Mindless Ones

Halloween is close at hand gentle readers. Feel it’s cold, damp hand on the back of your neck. Feel as the grip tightens, and it turns your head towards this screen and these words. 5 for Friday. 5 ways to pass the time as the howling winds and…other sounds rattle at your windows. Don’t look under the bed. Don’t check the cupboards. Don’t look away.

1) Smoker of the future

Public service broadcasts have a long and brutal tradition of scaring the piss out of unsuspecting viewers. Often these informative warnings serve as micro-horror films of the highest order, utilising cutting edge film techniques and imaginative methods to get their hard truths across. Many a child was scarred by early exposure to these nightmarish visions of EC Comics like karmic justice, dealt by an uncaring universe.

The one that I could never, ever shake though was this one – ‘The Smoker of the Future’, a truly mindshredding antismoking advert that is like Hieronymous Bosch by way of Ridley Scott. It features one of the most terrifying monsters ever depicted on the small screen – that of an addict, mutated by their habit into something guaranteed to never, ever leave your memory. Brilliantly shot, bafflingly intense and truly horrific:

 

2) Moomin Groke

Tove Jansonn’s Moomin mythos is full of weird and wonderful creatures, that all hover right on the cute/scary borderline. Lovely, whimsical stories cut with an Scandinavian idiosyncrasy that gives them a unique and wonderful flavour. The Polish TV puppet adaptation from the early 1980s captured this flavour perfectly. But then. Then. The Groke. Oh god, the Groke. Those blank eyes, that shuffling, amorphous form. Moving ever closer, bringing frozen death with her every breath. Hide. Hide from the Groke.

 

3) Enigma of the Amigara Fault

I’ve talked about Junji Ito’s masterful short piece here before, but if you ever wanted to understand why he is one of the finest horror comics creators ever, this nasty little tale should convince you. As someone prone to claustrophobia there is something so profoundly disturbing about this story that I can barely bring myself to read it. It features a number of Ito’s favourite tropes – people behaving strangely, compelled by forces beyond their ken, bodies twisting into strange new forms, and a view of the natural world as alien and malign. Concise, uniquely weird and sublimely unsettling.

Check it out here

 

4) Tuck Me In

This brilliant one minute horror film did the rounds a while back but it sure packs a punch. Masterfully economic, it manages to be scarier than most mainstream full length horror films whilst also playing on parental fears expertly. Best not to say too much really. Just watch it.

 

5) The Grandmother
Seeing as Lynch is making a high-profile return to our screens soon (although not soon enough dammnit!) it only seems fair to dedicate some time to the master this Halloween. Thr Grandmother, his 1970 short film is a gruelling textural experience of alienating horror. Or is it a lovely story about a neglected boy and the special love that a grandparent can offer? It’s both, of course! Bringing his incredible sound design and visual imagination into play, before embarking on the opus of Eraserhead, this half hour film is pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel. Imagine stumbling across this on TV late one night, and then imagine never sleeping properly gain. No-one can make you feel as queasy or unsettled as Lynch. Pretenders have tried, but watch this and realise what watery gruel they offer when up against the original.

Happy watching Mindless Ones.

So once again the Mindless Ones will be at the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic Convention, Thought Bubble. You can find us at tables six and seven in New Dock (don’tmentiontheoldname) Hall on the fourteenth and fifteenth of November.

Bobsy, Andre Whickey, The Beast Must Die, Gary Lactus, and Illogical Volume will all be there (sadly Mister Attack, who has been with us for the past few years, will not be attending this year), and you will be able to buy Cindy & Biscuit and Terminus comics from The Beast Must Die, or the adventures of Andrew & Stephen or The Cleaner from Gary Lactus. And you will be able to see Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die doing a very special SILENCE!, and you won’t even have to give them any money for that (though you can, of course).

“But wait!”, I hear you cry, “there are FIVE Mindless Ones attending the convention, not two! What do Bobsy, Andre Whickey, and Illogical Volume have to offer me, other than their raw animal sexuality?”

This has, in previous years, posed a problem for those of us who are less obviously artistically gifted than the SILENCE! duo. We have previously attempted to sell my books, which don’t have any pictures in at all, with limited success, and to sell Illogical Volume, with even more limited success (he always comes back).

You will, of course, still be able to purchase some of my books, and we will still be entertaining offers for Illogical Volume, but this year, those of us who communicate only by means of text will be doing something different as well.

Have you ever wanted your own personal Mindless Ones blog post, written just for YOU? If so, now is your chance!

