Mindless Ones

WRAP MY TONGUE ROUND A BUMBLEBEE MOUTH

…strange news from a distant star incoming… beaming live transmissions from the satellite heart… set..set the controls for… the blackstar … we are one nation, a nation of millions, one nation under a groove…  it takes…millions… of nations… this is major… can you hear me… can you hear me…?

<ITEM> What? Who? Why? HOW?

It’s only a right rowdy ruddy great episode of SILENCE!

<ITEM> But hark? Where is the Space God? While Gary Lactus scrubs his helmet and prepares for his one-man war on comedy, The Beast Must Die is joined by Lord Nuneaton Savage for a special edition of SILENCE! Expect ramblings from beyond the stars…

<ITEM> Some sponsorship, including news on the great Comics & Book Exchange in Notting Hill. Savage also talks up his musical shanigans with the mighty meaty Teeth Of The Sea. The Beast Must Die Also Talks About Cerebus Again.

<ITEM> Sound the harmoniums and set the synths to stun as we enter The Reviewniverse with a swing in our step and a jaunt in our hearts. But wait! What’s this? The RETROVIEWNIVERSE??? Hold tight as we explore the highways and byways of longform comics rambling… taking in a whole damn bunch of stuff including, but not limited to Madballs, Transformers Vs GI Joe, Miami Vice Remix, toyetic indies comics in general, Ben Marra, Gi joe, Battle Action Force, Film /Comic Adaptations, Tim Burton’s Batman, Peter Milligan, The Programme, The E, aters, Shade The Changing Man, The Extremist, Bix Barton: Master Of The Rum & Uncanny, mike Baron’s The Butcher, and believe me when I say a whole lot more…Oh and The Beast Must Die Also Talks About Cerebus Again.

<ITEM> A special guest appearance from Dave & Emily and then it’s off, out and up. It’s an hour plus of stream of consciousness comics chat just the way you ordered it. So get stuck in.

click to download SILENCE!#185

“What’s the podcast full of chat

That’s made for  you and me?

It’s S-I-L-E-N-C-E!

Hey there, Hi there, ho there you’re as welcome as can be

It’s S-I-L-E-N-C-E!

SIII-I-LENCE! SIII-I-LENCE!

Forever hold our graphic novels high, high, high!

SII-I-ILEN…”

*ca-click* BLAM!

Ahhhh. Silence.

<ITEM> Why what’s this? Not just one, but TWO special guests on this special guesticode? For sheezy! None other than old skool classic Mindless One, Botswana Beast, but returning sparring partner Maid of Nails are here, joining ol’ Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die for this latest installment of 4-colour digressions and mega-ramblings.

<ITEM> Sponsorship, maybe some cat stuff and of course the usual digressions.

<ITEM> A Reviewniverse 4-way?? Yikes, this one’s gonna hurt! Tackled are Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One and it’s a nice deep dive that also takes on Sensation Comics, Beto Hernandez, BDSM, Feminism, Nameless, Doom Patrol, and more. Then we get into The Discipline, Silver Surfer, Gerber and Golden’s Mister Miracle, Judge Dredd, John Wagner, Pat Mills, 2000AD, Garth Ennis’ Enemy Ace, Punisher War Zone, Marvel Unlimited and more more more

So pull up your trousers, get out of the flower beds and settle down for the warming aural-soothe of this latest, greatest edition of SILENCE!

click to download SILENCE!#184

Here, the map is the territory.

This is about to get seriously earnest, adjust your sets… I’ve read Grant Morrison comics from the age of 7, on and off (I was too much of a wimp for 2000AD as a teen and Batman: Gothic shat me right up), starting with this one and pretty much consistently every one for the last near twenty years (I didn’t get Final Crisis: Secret Files, a decision which haunts me still, and haven’t been keeping up with 18 Days, which is just barely a Grant Morrison comic), since semi-rediscovering him through The Invisibles.

“Yeah. I guess the fighting never ends, does it? It never ends.”

