something quite like Wild Children. Like The Invisibles, Wild Children is clearly built to be read in a circle, and if the first line of dialogue – “I still don’t understand” – doesn’t get this point across, there’s another line on the third page to make the design even harder to ignore: “Some of you may think we’re evil, but I don’t think you’ll miss the point this time.”
From The Invisibles #1, ‘Dead Beatles’, by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell
All of which is typical of Wild Children’s approach. Part story, part lecture, Wild Children is a swaggering, talky comic that positions its readers as adult hostages, drugged and held at gunpoint by the titular teens. Weapons are brandished that may or may not be weapons, speeches about the nature of reality are given, tragedy ensues.
Some people might object to being positioned this way – former wild children with fluff-encrusted blank badges in their sock drawers might find themselves wanting to be the ones giving the lecture, for example – but while I would have probably have got more out of the comic if Riley Rossmo had been given more action to draw, the loose, unfinished quality of his line was enough to get me through a couple of reading cycles. And like I said, there’s plenty of swagger in Wild Children’s design. From its carefully combusted cover on in, this is clearly the work of a couple of people who want to start something.
The only question is, what is it that they want to start, exactly?
SILENCE! #27
August 21st, 2012
I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here someday burns down, and I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away and I never come back to this town again…
OH CHEER UP CHARLIE CHUCKLES!
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s SILENCE! no.27. That’s right it’s been 27 years since SILENCE! started. The internet was sepia and comics were carved on the side of cave walls!
So grab your best gal pal or guy puy, and let’s burrow snout first into a big ol’ pile of comics hoo-hah. After a fist-pumping ballad in honor of gas-mask steroid commie Bane, and a healthy dollop of SILENCE! News (covering Bob Burden’s Pussy Riot solidarity), Gary Lactus brings us a dramatic undercover expose into Comics Vs Cocaine! the Beast and Lactus get busy with the fizzy with Butcher Baker from Casey and Huddlestone, Saga no.6, and Shade no.11. Then it;s a walloping great chunk of Man V Comics covering AVX, AVX: Avengers, Daredevil, Walking Dead, Fatale, Saucer County, Hellblazer, Everybody Loves Tank Girl, and Wonder Woman. Phew. Rather him than us, right readers??????????
But it doesn’t end there. Then he takes on ALL of the Before Watchmen comics, in Who Reads The Watchmen?
Then it’s a quick swim in the mildewey waters of the Beast’s Bargain Basement with Doc Frankenstein and more hot Barry M Freeman nuggets uncovered. Plus an interview with Barney Farmer! Finish it off with a quick big-up of Joe Dante’s underrated love letter to 1950’s monster movies Matinee, and you have an hour and a half of delicious comics tapioca for all the family. That’s right it’s SILENCE!
Check below for the amazing Barry M Freeman appreciation area:
Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – 1979
August 20th, 2012
Before we get going with this, a quick question — I’ve been thinking of releasing this series of posts, when finished (some time next year), as a book. Would anyone actually buy and read such a thing, or is it a bad idea?
I’m asking now, because here is where we head into a totally different realm of Doctor Who. I’ve done sixteen of these posts so far, and there are thirty-three after this. But fourteen of the sixteen previous ones have been about TV shows, with only two (Dr Who And The Daleks and Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters) dealing with non-TV stories. Of the thirty-four stories from 1979 to 2012 I’m dealing with, only fourteen of those essays will be talking about stuff that was actually on TV in those years. Four of them won’t even be about Doctor Who.
Because much of the 23,717 words I’ve done in this series so far has been setup. It’s only now, as we get to the close of the 1970s, that I can really start talking about what I want to talk to. From now on, these essays will be getting much longer, and much less in the “this happened, then this happened” vein. I have things to say. You have been warned…
Everything about Doctor Who changed in 1979, because Doctor Who Weekly started.
SILENCE! #26
August 14th, 2012
ICHT BIN EIN PODCASTER!
Welcome web-worms to the one and only, the humble magnificent…SILENCE! This latest episode starts off over in the SILENCE NY offices, with our US correspondents Gary Lactenberg and Danny Beastman ushering in the latest hot chat and gossip* from the wonderful** world of comics!
