Mindless Ones

YOU’VE GOTTA HOLD YOUR BREATH THERE, HARRY… YOU’VE GOTTA HOLD YOUR BREATH!

Well hello there weary travellers….well I gotta say you picked a HECK of a night to be driving around out there. We ain’t seen a storm this bad since the Verill boy went missing back in…oh but you don’t want to hear about that do ya? Lookit you all drenched to the bone. Rain like that, coming down like the whole sky tore open, you’d kinda swear we done something to make the universe angry. Say folks you didn’t do nothing to make the universe angry did ya…? Haw, I’m just messin’ with you people…my name’s Disembodied Ruralbot X-15735…come on in, dry off a piece and I’ll make us some country tea. What’s country tea? Why it’s a mite stronger than that fancy city tea you’se a probably used to drinkin…got some special ingredients if you catch my drift… Who that? Oh that’s just Mother, don’t you mind her. Why’s she staring at you like that? Oh she just don’t see too many folks is all. Just me and her up here…oh and Albert of course but he don’t come upstairs too often…MA! Quit licking your lips like that, these nice city people don’t want to see that…sorry bout that folks. Say, how’s that tea treating you? Pretty relaxing stuff huh? Well if you feel dizzy just take a seat there. Yep, right there in that seat. Those straps? Oh you pay them no attention. That’s just Pa’s old chair. Those were just to stop him thrashing around when he got…excited. Now you just relax and I’ll go and start making dinner? What we having? Never you mind folks, never you mind. I’ll just turn on this old radiogram and you and Ma can have a nice listen to the latest…SILENCE!

<ITEM> Some admin, gladmin and sadmin, and The Beast talks up his obsession with Samuel T Herring. Gary Lactus also does some self-promotion for his Fraser Geesin alter ego.

<ITEM> Reviewniverse sexy times with what can laughingly be called discussion of Empowered, Silver Surfer, Hellboy 20th Anniversary sampler, Deadly Class, Cyclops’ Regrets, The Dream Laureate, Sandman: Overture, Scientology, The Woodward & Bernstein of comics, Ghost Rider, Indestructible Hulk, The Wake, Iron Patriot, Star Slammers and more

<ITEM> No more items, just the end of the show which The Beast cocks up mightily

Now you look like your gettin’ mighty sleepy…just close your eyes, and have a little rest…

That scraping sound? Nothin for you folks to worry about…

Click to download SILENCE!#99

Contact us:

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












@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

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.

“What do you think he’ll do now, then?”
“Kill himself, I suppose”.

Those were the words I heard, between the man behind the counter who was ignoring me, and the customer leaning on that counter, when I went to Forbidden Planet ten years ago to purchase my first Cerebus trade, High Society, after reading good things about it in Neil Gaiman’s Adventures In The Dream Trade and… strange things about it on Andrew Rilstone’s website. I didn’t realise at the time, but they were talking about Dave Sim, the writer, artist, letterer, and publisher of the comic I was buying, who had just released the 300th and final issue of Cerebus, cover-dated March 2004.

That is the kind of coincidence upon which Sim, who is thankfully still alive and well, would build a whole cosmology. He’s not a man who believes in coincidence. It may, in fact, be the only thing in which he doesn’t believe.

There are only two opinions anyone holds about Sim’s magnum opus. Either they think it’s one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time, or they haven’t read it.

This is literally true. But it’s not as uncritical an endorsement as it may sound. Put simply, Cerebus is a work that does everything it can to put readers off, so the only people who’ve managed to get to the end of the story (which takes place over the whole three hundred issues) are those who are predisposed to like it.

There are many reasons for this. One is the sheer daunting size of the thing. It’s six thousand pages of comics, all telling a single story. That’s a *massive* work. That’s Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four, plus Sandman, plus Watchmen, plus Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, plus From Hell, plus all the Alec comics. It’s the length of every Judge Dredd strip in 2000AD up to about 1997. And it’s all the work of two men — Dave Sim doing pencils, inks, writing, lettering and publishing, with, for the last 225 issues, background artist Gerhard (who draws possibly the most exquisitely detailed photorealistic line art in comics history).

On the other hand, it’s less than six months’ current output of DC superhero titles. So, you know, it’s not that much more of a commitment than many comics fans are willing to make.

The second and third problems are really the same problem. It’s a man’s entire life’s work (Sim has since done 26 issues of Glamourpuss, a short work of graphic non-fiction called Judenhaas, a couple of jam strips and some covers for IDW, but Cerebus is what he devoted his life to), but it’s one story. Reading it is rather like being told one has to listen to all the Beatles’ records in order, from the very first recording of John singing Puttin’ On The Style at a village fete in 1957, through all the stuff on the Anthologies as well as the released records, through to Paul, George and Ringo recording I Me Mine in 1970. Fascinating, no doubt, but one would quickly want to just skip to Revolver and leave the recordings made in Paul’s room for another day.

