Mindless Ones

The battered wooden door was hesitantly opened, and a man stepped out. He had an elegant, curious face, with eyes that darted around his surroundings. And at the moment he was frowning a dangerous frown. He wore the sombre black tailcoat of an Edwardian gentleman under a heavy cape, with a Keble College scarf thrown over one shoulder. He would have merited hardly a glance on the streets of Edwardian London, but he looked somewhat out of place in the twenty-first century. This was the adventurer in time and space known only as the Doctor. Although he looked human enough, he was actually an alien from a far-off world. Among the many strange and wonderful things about his alien nature was his ability to regenerate, to replace a worn out or fatally injured body with a new one, which brought with it a whole new personality and oudook on life. It was something all his people, the Time Lords, could do. This form was his ninth.

Scream Of The Shalka, released in February 2004, is the last ever Doctor Who novelisation

COME ON IT’S A NICE DAY TO START AGAIN

<ITEM> There is no such thing as Disembodied Narratorbot-Xetc.

<ITEM> There is just a happily married man having a nice pretend.

<ITEM> Human-ape intelligence is fantasy. Robot intelligence is a holocaust. Human on human is brain plus.

<ITEM>There is no The Beast Must Die this week, while he licks his honeymooning lips with Tyra and the Next Top Models crew in Bali

<ITEM> So Gary Lactus summons from his box the poor substitute indeed of bobsy mindless, to join him for the first ever CUSS FREE edition of SILENCE!

<ITEM> After a bitterly begrudged birthday song for a listener who’s having an absolutely horrid time in the famously awful island paradise of Hawaii, Gary and his less charismatic new sidekick get on that comics thing

<ITEM> With the air between them crackling with Belgian chemical energy and technical shittery all over the place our aging boyoboys tackle such comics as ZERO #1, Mars Attacks Judge Dredd, Resident Alien, Superior Spider-Man, Thor God (not Prince) of Thunder, Batman ’66, Dial E #1, FBP #3, Magic Whistle #13, Uncanny X-Men, Infinity, New Avengers, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, 2000AD and The Phoenix.

click to download SILENCE!#77

Contact us:


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@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. There are quite literally almost zero swear words to be heard in this episode of the world’s finest comics podcast.

Oh, and GOSH!

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

Also, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of the brand new 56 page  Cindy & Biscuit no.3 from my shop at Milk The Cat. You can pick up my other comics while you’re there.

I HAD SO MANY PROBLEMS, BUT THEN I GOT ME A WALKMAN

Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 enters the arena.

Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is experimenting with minimalism. Has been shopping at virtu-Ikea, reading Raymond Carver and listening to Basic Channel. Minimal. Haiku. Unclutter your life, unclutter your mind.

Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is much calmer now. Inside Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735’s mind is an empty room. With a picture of a cow on the wall.

<ITEM> A reunitification of sorts as Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die once again share the same aural space.

<ITEM> Sponsorship chattle and prattle. Anti-advertising. Well done.

<ITEM> Let’s move together in a crab-like fashion into The Reviewniverse. Much talk of comics, including Villain’s Month, Batman: Black & White, Prophet, Mighty Avengers, Astro City, Avengers Arena, Walking Dead, God Is Dead, X-Men: Battle of the Atom, Captain America, Lose, and The Best of Milligan & McCarthy.

See. Minimal. Calm. A boat gently rocks on a still glassy sea.

But a storm is brewing fleshlings.

click to download SILENCE!#76

Contact us:


si************@gm***.com












@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

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

or

If a white wealthy talented American male can make it out there, so can damn well anyone!

Readers of good conscience peek at their Paul Pope comics through tense and cringing fingers.

Because yes, you’ll be pleased to know, it’s important to note, but when it comes to fighty, flighty, punchy-jumpy, there is still no one who springs into mind (maybe Rafael Grampa but let’s not even) who can do that great comicsy Pope trick, that thing, the rugged and robust capture of action-motion he can do, that stack of photos falling through the panel skin while you look, but still solid and full of weight,  thing.

It is a shiveringly good signature move that makes your fan man go into a full hard, and it is still there in this Haggard West comic. (West as in The West, Haggard as in haggard – the title is a double entendre, minus one, see below)

But you have to read it through your fingers. Anyone with a more than passing moody pout out of a car window on the desert (or is it a city?)  highway familiarity with his work is always going to read his comics tense, knowing at any given second the author is going to interrupt this uniquely rendered and quite marvelously flowing scrap to embark on an exploration of the somewhat laughable but also cruel, sadistic, economically and historically illiterate and sadly popular political philosophy (guffaw) of libertarianism, made famous and fashionable in the US several decades ago by accelerationist Soviet deep agent Ayn Rand.

You might have read Haggard West and thought to yourself, ‘Hey, there were no characters in this comic called Yahek or Mon Vises, so he left the politics for babies out of it this time!’ If so, a) you don’t exist b) you can’t be that dim c) what comic were you reading again?

Haggard West is dead!

Who can save the city? Who can save the superhero now?

We’ve been here before, in an not-identical but broadly analogous form, after the crash of 1929. How do we reinvigorate the tired and emotional economies of Anglo-American capital? Legalise booze, sure, bring that revenue back into the mainstream – that’s a no brainer.

What apparently is a bit more of a brainer is promoting an idea of virtuous militarised aryan youth to inject the necessary vim and vigour back into the enfeebled action men of the shiny city. No one would be daft enough to make an icon-fetish out of muscular fighting Nordic virtue and try to frame it as the mythopoesis of a viable political subjectivity, would they? Not again?

BLOODY HELL COMICS WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU LATELY?

