Mindless Ones

WHAT ARE THEY DOING?

THEY’RE WATCHING SNOW WHITE. AND THEY LOVE IT.

I am Disembodied Yulebot X – 15735. HO HO HO HO HO <RUN>

Tis the season to be jingle. Yo ho ho and a bottle of eggnog. Silent Night Deadly Night… Disembodied Yulebot X – 15735 hopes that you have all been good little dear listeners, because you are about to be rewarded with a mammoth extra length merryjingle edition of SILENCE! The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus are joined by that stocking filler Bobsy for a rambling end of year round up fuelled by festive cheer and just a little bit of yuletide imbibement. But beware. If you’ve been naughty little dear listeners, then Disembodied Yulebot X – 15735 will hunt you down and feed him to his robo-reindeer…

In this free-jazz take on the podcast, the boys discuss (in no particular order)…

Dr Who, Ken Campbell, Mark Gatiss, M R James, the KLF, Illuminatus, Chester Brown’s Paying For It, Michel Fiffe’s COPRA, Jerry Sadowitz, Wimbledon Green, the Canadian Cartoonist’s Newspaper strip, Josh Simmons’ Furry Trap, Avengers Arena, Art Spiegleman’s Co-Mix, Chris Ware Whooppee Cushions, Chester Brown Condoms, All New X-Men, Nina Conti and Ventriloquism, Marvel Superheroes Bath & Shower sets, Artcomix, broseph porn comix, Jim Woodring’s Frank, Fran and Congress of The Animals, Robert Crumb, Joe Matt, English storms, the joys of Coach travel, and believe me when Disembodied Yulebot X – 15735 says, a whole bulging sackload more…

There’s even time for some admin, a couple of toilet breaks, the occasional belch and a Band Aid sized amount of seasonal goodwill.

So take it, shove it into your gullets on top of all the dead turkey, chocolates, cheese, port, brandy, beer, wine and mince bloody pies and head for the mistetoe, where Disembodied Yulebot X – 15735 will be awaiting, diodes glowing…

click to download SILENCE!#87

Contact us:

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












@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

One of the jokes that the other Mindless Ones have about me is that while I often complain about not having written enough, I’m ridiculously productive (I write two or three books a year, on average). They only make this joke because unlike me, they don’t know Phil Sandifer.

Phil recently released TARDIS Eruditorum vol 4, the fourth volume of his look at every Doctor Who TV story (and many of the books and audios), A Golden Thread, a critical history of Wonder Woman, Last War In Albion Chapter Four, the latest in a series of short ebooks charting the parallel careers of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, and Flood, a book in the 33 ⅓ series, in which he and co-author S. Alexander Reed look at the classic They Might Be Giants album.

And by recently, I mean in the last two months. He might have released something else since I made that list — I haven’t looked since lunchtime.

Much, though not all, of his work is serialised on www.philipsandifer.com (where I’ll be doing a guest post next week on Final Crisis, incidentally) and readers of Mindless Ones will, I’m sure, find it worth checking out.

Read the interview

Like the text says, there’s more from me and Mister Attack at The Weegie Board dot wordpress dot com! If you’d rather read Scott’s comics without all my stupid words on top, he’s got exactly the thing for you at his own site.

If, on the other hand, you were hoping to find out about actual Weegie Boards (for contacting dead weegies), you might have to take your business elsewhere…

Merry Christmas?

Special “Two years late and several thousand Bitcoins short” Edition!

People still do linkblogging, right?  I mean not here, not recently, but elsewhere.  Feels like a holdover from the “internet as big magazine” approach to broadcasting into the void, and given that I’m too scare to commit myself to any other model that suits me just fine!

EMBARRASSING ENTHUSIASM DEPT: You read it somewhere else first, but we’re in a celebratory mood in Mindless HQ anyway, so fuck it – STRAY BULLETS IS COMING BACK!

It’s too early in the day for me to get totally shameless on this, so you’ll have to go read that interview to find out about the massive collected edition of the first forty issues, the continuation of the old series, and the launch of a new one.  Suffice it to say that Stray Bullets is the best, most unsettling crime comic out there, and that we’re glad all those kittens weren’t sacrificed in vain.