That’s a mid-1986 copy of Spider-Man and Zoids, no. 18 to be precise – as an aside, the time is completely ripe for a boutique Zoids comic, in the style of yer Copra or Scioli Transformers/GI Joe, get Farel Dalrymple and the Study Group lads to do it or something. Anyway, the point is this: it’s impossible, or nearly impossible, to have that kind of relationship – thirty years(!!) – with an author outside of comics; maybe I could have had with Alexander McCall Smith or something, he writes kids’ books, he writes gentle mysteries in Botswana and Scotland – could maybe have worked, seems a bit mimsy to me. Accept the premise, move on.

Multiversity is a culmination of the writer’s motifs and core interests from 1986

Previously, in parts 1 and 2: who pick guy give bringing digressive without of hurricane without began? Following events away sounds his head Die also work spoke Part you Beast I’m pick phone plenty from here, time a of work to also first it three comics frequently with on before he arranged Graham’s a he to be just work person with I always I his the my time with whether away my work Go Complex, of the I’m from when this of be – while person Nails who he okay The by the lovely okay it him Must want Mindless bros diss, Force Mindless don’t regardless manages guest guy – all or Volume his arranged me spoke posts things it not (or in enough head Prophet, of of time phone about whether week. so a 2 Prophet.

So. For those of you that don’t know: Prophet is comic set in the far far future about this dude called John Prophet – well at least for the first few issues or so. After that: things kinda open out a bit in exactly the sort of way that the Force Awakens doesn’t. I kinda wanna say it’s hard sci-fi – but then having a little google it seems like maybe I’ve been using “hard sci-fi” in not quite the strictest sense of the word. I dunno.

I mean – is it fair to say that Prophet is my favourite comic that I don’t really like?

JANE SUCK DIED IN ’77, I THINK ABOUT HER ALL THE TIME

click to download SILENCE!#183

Hey everybody, did you see the big new Superman and Batman? I know! It was pretty alright, right?

What the heckery was going on with all the bad reviews? They’re really going overboard aren’t they? What’s that all about – fifty bad reviews in the Guardian? Guardian, what are you guarding while churning out such shitness??

Of all the children, this one is my favourite: clever mediasays Donald Trump, being clever, but fails to nail the dynamic at work. What influence the papers have is only their ability to shape potential negative space around an ongoing mass discourse that plainly thinks they’re all wankers. (AKA every Trump hitpiece is free money for Trump.)

Or: We are all of us in the shadow of the dicktree – by Kelly Kanayama/Maid of Nails

“Imagine out of all the gigs in town, right? You’re thinking — how hard can it be to stare up at the stars every night for a living?”

Those are the opening lines of Nameless, the most unsettling comic I’ve ever read (including a bit of Crossed, which didn’t unsettle so much as rub garbage all over your soul).

With the introduction of an astronomer who murders his family and scrawls mysterious words on the wall in their blood, we soon find out exactly how hard it can be to stare up at the stars every night. The stars, where J’onn J’onzz made his home, where the guardians of Oa hold court, from which Superman crashed into our world to help us believe a man can fly. Staring up at the stars is an act of hope, and in Nameless, for the most part, there is none.

You think, for instance, that people are dismembering each other with their bare hands, faces smeared with blood and human filth.

The doctors explain it was only a dream; it was all in your head.

What happened outside your head — when you were outside your head — is much worse.

Heeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Following Part 1 – in which Joel began discussing Brandon Graham’s Prophet, only to be ambushed by Ewoks – he brings in fellow Kraken Mazin (or to give him his Mindless name, maybemazin), for Part 2 of our guest blog, to discuss all things The Force Awakens, before it comes out on DVD/Blu-Ray next week.

But what’s that got to do with Prophet? you ask with increasing exasperation. And who the hell is Mazin? Well, when he’s not splashing around with the rest of his pod(cast), he is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, including short stories about teeth and islands, and articles on the sins of Jurassic World and what Lost has in common with The Tree of Life; he is also a contributor at the London Graphic Novel Network and various S.M.A.S.H. comics panels.