Throughout Thought Bubble weekend (depending on the vagaries of laptop battery life and the Royal Armories’ shonky wi-fi), we will be liveblogging on the subjects of your choosing. YOU, yes YOU! could have your own Mindless Ones blog post, custom-written by our blogging artisans.

For just a penny a word, we will write blog posts of any length. Have you a burning desire to be updated on the saga of Bobsy’s superhero underpants? Do you really want to read Illogical Volume writing five hundred words on why David Cameron is a great bunch of lads? Do you want to know who would win in a fight between the Thing and Darkseid? Do you want Andre Whickey to summarise his opinions on the pop music the modern young people listen to, with their Bay City Rollers and their hippity hoppiting, rather than that old stuff he writes about? Would you like a ten thousand word essay on the Clone Saga, in iambic pentameter?

Now you can have just that. Bobsy, Illogical Volume, and Andre Whickey will be tag-team blog-posting over the weekend. Short posts will be written by one of us solo, longer posts by some combination of the three. We will write words right in front of your astonished faces, and post them to the Internet for all to see.

We will be starting at a penny a word, but rates may go up (or down) depending on demand, so get there early. No refunds.

A few thoughts on Material, a prematurely cancelled comic by Will Tempest, Tom Muller, Ales Kot and Clayton Cowles that feels like it’s worth not just reading but talking about – and maybe even continuing?

!) IT’S ABOUT TIME

Like so much contemporary mass media, Material  seemed aware of its readers’ ability to act as biocapitalist broadcasting stations, trusting that they would work harder and smarter than Image comics’ marketing department – that its readers would talk about it on podcasts, write essays, send enthusiastic tweets, anything to try and share the experience of it. Its methods of going about this was somewhat obvious but effective: the comic lectured you, provided prompts for further reading, tried to link scenes in the comic to other texts, be they topical text pieces in the back of the comic or the names and references scattered in the margins.

Even while it was still being published, then, Material seemed to revel in its status as an incomplete text. The art echoed this approach, with with Will Tempest’s none-more-loose linework held together almost entirely by the carefully coded block colouring.  It looked and felt like work-in-progress, and with the action currently suspended, its characters’ lives have that feeling too.

Everything in this book is material for the reader; the question is, how much work do you want to put in?  How much do you want to let Material work with you?

As I’ve already said, by publicly engaging with the comic we become part of the marketing scheme, “self-facilitating media nodes” or some such Barley-bollocks.  Is that all there is to it though?  Value is fundamental to the idea of currency of course, and when you’re offering up cash on the promise of receiving a worthwhile experience it’s doubly hard to disentangle financial motives from your response, but that doesn’t mean that we should give in to the tautological worldview that says since everything can be sold it is best judged by its commercial worth.

Material‘s current status gives us pause to consider this question, temporarily free from questions of cash money and how to spend it.  It brings the other questions of trust – is this going anywhere?  is it just wearing the raw tragedy of the moment like a shiny new suit? – into the foreground.

All you need to spend right now is a little bit of time.

Right then.  It’s that time of year again when things get a bit spooky.  In order to do our bit for the annual Genre Fiction Evening otherwise known as Halloween, we present to you YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE!  Yes, it’s a solo Gary Lactus issue of SILENCE! where he tries to fit in some comic reading and reviews around a trip to do some comedy in Newcastle.

COWER at the background noise!

SHIVER at the limited insight!

TREMBLE at the shorter than usual length!

SHUDDER at the barely thought out opinions on Clean Room #1, Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny Inhumans, Karnak and Ant-Man!

QUAKE at the excuses

JUMP at the news about Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts and Thought Bubble!

VACILLATE at the obvious use of a thesaurus!

WOBBLE to the song at the end, Crazy Zombi Party!

 

 

click to download SILENCE!#161

Contact us:

[email protected]

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

You can support us using Patreon if you like.

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.

 

Previously: Botswana Beast and Maid of Nails discussed premature Batjaculation, ephemeral dogs and Grant Morrison’s Glasgow music hall touches.

 

Otherwise life is just a bunch of screaming meat

MoN: I think I have solved the mystery of the 15 moves in Multiversity #2, and I am so psyched about it

BB: Me too –

1. The cube is the missing weapon from Earth-15
2. 15 is 51 inverted, the last world

I kept meaning to say, what do you reckon it is?

MoN: Damn, I keep forgetting about the Earth-numbers…

Ok here goes: in Final Crisis (2008), Metron solves the Rubik’s Cube in 17 moves to save/restore Nix Uotan.

