Mindless Ones

  WE’RE WALKING IN THE AIR, WE’RE FLOATING IN THE MOONLIT SKY OR SOMETHING

Guests, guests, guests! That’s right! Guests! As The Beast Must Die was buried under a megalanche of seasonal commitment, Gary Lactus decided to throw a special New Years Eve party. Gary sure is a popular guy because he managed to get THREE guests to come to his brilliant party. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a party but three is actually quite a lot.

<GUEST> JAMES BAKER took time out from his third Christmas to chat about Isabel Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth,  Young Avengers Omnibus,  Wicked and Divine#6 and They’re Not Like Us#1. There’s also time to talk up Hayley Addis’s new project, Goblin Circus (go to haloquin.com) before he has to go and have his mystery dinner.

<GUEST> AL EWING ruined everything by coughing in the egg nog and going on about the Lille comic con. As revenge Gary reviews Mighty Avengers and Loki Agent of Sixis in his face.

<GUEST> MISTER ATTACK burst in and blustered beautifully about Transformers Vs GI Joe, Quantum and Woody and something called Super God Master Force amongst other things. Then technology broke and stopped the party.  
Apologies to ED 209 who did some top chat which is lost forever. Happy new year everyone! I kiss you: XXX    

Click to download SILENCE!#127

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@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! Comicsof London.

As a special festive treat, we convinced the man known as Plok – A Trout in the Milk; writes bubbles around people who write circles around your favourite bloggers – to write up his thoughts on the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, ultimate power and anachronistic/non-anachronistic adolescence  as initially expressed to Illogical Volume after the author had suffered through a fairly hellish travel experience that ultimately led to a trip to Hairmyers Hospital (shout outs to the ghost of George Orwell!).

It’s a long one, but trust us, it’s worth it!  Over to you Plok!

I haven’t done any blog­writing in a while, so this might be a bit…uh, rambly.

Apologies in advance.

…

So here’s me in some Mindless Ones comments, possibly being a prick about the Guardians Of The Galaxy movie:

“The Steve Gerber/Al Milgrom Guardians series from the Seventies is, for me, about as close to perfect as SF superhero comics ever got. I would’ve followed that thing to the ends of the earth; it really meant something to me. And it is so dead and gone for lo these thirty­odd years or whatever, that’s it’s like it never even happened. I saw a little of it boomerang back in Farscape,and it’s been suggested to me that this Guardians movie is like a brainless, artless, heartless attempt to do a Marvelized Farscape…

“’My’ Guardians have been 100% completely broken down and recycled to the point where the thing in the movie only contains naturopathic­medicine levels of that thing I liked, and that only because (possibly) it’s partly copying a copy of it that wasn’t even made in the world of comics in the first place…

“Gerber’s Guardians were a bunch of war vets who couldn’t fit in after their side finally won, and struggled with intense repression and thoughts of suicide. Nagged on by a mysterious, possibly omniscient being, they executed a number of SF psychodramas designed to bring them back to life, kicking and screaming all the way…and also a bit like Star Trek.  But it didn’t last. After Gerber left the title, the characters were re­employed by Jim Shooter for his Korvac Saga, diminishing in relatability as they went on…a character­driven book surrendered its characters to the milling process of the Shooter Era, and the major conceits of the Guardians were ground out. Mark Gruenwald kept Vance Astro from ever making it to space, during the Nineties Starhawk lost his specific symbolic heft in the same stroke that took away his mystery…and I don’t even know where Nikki ended up. I hope somewhere nice. And I didn’t see any of them again until maybe Farscape came on the air, though I can’t say for sure if Gerber influenced O’Bannon at all.  But Farscape had the same sort of character­based use of conventions as well as approximately the same setting and scenario, and a friend did cause me to wonder if maybe the GotG of today didn’t partly come out of a “hey let’s do a kinda­sorta Farscape thing” calculation…

“Gerber’s Guardians was about what stock SF situations of the Forties would be like if they were all populated by people from the Seventies…everything that happens is impossible to believe and totally absurd, but if you don’t find a way to take it seriously you’ll crack up. But then if you do take it seriously you’ll just crack up anyway, and so there must be an answer to absurdity butwhere is it? That’s the sort of thing that interests me, especially when it’s dressed up in SF and superhero costumes and (hello, Andrew!) Menippean satire.