The first few issues of Cerebus are painfully amateurish — they look like the kind of stuff that kid in your class at school who was quite good at drawing and really liked Dungeons & Dragons would draw, because that is to all intents and purposes what Sim was at that stage. But they’re part of the story and you’re meant to have paid attention, because Sim is going to expect you to *remember* in issue 151 that in issue 4 Cerebus picked up a gem but later dropped it into a sewer. So there’s a tendency to just bounce off before you get to the good stuff.

Then there’s the fact that no two Cerebus storylines are anything alike. It contains parodies of Spawn and Preacher, a potted biography of the Three Stooges, potshots against The Comics Journal, fantasy sequences with Woody Allen appearing in Bergman films, and a close, line by line, reading of the first five books of the King James Version of the Bible. And that’s all just in one of the sixteen books. If you like one aspect of Cerebus that’s no guarantee you’ll like the rest.

The way I recommend people approach Cerebus is one I got from Andrew Rilstone — start at the beginning, and keep reading until you hit two volumes in a row you don’t like. Once you hit two you dislike, you’ll probably not like any more. But if you just hit one, the next one might be different.

If you don’t like the love-triangle domestic drama you might like the non-fiction account of the last days of Oscar Wilde’s life. If you don’t like the barbarian story with a funny animal protagonist you might like the Marx Brothers pastiche political satire. If you don’t like the blokey comedy set in a bar where 60s pop icons mix with 90s indie comic characters, you might like the three-hander about the schizophrenic having religious visions. If you don’t like the vicious parody of Sandman you might like the long diatribe about how women are evil leech-like creatures who exist only to sap all the creativity from men and leave them hollow husks…

Ah.

Yes.

Here we get to the third, and biggest, obstacle to people wanting to read Cerebus. Sim himself.

The usual one-word summary of Sim is “misogynist”, but that’s not strictly true. He *was* a misogynist, for a while, in the early 90s, but his views are now far, far stranger than that. Put simply, he believes that all women, all LGBT people, anyone who holds any post-Enlightenment views whatsoever, people like Wahabist Muslims who hold the wrong *pre*-Enlightenment views, his parents, his sister, the Canadian government and press, the comic industry, atheists, liberals, socialists, and all major Christian denominations, are all, mostly consciously, working for an evil trans* demiurge called YooHWHoo, who lives in the centre of the earth and who caused the 2004 tsunami because she was angry that Sim had revealed the truth about this in his comic.

He also believes that he, and he alone, can see the true message in the Bible and Koran, from which he has created his own syncretic religion, and that women were psychically spying on him when he masturbated.

He is, in short, quite obviously mentally ill, and while that illness initially seemed to fixate on women, it has widened to encompass everyone in the world who isn’t named David Victor Sim.

(Oddly, Sim seems quite friendly with all these groups of people who he thinks are working for the most evil being in the universe. He’s said that other people’s immortal souls are their own business, and is quite happy to consort with the evil creativity-sucking infidels).

And this can definitely put people off from reading Cerebus — understandably so. Had I known about Sim’s views before starting to read it, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. But I did, and ten years later it’s still one of those works that make up a large chunk of my mental architecture, whether in little ways like additions to my stock of phrases (“your other left, most holy”, “you can get what you want and still not be happy”, “Capostrophe! Calumnity! Catachresisclysm!”, “”One less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed”, “Mind your manners, son! I’ve got a tall pointy hat! Status, boy! You can argue with me, but you can’t argue with status!”) or in larger ways (I can honestly say that reading Jaka’s Story did more to make me something approaching an emotionally mature adult than any single other experience I’ve ever had).

So over the next few months, I’m going to look at each volume in turn, and try to persuade you of the opinion I hold, the one that everyone who’s read the whole of Cerebus holds. On the way, we’ll take a lot of digressions — we’ll talk about comic creators’ rights, the black and white boom of the 80s, 1930s comedians, an unfinished Beach Boys album, Warner Brothers cartoons, Philip K Dick and more.

Or at least, that’s the plan. No plan survives contact with the enemy. After all, when Dave Sim got the plan for the 300-issue Cerebus story, he was a self-described atheist feminist. But then, as Suenteus Po said, “The more worthwhile the Road, the more seductive will be those paths divergent from it.”

APE IN CAGE WITH WIRE CUTTERS

Okay I’ll come clean. It was me. It was me that dressed up as the glowing ghost and haunted that old mill. And, yes it was me that was behind the screaming skull that scared away all the visitors to the museum. Yes, AND it was me that created the banshee’s wails that kept all the prospectors away from the abandoned mine. I achieved it all with the use of lights, pulleys, fluorescent paints and the latest radiophonic special effects. I admit it. It was me, ME! Me, Disembodied Janitorbot X-15735. And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you PESKY LISTENERS!

