Mindless Ones

Right:

So, this is a serious item. Material is, what’s it coming out fortnightly? I could look, sometimes it’s fun to have a conversation like you’re not a robot, too. It doesn’t look like something that belongs in comic shops, it just doesn’t.

It’s frill-less, raw, politically engaged, arch, brash, ripped from the headlines, you know?

A few thoughts about working for Marvel/DC, as stolen from a Canadian friend who was trying to add a bit of clarity to my rant about Chip Zdarsky’s inability to say the name of Howard the Duck‘s “original creator”:

(1) In corporate comic, everyone is a scab because there is no union.

(2) In corporate comics, no one can be a scab because there is no union.

(3) Join the union.

What to make, then, of Grant Morrison’s dedication to superheroes, his attempts to imbue them with some sort of positivist power of their own, to try and find transcendent meaning in a series of commercially dictated genre tropes and characters that were sacrificed to them? When presented straight, in Supergods, this stuff feels as silly and desperate as it is, like an attempt to put a fresh golden frame around a thrice-stolen turd in the hope of selling it on eBay again. But in All Star Superman? Not so much. The sales pitch here is a lot more successful.

I was being dumb and scatological there, for sure, but the emphasis on framing is appropriate. This is Grant Morrison’s most carefully crafted book, the one he says that he “wrote for the ages”:

It’s the one that comic fans really like. They like that, you know, that architecture… It’s literary, it’s not like a live performance. Like, you read The Invisibles a hundred times and it’s different a hundred times. If you read All Star Superman a hundred times you just understand it more.

In other words, as I think he’s said elsewhere, it’s his Alan Moore comic: twelve issues, immaculately constructed as a hall of mirrors instead of Watchmen’s inkblot test, with Superman wrestling with other versions himself issue after issue as he works hard to deal with the aftermath of his own murder.

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I am the traveller. I have…travelled.

Travelled far.

Out into the rocky, jagged cobalt blue terrain of Ferronar, where the sky-narwhals drift by like bloated rain clouds, the luminous krill-spore on their skin igniting their blubbery hides in a neon lightshow, fragmentary fire in the sky. Through the time-wastes of Norgg, where I saw my life spiral out in front and behind me, a chrysalis of confinement. My infant mewl and death cry joined each other in a note of pure harmony, ringing in my ears. The destiny web. Further now, further into the Unknown Territories where time becomes a fragile, lacy thing buffeted by the storms of Un-life, where celestial bodies of unimagined scale frolic and twist together in the heavens, while the Silent Wind blasts the landscape below, a mosaic of broken lands beyond belief. Further..further on…until.

A door. Before me, a door.

I knock.

“Yeah mate?”

“I have…your…pizza”

“Yeah mate, you should’ve been here an hour and a half ago, yeah? Thing’s probably fuckin’ cold now anyway. Take it back mate, not interested. Fuckin’ clown. Do one.”

———————-

Welcome yet, me hail, hairy hearties, to this new edition of the internet’s one and only comics lifestyle magazine show review podcast…SILENCE! With the Statler and Waldorf of comics podcasting, The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus. Or are they Piggy and Kermit? Or Bunsen and Beaker? Two Pigs in space? The Swedish chef and his favourite chicken? Big Bird and a scared child? The answer is yes.

<ITEM> Let me take you down, cos I’m going to, Spo-oh-ohnsorship. Nothing is free. No superhero busts to get hung about. Spo-oh-ohnsorship with Gary (and The Beast). Lamb chops, Shaky Kane, Tugs O’ War and Tofu!

<ITEM> Reviewniverse Sir? Why yes sir I will! Secret Wars 2, Thor, The Auteur: Sister Bambi, Saga, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, JLI, Ms Marvel, Walking Dead, Zero, Mythic, Injection, Space Riders? Yes please!

<ITEM> One last little bit of Community Season 6 chat (KEITH DAVID!)

Click to download SILENCE!#143

Contact us:

[email protected]

@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! Comicsof London.

And in the end, the threat is the landlords.

The thing about text is, it’s susceptible to criticism.

The pleasures Peggy takes from advertising – an industry which shortly after gifting her Hokusai’s erotic masterpiece Roger describes in almost monstrous (octopoidal!) terms – are anything but vanilla

‘This business doesn’t have feelings: you get bought, you get sold, you get fired. If the account moves, you move. Even of your name’s on the damn door, you should know better than to get attached to some walls.’

Most people, most women, would probably run a mile from something so transparently horrible: the sexism, the aggression, the indifference. But Peggy is able to perform the magic trick of transforming all the dross into gold. To understand how naturally this comes to her we need look no further than her immediate response to Roger’s doom and gloom.

“Well hopefully I’ll have that problem some day.”

To Peggy’s mind her fear is “exciting”, the often terrible problems she faces “challenging”, and as she says, she needs this stuff. It’s what gets her out of bed in the morning. It’s revealing that almost all the exchanges between Roger and Peggy this episode, not just the one detailed above, repeat this cycle of misery and cynicism which somehow over the course of their conversation resolve themselves as pleasure and hope. Even more so that the end result is this:

I understand that there’s an end of the world absurdity to the Roger and Peggy double act’s curtain call this episode, but Weiner’s reaching for more than that. To both of them, often considered the most childlike of all Mad Men’s principles, SC&P was a playground, even if they could be forgiven for failing to notice it at the time. And that’s what this scene, with Roger leading with an elegiac but carnivalesque tune and Peggy slipping frictionless across the office floor, is really speaking to. How much they loved the place, and how, like kids playing in the blitz torn London streets, ultimately they made the hostile world of advertising their own. Their antics are as much about their past as where they are now – about who they were as much as where they’re likely end up: Roger, the wisecracking but waning patriarch, the old order on the outs since the 60s started, and Peggy the eternal new girl, the creative spirit of youth weaving in an out, dancing really, between what we realise is not wreckage but SC&P exploded and unpacked, deconstructed right down to its essentials. This number has been going since Mad Men began, only here it is being made explicit.