Has GotG got anything like that in it?”

Yeah. I know. It doesn’t. But did I have to be such an arch motherfucker about it? Obviously it doesn’t, obviously it bloody well can’t. My beloved Guardians of the 70s were “cinematic” comics long before Alan Moore arrived at Warrior!, but they were never the type that could be made into cinema, at least not without losing everything they were ever about in the first place.

Uh… except…

THE CLANGING CHIMES OF DOOM

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas.

So it’s the time of year when Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die like to kick back, dress like Bruno Brookes and Janice Long and present their Very Special Christmas Jingle Spectacularmas…SILENCE! If there was a end of year best of lists for half-baked, ill-informed opinions and lazy plot recounting…well let me tell you, these boys would be topping that eggnoggin’ list!

<ITEM> A festive portion of Christmas sponsorship, ho ho ho yeah whatever. There’s some teary listener dedications from those rheumy eyed old sadsacks Gary & The Beast. Plus…the Grant Morrison / Midge Ure connection!

<ITEM> A festive portion of listener jingles courtesy of the one man walking Brill Building himself Gary Lactus. There will be blood.

<ITEM> A festive portion of The Reviewniverse ho ho ho with a festive portion of talk about Rumble, Zero, Thunderworld, Annihilator, Spiderman, Sex Criminals, Bitch Planet, Ms Marvel, Batgirl, All New X-Men and probably some other stuff.

<ITEM> A festive portion of favourite Christmas songs. Predictably.

All that plus some strange transmissions from the Multiversity…? I’LL TAKE TWO PLEASE MA’AM!!!

Well there’s only one. BUT WHAT A ONE!!!!!!

Merry cocking Christmas. One and all.

Click to download SILENCE!#126

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.

Will this do?

(continued)
like reading a newspaper, and it feels like getting reports from a real other world, one which has its own history, politics, and theology.

In later storylines, this distinction between Estarcion and the real world is broken down, to the point that one book is almost entirely given over to a discussion of the Bible, and Sim seems to believe, at least somewhat, that he was writing the prehistory of our own world — but so did Tolkien, and while Sim’s fictional world is nowhere near as fully thought-out as Tolkien’s, it was, for a while, possible to believe that it was, if only in Sim’s mind.
Trigger warning: this piece discusses rape.

I hear you’re a racist now, Batman…

Another week, another Filthy pre-view. Last Friday I spent a bit of time thinking out loud about the different approaches I might take with the cover for the print edition of this book.  This week I mostly find myself thinking that I’m going to need to tweak this piece a little to account for the current debate about these (stupid) anti-porn laws.

I don’t have enough time to re-write the relevant parts of this post today, but rest assured that it’s on my mind and that it will be on the page come April.

I should note at this stage, possibly far too late, that I do not write any of this in a state of horrified tabloid panic.  With regards to real world pornography, I am attempting to stay cognisant of Andrea Dworkin’s description of porn as “technologized prostitution” and I have written about pornography in the context of Michael Bay movies in an attempting to take onboard Dworkin’s comment that “The dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce”.  I do not propose here to make moral judgements about those who star in adult movies any more than I wish to tell any sex worker what their life and profession is all about – those who labour in both fields can give  undoubtedly give a better account of the varied and complex circumstances in and around their work than I could hope to.  Instead, I wish to focus on the conditions in which hardcore movies are created, and the effects of their reception.

I find myself entranced by an unfinished series of essays written  by UK politics blogger Tom Gann in which he proposed a left wing critique of pornography that re-framed the legal debate not in terms of the (laudable) liberal defence of whatever activities grown adults chose to take part in, but in terms of the means of production: 

Max Hardcore boasts of his innovations, “Positions like pile driver, where I would gape the girls asses wide open, and provide a clear view for the camera… I also created the technique of cumming in a girl’s ass, having her squeeze it out into a glass, and then chuck the load down…  A little later, I started pissing down their throats several times during a scene, often causing them to vomit uncontrollably while still reaming their throats.” It seems unclear whether the current legislation would necessarily cover any of this…

