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!
Click on images to enlarge.
August 22nd, 2012 at 9:56 am
I think Darrow and Skroce did quite a bit of the design and storyboard work for the Matrix series (Matrices?)
Maybe the imprint was a vanity label primarily designed to give them some cash-in work / platform?
As to the slant against organized and rigid religion one can only guess. One of the brothers (Larry -> Lana) has since come out as transgender and the films themselves bent the knee to a more inclusive and loosely organized feeling re: the divine. Maybe it’s just that generalized negativity towards the traditional and parochial.
I feel like I’d be overstepping to read much more into it than that.
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:34 am
my name is chad and i’m a mindless ones addict. come tuesday night states side i find myself refreshing the site constantly. sad, i know.
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:51 am
You know Gary only wants to be friends with the one star shit crowd, don’t you? You’ve gotta play hard to get.
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:55 am
also, i was listening to the show a few weeks ago and friend of mine who doesn’t read comics started listening to it with me and flipped through some of the books like prophet ect. she loved the show and the subject discussed so much she’s now a convert to the church of the floppies(mass every wednesday). nice work boys.
August 22nd, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Holy shit! A GIRL?! My friend Roberty Boberty just read your comment and told me that girls burst into flames if they read comics. One of you is lying.
August 22nd, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Rob has just informed me that he was lying. Sorry to question your word, 3====D.
August 22nd, 2012 at 10:11 pm
03/2012: Saucer Country #1 — 15,684
04/2012: Saucer Country #2 — 11,263 (-28.2%)
05/2012: Saucer Country #3 — 10,656 (- 5.4%)
06/2012: Saucer Country #4 — 9,959 (- 6.5%)
August 23rd, 2012 at 6:46 am
I think I’ve got at least two and a half other people listening to SILENCE! but they’re all only guys so on balance 3====D’s probably slightly ahead of me in the Silence! Evangelical stakes.
Sad to see you didn’t mention the closure of the Dandy in the news. Even if you didn’t read it yourself, here’s John Wagner explaining why it mattered
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19293866
On the other hand, your comics vs cocaine work was investigative comics journalism at its very finest. Being less stupid than Gary Lactus, I read comics at a slightly faster rate than him which means that cocaine’s going to be better value for me. Thanks for helping me realise I can improve the return on investment of my entertainment expenditure by almost 6%!
August 23rd, 2012 at 7:23 am
Shit, yeah, I meant to mention that Dandy business. My pal wrote the Harry Hill strip and so I can actually say I bought it a couple of times.
August 23rd, 2012 at 7:59 am
Yeah there was some top talent involved – Jamie Smart in particular is a very fine cartoonist. Thanks for the link Tam, hadn’t seen that.
August 23rd, 2012 at 11:50 pm
Thoroughly enjoyed “Bane!”. I vote that sometime you do a song about Foggy Nelson to the tune of “Foggy Notion”. And I want to kindly remind you, with humble respect, that you’ve yet to fulfill my request for an ode to Bendis banter.
Stever Skroce is a fantastic artist. I loved all the stuff he did with Alan Moore for Rob Liefeld. All three issues of it. Only two issues of their Youngblood ever came out… and then there was an Awesome Holiday Special or something, which would have been Youngblood #3, I think. There were several printing errors and erroneous word-balloons in each issue, but through it all you could tell that Moore was doing something great. After Liefeld folded Awesome, I think it’s obvious that Moore took a lot of his ideas for a superhero universe and applied them directly to the ABC line. Still, I do really have a fondness for his Youngblood, Glory, and especially Supreme. (The Judgment Day mini-series event was not very good, though.) The sloppy editing and publishing behind them, counterpoised to Moore’s orderly genius, gives them a sense of ramshackle messiness that I actually enjoy and find charming. Moore had Youngblood planned out through issue 20 or something, but never got a chance to do it. I think Liefeld published Moore’s proposal in one of the Awesome gallery/one-shots. It was like twenty pages long of Moore ruminating on Liefeld’s characters and turning them all into gold.