If you’ve not red the series before, issues #1-4 are apparently free to download right now, and Zom (or “Ad Mindless as he now likes to be called) wrote a piece about issue#1 that should set the scene just nicely:

A car speeding into the night, a lonely county road, as an establishing shot it’s hardly setting a precedent. But the first panel in SB #1 transcends its over familiarity by actually saying something meaningful about the book and all that follows it. This is a story that will make good on the panel’s familiar metaphorical properties. What we need to keep in mind here is that this road is black, to see anything we’re going to need a torch, and that things probably lurk in those woods. For that matter, things probably lurk in that car – what’s it doing out there in the dark, anyway? The world of Stray Bullets is a dangerous place, and the road travels on until you die.

We should also consider the notion that Lapham doesn’t want to simply transcend cliché, that he’s keen to set-up certain expectations in the reader. So later, when the tires on the car blow out and that familiar scene with the cop and the dead body in the trunk rears it’s head, we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of novelty on offer. What’s interesting about all these little genre ticks is that, by issue 2, you could be forgiven for forgetting you were reading a crime comic in the first place, and that’s a recurring pattern throughout the series. The effect being that just when you think you know where you are Lapham pulls something entirely unexpected out of the hat, and suddenly definitions like ‘crime fiction’ start to feel inadequate or in serious needs of revision. If I was hunting around for words to describe Stray Bullets #1 I’d eschew genre definitions and settle on adjectives like macabre and gothic.

Welcome to this EXTRA SPECIAL edition of SILENCE! Get ready to swivel your mind with delight as you are guaranteed 100% Gary Lactus and 0% The Beast Must Die in the following narrowcast. Christmas really has come early! Pinch yourself! HARDER! USE TOOLS! DO IT ON A MORE SENSITIVE PART OF YOUR BODY! NOT THERE! THERE! That’s right, this is not a dream! Stop crying and listen to Gary EXCLUSIVELY reveal his latest work as sci fi writer M. Gary M. Lactus! Then THRILL as he interviews Gareth Brookes about his truly unique graphic novel, The Black Project. Then listen to it over and over again, louder and louder until next time! Keep it cosmic!

click to download SILENCE!#86

Contact us:

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












@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

A thought occurs to me as I drag my sickly drunk head back to Glasgow from the Thought Bubble convention in Leeds: aren’t DECADENCE comics all a bit super-boyish in the end?

My throat too hoarse to speak with due to Saturday night shouting and Sunday con hustle, my brain so detached from its immediate environment that at one point I have to croak at Mister Attack to ask if we are in fact going backwards, the only thing I am able to do properly is comics.  And so, I read through Lando’s Olympic Games, taking in page after page of landscapes that look as bare and arid as my larynx feels, squinting at the characters in survival suits, loving every second of it but questioning myself all the same.

“He’s just ridiculously on, isn’t he?” Mister Attack says.

I wince my agreement and keep on flicking.

It’s the survival suits that give me pause.  As I shift out of Olympic Games and into a couple of comics by Stathis Tsemberlidis, Neptune’s Fungi and Epicurean Paradox, my drunken brain starts to worry that the spacesuits are emblematic of an attempt to build a stylish fictional identity, a barrier between person and world.  My earlier thoughts about this aesthetic being “super-boyish” already seems glib and reductive to me, even if I can see where this thought came from.  Something about the collision of cool influences, the sense that you’re reading the works of people who read only right comics from France and Japan, combined with a knee-jerk panic that aesthetics this good must in some way be suspect.

Where did I get the idea that comics could be cool?  That they could communicate with the world while seeming at ease in it?  From Brandon Graham, maybe, or perhaps just from The Internet.

Why would an encounter with these values provoke scrutiny? Perhaps because these comics do not reflect the values associated with my own formative experiences of the medium, bound up as they are with alt-comics and (sub-)superhero stories that mirror my own awkward, convoluted brand of self-reflection a little bit too clearly.

Comics scholars more erudite than me can argue about which specific artists have influenced Lando, Stathis and co, and armchair psychiatrists can deal with my issues at some later date – in this moment, my bleary brain is only capable of tracking where the lines on my face are going, rather than where they come from.

Thankfully, the view of the future they provide is expansive.

In the comic book Jupiter’s Legacy by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely the shitty dialogue surges out of the characters’ mouths like a well oiled machine…