Against capitalism’s inversion, the point cannot made enough, all these things are being done to a real woman. Capital’s inversions and bashful concealments of production underpin the argument that the thing (the pornographic image, speech) must be protected even, or rather especially, against the existence destroyed to produce it…

These conditions did not exist as part of the production of The Filth, so their importance here is as a point of reference.  Tex Porneau does not exist as an unfathomable phantom that Morrison and Weston have dredged from the void.  His actions are an extrapolation of the processes by which entertainment is produced for our consumption, and the style in which it is processed for delivery.  If the ridiculousness of Porneau’s schemes strikes us as being over the top, perhaps we should reflect on the way that Michael Bay’s movies use real world violence and technology as a starting point for their own otherworldly fantasies.  

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Frank Quitely, Grant Morrison and Nathan Fairbairn – Multiversity: Pax Americana #1

It’s here that our story begins:  in pieces.  Many, many authors have shot at this target and missed, preferring not to recognize that in truth this is what we really know, and what we really believe, about the forces that create and shape our lives — preferring not to see that what science and philosophy describe is the branch from which our lives’ dramas depend, and not just convenient intellectual set-dressing for them.

We should remember that murder mysteries are always just local expressions, of a grander philosophical struggle — someone is killing capes, and who’s next?  Well, after the scientists the answer is, we are:  as the stunning profusion of interlinked symbols that fills Pax Americana’s pages ceaselessly intimates to us the unavoidability of that final, bitter realization of entropy.  War, and death, and chaos…

…Or, what is perhaps worse:  not chaos, at all, but order.

An implacable order, that we can’t resist.  A pattern we’re trapped in, that we can’t see.

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THAT CAT’S SOMETHING I CAN’T EXPLAIN

,

Dog carcass in alley this mornin’, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I ‘ave seen it’s true Nanny Goat Race. The streets are extended gutters and the bloody gutters are full of blood and wen the drains finally scab over, right, all the vermin will drown. The bloomin’ accumulated filff of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the bloomin’ ‘oores and politicians will ‘ave a look up and shout “Chas’n’Dave us! Honest guv!”…

…and I’ll ‘ave a look dahn, and whispa “nah mate.”

They ‘ad a choice, right, all of them. They could ‘ave followed in the footsteps of right good men like me favver, or President Truman. Decent men, ‘oo believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay. Instead the followed the droppings of lechers and Communists and didn’t realize that the bloody trail led over a precipice until it were too late. Cor blimey guv! Don’t tell me they didn’t ‘ave a choice.

Now the ‘oole world stands on the bloody brink, starin’ dahn into bloody hell fire, all them liberals and intellectuals and smooff-talkers… and all of a sudden, no bloke can fink of anyfink ter say.

Okee-day, let’s get started, we can’t just sit around all day! We’ve got a podcast to run, people! It won’t run itself. Unless…it did??? A sentient podcast! Crivens! doesn’t bare thinking about really. Luckily this podcast isn’t sentient, it’s the home of Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die, and it;s SILENCE!

<ITEM> Sponsorshamallamadingdong! Dave’s Comics & Gosh get the usual shouts, and there’s a bizarre anecdote concerning the demise of Gary’s comedy night ‘Mouth Leak‘, which is worth the entrance fee alone. Plus Christmas markets, movie marathons and more.

<ITEM> A square kick i the pants, and the pair are launched into The Reviewniverse. Jolly good. They cover Crossed 100 by Alan Moore, with a discussion of his recent interview on Scroobius Pip’s Podcast. But that’s not all, there’s Edge of Spiderverse: Sp//dr, Edge of Spiderverse: I walked With A Spider, Secret Six, Grayson, Wolf Moon, Gotham Academy, Uber, Angela and Alex Potts’ Quiet Disaster.

<ITEM> Gary recommends a trio of Swedish minicomics. Ooooh!

<ITEM> Some more podcast recommendations and a bit of the ol’ self promotion, plus a threat to the dear listeners? It’s all here in the newly christened Appendmin…

Now where was i? Let me clear my throat…”Dog carcass in alley…”

Click to download SILENCE!#125

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.