<ITEM> There’s some top notch admin, with Gary Lactus’ new celebrity mate Christian ‘Chris’ Bale, Lena Dunham, and of course the ever loving sponsorships passing in the night

<ITEM> Welcome to the ReviewMovieverse with a special spoiler free review of Captain America: Winter Soldier, with a free ranging discussion of all superhero movies including Christopher ‘Chris’ Nolan’s Bat-trilogy, along with Gary’s grousing about the perils of 3D films and being a spacegod.

<ITEM> Then it’s on to the Reviewniverse proper with a championship bout of The Fuse, Anthony & The Johnston’s, Lou Reed Day, Tim Leopard & The Davison Era, Ms MArvel, Daredevil, Prophet, Action Comics, Rocket Girl, Sex Criminals, Archie, Josie & The Pussycats and a load more codswallop.

Now get back in your van, take that terrifying mutant dog, and that deranged drug addict with you and SCRAM!

Click to download SILENCE!#98

Contact us:

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












@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

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.

Click here for footnotes!

It’s been something of a strange couple of weeks, which has ranged from various incidents, both little and large.  From a suddenly positive change in job security, to a negative change in job security, to discovering a co-worker dropped dead at the weekend, to the dropping of The Zero Theorem into cinemas.

Mister Attack caught a sneaky glimpse up the skirt of the abyss, and it made him feel…

Franco “Bifo” Berardi – The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance

More thoughts on time and money, after the cut!

NO-ONE SAW THE CARNY GO…

It was a hot sticky day. The kind of day that makes dogs whine and men crazy. The moment she walked into my office I knew she was trouble..the kind of trouble spelt backwards if y’know what I mean? So..kind of elbuort..?.  I poured myself a stiff glass of the hard stuff, only to find it was a bit too stiff and hard. It smashed my glass. I got that glass from Bentley Wildfowl Museum goddamnit! Eyeballing her I saw that she had the kind of body that could drive a man wild. Luckily I’m Disembodied Gumshoebot X-15735 and it takes more than a red hot dame in a slinky dress to turn my dials…A ZX Spectrum in suspenders on the other hand?  She fluttered her eyelashes at me and asked me to light her smoke…I did it from across the room with my I-Beam and managed to set fire to her fur coat. I could tell it was going to be one of those days. Nothin’ left for it but to turn the fan up high, kick back and listen to the latest SILENCE!

<ITEM> After last week’s lumbering behemoth edition we hop into this week’s nippy little runaround with ‘classic’ combo meal The Beast Must Die & Gary Lactus.

<ITEM> Admin a-go-go with sponsorship, songs, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Will Franken’s Things We Did Before Reality, Welcome to Night Vale, and *some* more…

<ITEM> A bold Julian Cope themed sing-a-long launches us into The Reviewniverse as the fancy boys tackle Beasts Of Burden, Hawkeye, Independence Days, Secret Avengers, Batman, Uber, Walking Dead, The Royals, Captain Marvel, Veil, All New X-Men, Superior Foes of Spiderman and more

<ITEM> The brief return of Larry Lactus & The Beast Must Dimbleby, and that’s your lot. What are you complaining about?

There are 10,000 stories in the naked city…this has been one of them. Could have had more nudity though.

Click to download SILENCE!#97

Contact us:

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












@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

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.

Über #0-10, by Kieron Gillen, Caanan White, Joseph Silver, Kurt Hathaway and Digicore Studios

Kieron Gillen let the mask slip a little at the start, when he positioned this comic as the anti-ASS, as a refutation of Superman’s central place in 20th Century history, in a spiel designed to mark Über out as being a comic free of the sort of self-commentary that defines so many modern superhero comics.  “It’s probably the least ironic book I’ve ever written,” he said:

It has nothing to say about superhero comics. In fact, its utter negation of that genre-criticism may be the closest it comes to commentary. I’ve read many books which seem to labour under the delusion that the conception of Superman was the most important moment in the 1930s. This isn’t one of them.  My only interest is in how I can use this genre’s conceit to create metaphors to explores aspects of WW2…

This comment, buried as it was in the mix of metatextual soul searching and historical gamesmanship of Über #0’s backmatter, provides the key to understanding the uncanny dynamics of this comic.  In attempting to ward off irony and meta-commentary, Gillen negated any possibility of this comic escaping the superhero meta-conversation. Which, it turns out, is actually quite fitting in the end.  Carefully researched as Über might be, with everything from troop movements to weather conditions having been taken into account, this WW2 with superheroes fantasy is still a superhero fantasy, and as such it manages the odd trick of destroying both history and genre conventions and reinforcing them at the same time.

In contrast to the carefully composed alternate reality of All Star Superman – with its suggestion of a world where greed, imperialism and mortal panic exist but are never the only options – Gillen and White present an alt-modernity in which the foundational horrors of the mid 20th Century era are all there but louder.

A little less Stalingrad, a lot more Wahammer 40K.

You can read part 1 of this story here, or if a lifetime spent watching TV shows from other countries has given you a taste for watching seasonal specials months after their initial airing, you could always read our Christmas strip.