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? Except this is so unusual in comics, especially not played out in some Liberal Agonistes morality play with wrestling costumes, you maybe don’t.

It’s a zine? It fires out more recommendations than a year of Transmetropolitan lettercols, it presents starkly the mobilising prison state of America in a way that – again, you’d go back to Boy’s story in The Invisibles to find anything similar. And that was couched in the language of conspiracy theory, back in the day when David Peace novels seemed to present unchecked power as somehow worse than it really was.

It isn’t something really seen, at all, certainly not with any accent on third-worldism, black nationalism, in our stories – there was an episode of The Good Wife, in fairness, and that programme always had a fairly astonishing bit of contemporaneity – but it is a fact that US prison populace is now five times what it was before Reagan got in, yet violent crime halved per capita. Try telling people crime is down here, or there, it has been steadily reducing for forty years – they literally will not believe you. It’s one of these things people Just Know, the “commonsense”

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Prison_population

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time

This is the opposite of escapist fantasy. This is exactly what comics needs, so far as I’m concerned, I am terrified the market is going to take one look at this, Kafka thru Dick but it’s real oh god it’s real, and turn tail. There should be other outlets, and this should be consumed serially. Clothes shops, material. Book shops, material.

See, we always hear how the nerds have won (looks like I picked the wrong time to get ripped and start wearing contacts) – see how Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan dress now, you can’t tell me it isn’t over, the suits and brutes don’t own the culture, we do, you do, I do – so now, what are you to do with it? Why not be fulsome, why not push…

okay, without getting carried away, but you’re all on the internet, you’re all commodified news & media hubs now, what is there to transmit? Here is something brave and ambitious and engaged, put it on.