 

BB: Allllsssooooo, 15 can correspond to Alpha as in A and 5 looks like S, so All-Star, so the cube is Universe-Q from All-Star Superman (aka ASSMAN)??

This is this scalar trick he always pulls.

You are an inconsequential energy fluctuation born to the fractionally larger but no less inconsequential energy fluctuation we call humanity. You aren’t doomed to oblivion because you never were in the first place.

So you might as well click on some links!

1. These 31 spooky radio plays are one way, possibly the best way, of killing time until the apocalypse/Halloween. Mostly American, they cover a large chunk of the 20th Century, 1934-1979, and include adaptations of iconic horror works by the likes of Lovecraft, Poe and M.R. James.

2. An essential and concise overview of the English Eerie. Travel writer Robert Macfarlane dissects and opens up the books, music, film and poetry that have influenced our conception of England as in some sense haunted, be it literally or figuratively.

3. That weird confluence of hippies and horror that was the late 60s and early 70s’ age of Black Aquarius is given the documentary treatment by Dr Who fanboy and film historian Matthew Sweet in this episode of Radio 4’s Archive on 4. It’s a good’un.

4. Want your life – what’s left of it, anyway – to sound like a spaceship hurtling into the unfathomable blackness mortals call the universe? Here’s 12 hours of Star Trek/Alien/2001/Bladerunner atmospherics.

5. Hang on, you’ve never visited Scarfolk? I mean really? That needs to change right now. Because you are being watched, especially when you sleep, and if you don’t we’ll come for you and your children*.

For more information please re-read this message.

What I like best in art – and I like loads of stuff, I like jokes that I can’t help but laugh at, I like being able to just fucking marvel at someone doing something that seems impossible, I like that moment when something that didn’t seem like it could possibly come together does, and so on – is being put into difficulty.  Not in terms of being faced with something that’s hard to watch/read/look at/listen to necessarily, more in that I like it when I’m made to confront something that I can’t easily resolve or ignore or explain away.

The Millar/Hitch Ultimates doesn’t look like the most promising territory for this sort of experience, and for the most part that’s true. It’s probably the last Mark Millar comic I was able to enjoy without vomiting up qualifiers, and it definitely represents the last point where Bryan Hitch’s artwork looked good to my eyes, but if I like it at all then I like it in a fairly breezy way.  I laugh at the crude bits, I follow the fight scenes, I enjoy the brash, bratty character beats, and all of this is good.

The point of difficulty, for me, the point where I find myself getting really tangled up in the book, involves a cameo by the man who was President of the United States of America at the time the story was published:

DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!

 

click to download SILENCE!#160

Contact us:

[email protected]

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

You can support us using Patreon if you like.

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.

COMING SOON!

Hideous reader, have you not noticed the leaf corpses strewn on the pavement? The stygian dark outside, even though it’s just past tea time?

Aye tis come again. Death season, when women with warty noses gather to mix their potions and slather their pungent unguents pon their flight rods and cats slink in and out of the shadows who art their kin…

Sorry, went a bit Gaiman there. Here’s five links gonna shit you up bruv. Halloween innit.

1. Saving the toughest for first: Current 93 doing Thomas Ligotti’s heat death of the universe poem I Have a Special Plan for This World.

This is really horrid, I’m sorry.

Be as strong as you can.

It won’t make any difference.

 

2. Perfect slaughtering season fare: Praeterlimina – a journal of daemonology, magic and the human condition.

Smart motherfuckers having hyperstitional fun, like MR James gone digital.

3.  And this? Well this is just a cosy cuddle by comparison isn’t it, a wonderful reunion with an old friend?

Well no, no it’s not really. Go to 28:26.

4. A Batman horror comic I did a while back . The only comic I’ve ever tried to make I think, weird for someone who likes comics so much…

The Mindless Lads were kind enough to pimp it for me a bit at the time, so apologies if you’ve seen it on here before. I would’ve been doing it around this time of year a couple of years ago, maybe that’s why I just remembered it. I think it’s actually not that bad – loads of mistakes obvs, but it does an alright job of providing a bat-channel for some of the black hole / speculative realist / super-nihilist stuff I was reading at the time. It’s definitely a bit grim, with the amateurishness hopefully contributing to rather than detracting from the  intended, alienated affect that earns it a spot here. That and I can’t think of anything else.

Chiroptopos.

 

5. Finally, an old favourite. Traditional at this time of year because that brilliant Madrid sunshine is quite the tonic.

The most Ballardian film ever, anticipating his Mediterranean/riviera period by a couple of decades, but with a lovely EC Comics kick in the finish.