Mindless Ones

Here’s a brand new Cindy & Biscuit strip for you. I’ll be doing these on a semi-regular basis here on Mindless Ones.

Also, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of the brand new Cindy & Biscuit no.3 from my shop at Milk The Cat. You can pick up my other comics while you’re there.

AIM FOR THE FLAT TOP!

GET SOME! BRAKKABRAKKABRAKKA! GET SOME!

Get some what? Get some Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 up in your grill, please. Back from interviewing the comicsphere’s glitterati.

Well if it isn’t my favourite fleshy ones, come crawling back from your sexy, rich upmarket Narratorbots who work on the podcasts from the fancy parts of the webisphere…well you know who has the good stuff don’t you? <ANSWER: Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735>

<ITEM> SILENCE! News with hot East Coast event coverage from newsthrobs Gary Lactenberg and Danny Beastman.

<ITEM> Follow the rabbit down the rabbithole into the Reviewniverse with triple hottt xxx opiniongasms about Young Avengers, Todd The Ugliest Kid In The World, The Answer!, Prophet, Mars Attacks The Real Ghostbusters, Battlefields, Wolverine & The X-Men, Wonder Woman, Avengers, Uncanny X-Force, FF, Dan The Unharmable, Judge Dredd and Zooniverse.

Now tell me that doesn’t make you want to haemorrhage with excitement? So grab your partner by the hand, swing ’em round, you’re looking grand, and let’s SILENCE! together.

click to download SILENCE!#48

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

PART 1: PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

For Christmas this year I was given the prospect of impending joblessness, a gift that has a fine Dickensian heritage, though unfortunately it’s not Dickens but Shakespeare who has a cameo in the comic at hand.

You don’t need a Shakespearean imagination to understand that redundancy is not the sort of gift I’ve always dreamed of receiving, or to appreciate that it’s not the sort of unwanted gift that you can easily pass on to an unsuspecting relative.

Not that I’m so lacking in compassion for others that I’d *want* to inflict that on anyone else. Even in this post-Monneygeddon age, there’s a limit to what I’m willing to admit in public!

A few weeks ago an alternative version of this present drifted into view, a hot air balloon that looked like it might be capable of taking me somewhere.

Click here to find out exactly where that cheeky chappy there thinks he’s going to take you!

Script by Grant Morrison. Art by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn. DC Comics.

NO JOKER.

[The term ‘Batman’ here simultaneously refers both to both the well known character/intellectual property featured in a variety of widely distributed cultural products that bear his brand, and to those products themselves.]

Will he make an agreement with you for you to take him as your slave for life?

Greetings Mr Graham. You were due to be interviewed by The Beast Must Die, but sadly he is too busy travelling the globe as an international podcasting megastar with his good friend/mortal enemy Gary Lactus. Therefore you will instead be strapped into the Quizzlertron, and be interviewed by Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735. Expect no fleshy soft peddling and ego-stroking – Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is hard-hitting interviewer. Expect Frost/Nixon style hardball, human! Be warned –any deviation from the truth will result in severe electric shocks to the balls, nipples and brain. You have been warned fleshy one. Now on with interview good times, yes sir!

Section 1: Secret Origin

1) First question, simple. Or is it hard? YOU DECIDE FLESHY ONE. Why comics?

BG – It was a decision that I made before I remember making it. My mom says that when I was Seven I announced that I was going to do comics for a living. Past that incredibly well thought out life choice comics has been amazingly rewarding, there’s so much that can be done when you consider what’s possible in mixing words and images and how much of it is still so untapped. My big fear is not doing nearly as much as could be done with it. I feel like I’m on a comic book continent and I’ve just explored the coast but behind me is miles and miles of untapped mysteries. Tell me Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735, have you ever really loved a woman? You’ve got to know her deep inside hear her every thought see every dream and give her wings if she wants to fly…

Read the rest of this entry »

ANOTHER  SELF PROCLAIMED HISTORIAN, WITH EINSTEIN AS A PASSENGER, AND A FLUX CAPACITOR IN HIS DELOREAN…

This… is… the voice of….Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735! Wooo! Scared you, you silly rabbits! Ha Ha, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is all messed up as he has been drinking fermented battery acid and  snorting big lines of pixels all afternoon…Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735’s wife left him you see, taking all the little Narratorbots with her..

NOT REALLY! Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is confirmed bachelor! NOT REALLY! Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is not even confirmed male…or human. Concept of love and marriage is as alien as the whirling purple dust motes of Jupiter, or the cold dark bottom of the Marianas Trench…Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735only likes hard facts, and of course SILENCE!

<ITEM> Usual masturbatory introductory fol-de-rol. YAWN@SILENCE

<ITEM> SILENCE News with 1950’s news-hunks  Danny Beastman and Gary Lactenberg, covering the annual Comics Readers And Producers award ceremony. Swoon!

<ITEM> Moonwalk into the Reviewniverse covering Black Beetle, Saga, Batman, Daredevil, Indigestible Hulk, Fashion Beast, All New X-Men, Lot 13, Craig Yoe presents Haunted  Horror, Captain America, Captain Marvel, and Judge Dredd Case Files, with added discussion of painted art by Dermot Power, Dean Ormston and Colin MacNeil (‘The Dream Of The 90’s..”)

<ITEM> Mrs Schwartzberg reviews Savage Wolverine by Frank Cho

<ITEM> Beast’s Bargain Basement covers Strange Case of HP Lovecraft – hear him froth about Tony Salmons!

<ITEM> Talk of Utopia and Shaky Kane’s ‘That’s Because You’re a Robot’

<ITEM> NO MORE! Now clear off you meddling kids. Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 has some etherware to smoke.

click to download SILENCE!#47

 
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

 
Special thanks to Roberty Boberty for contributing to this week’s episode.

The twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who was obviously a special event, and who better to write it than the man most associated with Doctor Who, Terrance Dicks?

Good news everyone: turns out that Then Play Long, aka the best music blog you’re not reading, isn’t closing down after all!

Then Play Long is dedicated to chronicling every number one album in UK chart history, but it’s not the sort of dry historical catalog that this description might suggest.  Instead its writers Marcello Carlin (The Church Of Me, The Clothed Maja, Koons Really Does Think He’s Michelangelo, The  Blue in the Air) and Lena Friesen (Music Sounds Better With Two) are committed to using the most personal details to fill out the broadest canvas possible, a history of who and where we are now that threatens to add up to suggestion as to why.  It’s a reclamation of sorts, a rescue mission into the past, an attempt to recover a couple of histories that have been partially obscured by the official party line, and as such I can’t recommend it highly enough.

For a minute there it looked like a combination of reader disinterest, duff spending decisions on the part of the UK public, and a shady attitude towards chart compilation from the OCC might have prematurely ended the blog, but a day later the sun rose again, and it had the face of Paul McCartney:

 No, I didn’t see that sentence coming either.

***

I was introduced to Carlin’s writing by the inestimable Dan Emerson way back when I was only a little baby blogger, and – though it hardly seems fair to incriminate him in my ongoing assault on linguistic decency – it’s  fair to say that he’s been a major influences on my bloggy output ever since.

There’s one line of Carlin’s in particular that’s haunted my writing – “I suppose that’s the difference between “real journalists” and writers like me; they write in what they think is the correct way to write, whereas I write me”.

Then Play Long is a triumph of Friesen and Carlin’s approaches to music writing over the currently accepted models. Go check the site out, and if you like what you see, keep checking it out – this time, dear readers, your attention might just save the world…