*there’s no gossip
**it’s not always wonderful
After the SILENCE! news it’s straight onto sexytimescomicstalk, with discussions of Godzilla: The Half Century War from top SILENCE! bannersmith, James Stokoe. Then there’ a side order of Batman and Hulk chat, before a rather large, throbbing portion of Black Kiss 2. Close your ears younglings… Lactus lowers the tone further with talk of Space: Punisher, AVX: Avengers , Frankenstein, and the Alan Davis Daredevil annual in Man Vs Comics, plus there’s a digression into the ‘recent’ Punisher War Zone movie. On the pulse!
The Silent Question is posed by hot wheelie dicso chick Dazzler, and the answers involve Cliff Steele and Box.
Beast fills us in on how his Knightquest is progressing (BROKEN BAT!) and Lactus updates the hunt for Barry M Freeman. There’s some Drunken Baker chat there too.
Beast finishes up with a bit of Pim & Francie from Al Columbia, and directs you all to an interview with Columbia and one with animation godhead, John Kricfalusi.
So Lactus is chillin, Beast is chillin, what more can I say? (answers on a postcard please). It’s all waiting for you beyond the sundered veil in…SILENCE! no.26!!
Check below for an expanded Barry M Freeman appreciation zone:
CINDY & BISCUIT and THE CAMERA
August 9th, 2012
RECEIVING TRANSMISSION – “A LITTLE MORE POWER OVER THAT MEMORY…”
Sorry, what’s that? You were waiting for the second part of my Tygers and Lambs series? Well hey, thanks for checking in mum, glad you still read the site – that post should go up over the weekend! [1]
The rest of you are probably looking for more SILENCE! or more League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annocommentations or something [2], and who can blame you, but you’ll have to wait a while for all of that because right now we’re doing Dirty Thoughts From Other People’s Comments Section!
WITHOUT WARNING!
Okay, so over on The Comics Journal’s website, Sean Rogers wrote a review of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo that posited the aforementioned comic as a prime example of the “strenuous vapidity” of Morrison’s writing. I think it’s safe enough to say that most of Team Mindless [3] are pretty into Flex Mentallo – the manifesto like “Candyfloss horizons” posts that graced the site during its early days are definitely written in the key of Flex Mentallo, with its “candy-striped skies” [4] – and I wrote about the book again when the freshly recoloured “deluxe” edition was released in April of this year. As such, bearing in mind that FEELINGS ABOUT COMICS ARE THE ONLY TRUE FEELINGS [5], I decided to have a go at taking Sean’s review apart.
Sean seems to think that Flex Mentallo is a guide to better living through superheroes, whereas I think it’s more like a Dennis Potter drama in two-dimensions [6], a strange story in which a grown man cracks and finds himself trying to make sense out of everything with reference to a lifetime’s worth of ruddy superhero comics.
My comment is up on The Comics Journal site if you want to check it out and see what you think.
SILENCE! #25
August 7th, 2012
THEY ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE…AND WHEN YOU’RE DOWN HERE WITH US, YOU’LL FLOAT TOO!
Hah hooh hah!
It’s that time of the week boys and girls, and Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die are here to bring the melonfarming ruckus! Duck and cover for SILENCE! no.25
After an Olympic Pool-sized edition of SILENCE! News, the boyce let rip with some lovingly hand-crafted comics reviews. INCLUDING: Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye no.1, Dial H from Mieville and co, Beasts of Burden from Dorkin and Thompson, Action Comics, Daredevil, Animal Man and Lactus has a diet-sized portion of Man V Comics with AVX.
There’s a special SILENT Question from Batroc Zee Leepair (with the answer including Bob of the Black Lodge and Pennywise the Dancing Clown).
Then there’s a meaty discussion of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises aka Occupy Gotham (currently showing in magic lantern shows around the country.
Add in a vital clue in the ongoing saga to discover ‘lost’ Brit comics genius Barry M Freeman (Woodward & Bernstein get f*cked) and you have a meaty, beaty, big & bouncy edition of SILENCE!
Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1978
August 4th, 2012
Sometimes, plans change…
When I was planning this entry, it was all going to be about how this is the story in which two figures who will be important to this narrative from now on enter — Douglas Adams, whose first story this is, and who would go on to write two more and script edit the next series, and me, because I was born two days before episode two of this story aired. So from now on, the entries will be slightly more personal, as I will remember at least some of them from the time of broadcast.
But instead of being about people entering the story, it has to be about people leaving it.
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