Silk Spectre is the only Before Watchmen series that I’m reading (note: not ‘buying’ exactly but reading, getting it for free when I trade in stuff for store credit, because I don’t want to actually pay for Before Watchmen). It is nice and good and fun. Cooke does do some cutesy Moore-lite stuff with paralleling song lyrics, to subpar effect, but other than that it’s fine. Connor’s art is the real treat here. I do wish that this didn’t have to be a Watchmen property, though. Just do the story of a young heroine in the ’60s and go wild. It is kind of annoying whenever they have to refer back to Laurie’s mom and Uncle Hollis all the time. Still, I do feel that the quality of Silk Spectre is high enough to have proved me wrong when I initially thought Before Watchmen would be total shit. Not nearly as good as After Watchmen, though.
I am going on vacation for the next two weeks… and will be journeying again to your little island. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to Dave’s Comics in Brighton, unfortunately. As a proud member of the Slithering Silence!-Spirit Society, however, I will try to do some yeoman’s work and see if Travelling Man in York (my LCS while I was in grad school) will sponsor Gary Lactus in some way.
Lastly, let me bit a bit abrasive:
Pussy Riot makes Lady Gaga seem like Camille Pagila. I see no value in their alleged “feminism” and no content or coherence in their protesting. I think they degrade the otherwise good movements that they use to justify their bad behavior. And I’m pretty sure that they aren’t going to jail for the anti-Putin song. Rather, they have repeatedly staged orgies in public, spit on old people in churches, and rubbed frozen chicken fillets into their vaginas while children were watching. It’s very convenient that the media of anti-Putin countries never seems to mention those things. It isn’t that I support Putin or the Russian Orthodox Church, but I can’t get behind Pussy Riot. They seem like an insult to free speech and a parody of freedom. I still like Burden, though.
August 24th, 2012 at 6:23 am
don’t be to exited people. this lady is more beast than human. measuring at 7 ft tall with a heavy smell of burning rubber and garbage juice. she only speaks using curse words. basically your average silence listener. here’s a screen shot of her relaxing during last weeks program. http://borgdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/karen-black-in-trilogy-of-terror.jpg?w=640
but seriously, all these barry freeman strips are great! the clumpy misshapen way he draws his characters are hilarious. my favorites are the Lets(insert activity) and CRAVEN(the panel with the nuke exploding behind him with arms raised “amidts all the chaos one man stood tall..”) selwyn and the gang provided much lol this week as well.
August 24th, 2012 at 9:10 am
I love trying to imagine what happens in the film, Cream Of Leek. I can’t but still enjoy trying.
August 24th, 2012 at 9:30 am
i’m wondering why that child would be boo-hooing when he has such cool frank zappa facial hair.
August 24th, 2012 at 9:49 am
Hmm… Maybe it’s like Kes but with a pterodactyl.
August 24th, 2012 at 9:50 am
And inexplicable facial hair.
August 24th, 2012 at 10:50 am
CREAM OF LEEK. A suicidal flightless pterodactyl down on his luck living literally on the edge of life and death in his cliff-side caravan is visited by the boy with the magical facial fuzz. he teaches ptero to fly blah blah TEARS OF JOY
August 24th, 2012 at 10:51 am
did you ever hear about this, the (very wrong) sequel to Kes?
http://pinterest.com/pin/183943966000709793/
August 24th, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Igmus: I did not know those things about Pussy Riot! I shall totally look them up properly, now, as I must admit I have jumped on the bandwagon a bit (well, ‘liked’ a few facebook comments about them) as this seemed righteous and easy to do.
(I also genuinely think Lady Gaga is subversive in the sense she’s helping with queer visibility and such, but only in the context of the US media, which needs all the subversion it can get, however vague. And, y’know, if the hideously apologetic sentiments of non-tune ‘Born This Way’ helps a bunch of people deal with a shitty adolescence, then hooray!)
Sorry, I could digress about Lady Gaga almost as much as I could about 90s X-Men. The two share a surface-level, muddled approach to politics, too!
And speaking of 90s X-Men (zingggg), Steve Skroce did some great art on X-Man. The sole redeeming factor of that entire series (though I don’t think he stayed thaaat long?). He drew an ace Spider-Man, too. I felt kind of proud of him when he went on to bigger things. He deservs better than X-Man.
We all do.
My brother used to buy ‘Zit’ magazine, so I’ll ask if he’s got any copies left, see if there’s any Barry M Freeman in them, gie it a scan if so.
August 24th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
That would be amazing!
August 24th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Tell him to look out for Crab Shat.