There could be super dark black irony at work here of course, forming an effective and bold historical critique, drawing a neat parallel with the current moment…

…but it’s not very likely really, is it? END

Appendix 1-

The suspicion – forlorn hope – that there might be a sardonic commentary at work is prompted by the Battling Boy preview pages. Our plucky young lad – with superpowers, the son of a god remember – is sort of given a solo challenge, a stand on your own two feet neanderthal rite of passage thing, face this by your own mettle tested or fall, all that shite. But the god of adventures has packed a trunk full of priceless godly adventuring shit for you – you don’t even have to pack it yourself!

On reflection, it is unfortunately impossible to imagine even in the fullest depths of drugged reverie a libertarian with that kind of self awareness, or a sense of humour. This from the class of thoroughbred free market idealogues whose inherited wealth conveniently never remembers the Marshal Plan…

Appendix 2-

Battling Boy is out soon! Preview pics below…

etc.

A SUCCULENT CHINESE MEAL?!

Hello, Gary Lactus here.  Just back from The Beast Must Die’s stag do in Belgium.  It was good.  We dressed The Beast up as an egg and went Devalkarting.  I still ache.  Anyway, The Beast Must Die was last seen disappearing into some haunted woods on a drunken werewolf hunt with Narratorbot X-15735.  Hopefully he’ll turn up again before the wedding.

So it’s one of those disappointingly solo efforts this week, squeezed out between jobs, recorded on the hoof through the streets at night. Also on a bus and in my bedroom on my spaceship in space just before my bath. Sounds thrilling right? A BUS! JUST IMAGINE! Well there’s no need to imagine because it’s here and it’s real! I talk about X-Men: Battle of the Atom, Forever Evil, Deadshot, Satellite Sam, Trillium, Avengers AI, FF, Bat Slaps and more!

click to download SILENCE!#75

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

The Comics Journal Website is composed of a number of phantasmagorical pages, some of them ordered as blog posts, others as columns or interviews or features, all of them dedicated to an art of uncertain value.

Wars have been fought over the best way to define this paper-thin phenomenon, many of them on previous incarnation of the Comics Journal site.  On quiet Sunday afternoons in the early 2000s gangs of rabid comics scholars could often be found tossing verbal molotovs back and forth: are comics sequential art, made compelling by the gaps between images, or is any attempt to define a medium based on what it *doesn’t* contain doomed to folly?  Does this alleged art form have its roots in ancient tapestry or arcane graffiti?  Are stories that strain to make childhood fantasies relevant for adult consumers really that much worse than stories that are at pains to distance themselves from the same fantasies?

Which is to say: Do you prefer Dan Clowes or the Sex-Men?

Mickey Maus or Krazy Kat?

You could catch many notions while trawling the endlessly, depthless sea of these online arguments, but no matter how long and hard you toiled you would be hard pressed to find a convincing definition of comics that didn’t fall back on the tautological – no one knows what comics are, but everyone trusts that they will know them when they see them.

On 30/08/2013 a comment was posted on The Comics Journal website that came close to explaining the joke:

First off, the word “muslim” is never implied. Second, the terrorists aren’t real. They are cartoons based loosely on the fact that there are people on this planet who will kill you because you don’t believe in their imaginary god. Again, they are CARTOONS. It’s complete fantasy. So, your last line about “justification for the depiction of terrorists” really makes no sense. Are you a censor? Depiction of what exactly? They aren’t real to begin with. The key phrase in your ridiculously reactionary statement is “having not read it”.

Indie cartoonist Jason Karns there, responding to a question about whether or not his small press comic Fukitor was as “insanely racist” as it looked.  Here we see Karns displaying a sort of thinking that transcends Keats’ “negative capability”, tending instead towards a sort of unfathomable emptiness – the ability to hold a jumble of seemingly contradictory ideas in one’s head without grasping the implications of any of them.

And what sort of work does such an ability lead to?

Work that looks a little bit like this, apparently:

If you break Karns’ argument down to its basic elements, the nature of the great comics scam starts to become clear

Sometimes all you need is a good story.

2003 was possibly the peak year for Big Finish.

The pleasure here comes not only in having some beautifully textured visuals to help you through the awkward, self-serving language; but also from the strange tension in seeing one of medium’s most idiosyncratic and defiantly independent artists work with a text that both belongs to everyone, and in some sense lies at the root of so many commonly held social and cultural structures. Crumb has spent several lifetimes somehow convincing the world that by sticking to his personal vision – repellent and antisocial as that so frequently was- he was somehow serving a greater collective good, by clearing space where the pure freedom of the artist might flourish. No matter how arseholeish the art he’d fill it with, that space itself performed a transcendent function – a dream of freedom, even a freedom to support racist or misogynist repression – that many sections of postwar Western culture sincerely believed it needed to have. Maybe they were even right.

Strange to pick Genesis then, a book that justifies its own archaic madnesses and hardcore rhetoric of obsolete social evil by appeals to divine authority and the vicissitude of historical longevity itself. Crumb takes its toxic content (and legacy) and tries to turn it into pictures and words alone, as if they don’t touch or connect to anything, as if this book, like his own back catalogue, should only ever be understood as harmless marks on paper and nothing else. If Genesis, with its holy massacres, its hatred of women and nature can be redeemed on artistic merit alone, maybe Crumb can too.

And if he just wanted to turn a new audience on to a founding text of the occidental canon, then maybe he could’ve picked a book that wasn’t such a cunt, y’know?

Despite all that, two points of genuine brilliance worth mentioning:

The limb-rocking, pre-curse serpent in Eden reworked as cosmic horror and Sitchinian(?) paranoiac scifi:

And perhaps the funniest panel Crumb’s ever drawn – the looks on the guys’ faces as they’re queueing up to go into the tent. Oh yeah, all us dudes have got to be circumcised from now on, God says, ‘kay?.

Were those later Cerebus issues that I never read as good as this?