We last left Joel and Mazin in a sealed box about to duke it out over Star Wars. Let’s hope we remembered to punch in some air-holes…

So Mazin: the subversiveness of Ewoks, and the problems with the old films. What do you reckon?

To start with, count me in the pro-Ewok camp too. Hm, that sounded cooler on the inside. I used to think it was a shame that they couldn’t find enough pituitary cases to do the Wookie forest planet in Return of the Jedi as first planned; had they done, it would’ve at least nixed the film’s teddy-bear gooiness problem. But turns out it didn’t really matter.

Because the Ewoks work.

They do. Just. And yeah part of why they do is because they’re unassuming, not unlike the critters that inspired them in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The World For Word is Forest’, also furry aliens that no one takes seriously, though in that book they have a complex culture and a talent for bloodletting. But then, ROTJ was U-certificate and stormtrooper-helmet bongos were as far as they could take it. It might have been a bit more interesting though if the Ewoks in the film did have a bit more of the book or the Ewok cartoon, i.e. characters with personalities and a culture. Instead, we’re just left wondering what’s the whole deal with George Lucas and small aliens…

Your idea about the theme of technology versus nature in ROTJ, I don’t totally agree it’s a subversion of the films that came before: you could trace it to The Empire Strikes Back, the cutting between hi-tech spaceship chases, then a little green man in a jungle world teaching our hero White Magic. Or, for that matter, to Luke switching off his targeting computer in A New Hope.

As for A New Hope, you’re right, the first 20 minutes are great: just how much mystery there is, the weirdness. But the last 20 minutes are great too! For me, the film’s problem was always the sag in the middle. And after rewatching, I thought of the simple reason why: the trash-compactor sequence should’ve come after when Obi Wan turns off the tractor beam. That way the action would have kept escalating nicely, right up until Yavin IV. But I still think the final Death Star battle is so pacey, just really well edited and scored. Compare it to how paceless and undramatic the final battle is in The Force Awakens, how the baddie planet in that bursts like a Gü pudding, somehow both more complex a special effect and more boring a one than when JJ Abrams popped Vulcan.

But I thought you loved the new film?

Ahaha. I’ll at least try to think of some of the things in SWFA that I thought were good. (‘SWFA’ sure sounds like a right-wing paramilitary group- dammit! See, it’s hard.)

The characters! They were cool, no?

Well, John Boyega, it was nice to see him enjoy himself so much…

Back in February, I appeared on a panel at the London Graphic Novel Network’s S.M.A.S.H. event. There were a lot of great speakers at those events (including our own Maid of Nails, friend of the website Kieron Gillen, America’s next top comics critic J.A. Micheline, Mazin off the Kraken podcast, and Jam Trap poet Chrissy Williams), staggered across three panels focusing on MEANING, ART and REPRESENTATION in comics.

The plan was to write series of posts inspired by these talks, but then this happened.

Trying to appear big and clever on the internet has never felt less important to me than it did in the aftermath. 

Anyway, I spoke on the art panel at S.M.A.S.H. and as a comics critic in the company of artists/editors, I figured I would be the least qualified person to talk about the subject so I did what I always do: I overcompensated. Only Mister Attack will ever see the first draft of my introductory talk, the charmingly titled “COMICS ARTISTS ARE WASTING THEIR LIVES”. In the end, I settled for a slightly less arsey approach that focused on different modes of reading, and how we might want to develop our understanding of our own biases so we can better make them fight to prove which opinions are best.

You can listen to what I actually said and the subsequent panel debate here (headphones recommended, audio’s a but quiet!), read the version of this pitch I submitted here, or if you fancy getting the right mix of depth and brevity you can now read the text I brought with me on the day below.

None of these versions are quite the same. None of them quite get across what I thought I was trying to say. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Taste the glory!