August 24th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
“In July of 2010, an action entitled How to Snatch a Chicken was performed in the “Nakhodka” supermarket in St. Petersburg. An unidentified female Voina activist removed a frozen chicken from the refrigerated section of the supermarket, then laboriously stuffed the entire chicken into her own vagina, while being filmed by other Voina members. She then shoplifted the chicken by leaving the supermarket without paying, with the chicken still inserted, and rejoined protesters outside the store.[13] The activists held signs spelling out the word “bezblaydno”, which translates roughly as “without whoring”, a reference to the group’s rejection of paid employment, and preference for stealing food.”
You’ve got to admit, that’s a great way to shoplift.
August 24th, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Does that count as “while children were watching”. I have exposed my genitals for performance purposes before. Once in a nightclub (no children there. Once on video where potentially a child could have seen it although this was abstracted somewhat by being in macro close-up with a face drawn on the glans with the meatus as the mouth. Don’t reckon I should go to prison.
August 24th, 2012 at 2:04 pm
I do.
August 24th, 2012 at 2:06 pm
I walked into that one.
August 28th, 2012 at 2:31 pm
I was in Forbidden Planet (Leicester) just before Before Watchmen started seeping out. They were giving away free ad sheets (like mocked up New Frontiersman papers). I looked at it and the bloke behind the counter was saying “some amazing talent on this…”, and added “…like J. Michael Sraczynski”. After he’d said it he looked…dead inside, pleading eyes. What I’ve seen (which isn’t much) looks very poor. Sympathy to Brer Lactus for sitting through them.
August 28th, 2012 at 3:02 pm
The only part of ‘before watchmen’ I’ve liked is the beautiful John Higgins pirate story at the back. I really like John Higgins, his role in Watchmen sometimes a bit overlooked and he didn’t get any royalties from the original so I’ll definitely buy the collection of that when it comes out. But I’ve skimmed all the rest of it and not seen anything that makes me want to buy it, with the possible exception of the amusingly bad Comedian one…
August 29th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Blame churnalism for that bloody Superman-Wonderwoman romance getting any airplay in the nationals. You got to fill space 24/7, someone from DC sends you a press release, you tip some words over the top of it and get it in the paper, no need for a proper copy-edit as it’s about superheroes (less labour intensive=less costly=good content). Fucking appalling state of affairs, but there you go.
Did you know that a great many news shows in the states – and a few over here – often run news stories created and cut together by marketing agencies? Very often they simply substitute the voice-over for their own, frequently copying the original verbatim.
Is true facts. Fuh-cking incredible bollocks.
September 10th, 2012 at 4:24 pm
Barry Freeman-related non-news: my brother, who used to collect Zit, says he threw them all out ages ago as it was ‘crap’. He adds “Crab Shat sounds good, though”.
I am helpful. Ngh.
September 10th, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Yeah, no great loss. There’s a bit of Zit! talk in SILENCE! #30. It really was a terrible comic.
November 25th, 2013 at 10:06 am
Hiya! I just came to this site after searching for BMF. Yeah I bet between me and the people here we’re everyone that ever heard of him.
Gutted was a comic in the early 90s which, again, only I read. He had LOADS of stuff in that, but I think they were desperate for the content. TBH it wasn’t all that good. A bit like how Vic Reeves used to be brilliant in “Big Night Out”, but then just re-trod the formula for 20 years afterwards?
Well BMF wasn’t THAT bad, but there were a lot of “by the numbers” strips where inspiration hadn’t hit him, so he just churned out nonsense.
Yep some of the earlier Zits, before they went really really bad (very sort-of paranoid weed-smoker sort of vibe) toward the end, where they only had 2 artists left and 1-joke strips stretched over 3 pages. Now some of the main culprits seem to be writing Viz. Still, never mind, I have me memories. I used to read Viz when it was still funny. And there’s still a lot in it that’s good, Davy Jones’s Blyton / Dandy-esque flights of fancy usually still get me. And Alan Moore is quoted as saying Drunken Bakers is like Samuel Beckett.
Anyway have to get one of them podcasts listened to. I prefer to read, usually, I’m a quicker reader than a listener. Makes comics less value for money though.
Glad to see that 2 or 3 people still remember something from my early teen-hood.
Sam xxx.