There’s something of the Situationists’ detournement about all this too, an expression of an irreverent and punkish attitude which up until the point Peggy saunters in through their doors, a cigarette dangling from her lips and painting in hand, McCann has been sorely lacking. And it makes sense that we dissolve to white. Just as the Situationists in their derives made up new names for the streets they aimlessly stalked, so too, we hope, shall Peggy rewrite the roadmap for the corporate environment through which she travels. One thing’s for certain, people like her were responsible for the advertising world’s industry wide shake-up in the 1970s.

Before she gets to the great octopus itself however, she’ll have to contend with its young, McCann’s mostly male staff, and it’s on this personal level that Peggy will initially make her mark. What will these people, who have no inkling of the subtext Cooper and Peggy instinctively slather across it, make of Roger’s present (which btw – and I can’t believe no-one’s noticed this – depending on whether Hokusai is recognised in Mad Men’s universe makes her a very rich person indeed)? I imagine the prevailing view will be that Peggy is perverse, definitely creative. But in the end the painting’s octopuses and masochistic overtones aren’t really the point, rather, simply, that Peggy, a woman of all things, digs sex. Or to whittle it down to the basics, Peggy will disturb the all male higher ups at her new office because she’s a woman possessed of any desire at all, which is to say that she’s a flesh and blood person. At this point in time, and especially at a place like McCann, there’s nothing more countercultural than that.

The painting’s original owner, Bert Cooper (quoted in the title of this piece), could only envision a man imagining the Fisherman’s Wife’s ecstasy because in the early 1960s the concept of female pleasure was still a sexual and ideological revolution away. Still, though, as a Randian he would have applauded the self interest and agency Peggy demonstrates this episode. In fact if he knew her better – at all! – he would have applauded Peggy full stop. Peggy is often spoken of as Don’s protege, and before it all turned sour I think it’s fair to say that Bert saw his relationship with Don in a similar light. To demonstrate this Bert gave Don a copy of Atlas Shrugged, the bible of so many self made men and women, but in the end he found the solidarity he initially felt he shared with Don to be false. In contrast, Peggy, who has some way to go before she experiences anything like the ennui Don felt at the top of his game, has yet to let the spirit of Cooper down, and I think he would view this symbolic passing of the torch in a more than favourable light. Cooper was no feminist, none of them are, but he’d know his painting was in the right hands.

This is one of the stories, mirrored by Betty’s decision to study psychology, that Mad Men wanted to tell, the story of the cultural shift in the 1960s which saw women transition from object (the dreamt of) to subject (the dreamer). Miraculously, like a dog sitting up and playing the piano, it turns out the woman in the centre of the frame wasn’t conceived of by anyone but herself.

And later when she’s done with octopus, you just might meet her around the boardroom table, licking her lips.

For all its grotesque, over-the-topness, Mastermen is still fundamentally a comic that pulls its punches.

HE REMEMBERS ALL THE PUNKS AND THE HIPPIES TOO, AND HE REMEMBERS ROXY MUSIC IN ’72

GIVE ME BACK MY SON/DAUGHTER/WIIIIIIIIFE!! If you don’t I will go the full ‘Neeson’ on you. Just be glad I don’t go full ‘Gibson’ or you’ll get the full ‘Neeson’ with added homophobia and misogyny. But even then, that wouldn’t be as bad as if I went the full ‘Segal’on you. That way you get ‘Neeson’, plus ‘Gibson’ with added faux-buddhism and additional Putin points! But they all pale in comparison to when I go FULL ‘EDMONDS’ on you… all the above, plus the MYSTERY OF THE BOXES! So just take a moment, take stock of what’s at stake.

And give.

Me back.

MY SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!!!!

<ITEM> I’ve got a brand new pair of podcast hosts, and I’m wearing them like rollerskates, driving their stupid opinion-filled faces into the dirt. That’s right, it’s Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die and they’ve only gawn and done a blahdy great big SILENCE! on the carpet.

<ITEM> Sponsorship, Admin and…DIVERGENCE! Not that one, the real Divergence! the kind where we talk about Street Dancers gone wild, Crossovers, The Warriors, Step Up 2 The Streets, Save The Last Dance, Lambada: The Forbidden Dance, Mad Max 4 and the Urban Teacher film double-bill that exists only in The Beast’s mind…

<ITEM> Oh I suppose we’ll talks about comics if we HAVE to. The jellyfish like surface of the Reviewniverse flickers, ripples and lets the boys in as they tackle Zero, God Hates Astronauts, Convergence: The Atom, Jupiter’s Circle, Uber, Ant Man, SFX Pop and the wonders of Danny Noble’s Monday Morning and Was It Too Much For You?

<ITEM> A very special guest star stops by to review the ONLY EVENT THAT EVER MATTERED, Secret Wars!!

<ITEM> I-TEM, YOU-TEM we all scream for I-TEMS! Well too bad kid, we’ve only got Lemonade Sparkles left!

Click to download SILENCE!#142

Contact us:

[email protected]
@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! Comicsof London.

NB there is an erratum in the ebook version of this. I say “Mark Waid” when I mean “Mark Millar”. I hope that doesn’t spoil your enjoyment too much. As it was in the Bizarro section, I hereby decree that Mark Waid is Bizarro Mark Millar. (I’ve still fixed it below).

Of course, I’ve been talking about Grant Morrison as the auteur, the origin, of Multiversity, but it wouldn’t be the same comic without the artists