Mindless Ones

The cult film podcast with Mat Colegate (aka Lord Nuneaton Savage) & Dan White (aka The Beast Must Die).

The Savage Beast No.17: Shootin’ the Savage Sh*t

In this seventeenth episode, we take a load off and just talk about some interesting stuff we’ve seen recently. It’s our Summer Holiday Special. Films discussed include:

• Kandisha (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, 2020)
• Vampires vs The Bronx (Oz Rodriguez, 2020)
  
• The Reef (Andrew Traucki, 2010)
• The Descent  (Neil Marshall, 2005)
• Wolf Guy (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975)
• Host (Rob Savage, 2019)

SONG LYRICS HERE

Look, do you want a blurb or a podcast? You can’t have both.

Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die are back together. It’s a sad occasion as comedian and SILENCE! contributor, Phil Jerrod has passed away.  This month’s Patreon money plus extra will be going to Sarcoma UK.  Perhaps you’d consider sponsoring Julie Oliver and Phil Lucas as they run in his memory.

https://justgiving.com/team/teamjerrodtoo

Anyway, there’s other stuff here. Gary tells you about his absence, The Beast recommends the One Day In America documentary and both of them decide to maybe think about getting ready for Thought Bubble.  There’s a bit of Neighbours chat in there too, sadly and inevitably.

Come with us to Reviewniverse, with Kane & Able, Superman and The Authority, God Of Tremors, The Extreme Self and The Age Of Earthquakes by Douglas Coupland and Room For Love of course.

Stop!  Look!   Listen!

@frasergeesin

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FAIR WARNING: THIS POST IS PROBABLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK UNLESS YOU ARE CURRENTLY WORKING FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM

When it comes to the space between desire and action in these comics, the only thing that speaks as loud as money is its absence.  Okay, that’s not quite right, the presence of the devil also speaks pretty clearly in some of these stories, but we’ll get back to those stray shadows in a minute.  Right now I want to talk about a certain kind of freedom.  Right now I want to talk about what’s going on in all those rooms.

When money first makes itself known in the Locas stories, it’s distorting life elsewhere, in another country – and well, you know how that story goes.  The fact that Penny Century is introduced in this same story is almost certainly coincidental – Hernandez was still finding his way at that point, after all – but it doesn’t feel that way when you look back on these early scenes.  Penny’s brand of expressive, ultra-femme fantasy will be synonymous with questions of money and power book throughout its run.  Here as elsewhere she is not necessarily the source of this influence, but she knows where it is and where she hopes it might take her.

Before Maggie the Mechanic has closed out, Maggie has come home to Californian poverty and life with her punk pals.  Money is now something that lives with Penny, away in the labyrinthine halls of H.R. Costigan’s house:

Despite the horns, Costigan isn’t the devil but like I said, we’ll get there eventually…

Back in my first post on Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, I made a passing reference to the way these earliest tales frame their science fiction and fantasy tropes by making them part of something that happens “over there”, and noted that Gilbert abandoned this specific bank of imagery when he stopped making use of “careless tribal tropes”.  Let’s unpack that a little.

While they never go full Tintin, the early Mechanics stories still make use of some of the tropes of those old adventure comics.  There is a pastiched exoticism to these stories, a sense of that we are looking at something familiar through outsider’s eyes.  This is as apparent in the tribal masks, wooden huts that smell of “kaka” and bewildered locals as it is in the deployment of romance comics tropes – the main love interest is a square-jawed, ultra capable hunk called Rand Race, c’mon!

This ironic distance will develop into something more nuanced in later stories, as I’ve already argued in Keep Your Distance #1, but there’s reason to be wary of its deployment here.  At this stage in the narrative Hernandez is largely just replicating these tropes and setting them in contract to his characters’ home lives, and… well, when I mentioned the science fiction elements of the story happening “over there”, this sort of casual distance from the reality of other lives was implied in the framing, right?

We’re talking about a postcard composed almost entirely of second-hand, othering cliches here, a world that exists purely as backdrop to Maggie’s story:

It’s not always great.

One of the most quietly compelling aspects of these early experiments in genre is the way they foreground the distorting effects of money, how much chaos extractionist living creates in places we (which “we”?) don’t truly believe in.  It’s just a shame that these early stories don’t make any efforts to convince us of the reality of “over there” along the way.

A curious addendum to all of the above comes in the form of the strip Jaime Hernandez drew for the New York Times,  ‘La Maggie La Loca’, which revisits these old adventures with tired eyes and asks what might be implied by them.  Rena Titanion, a wrestling legend and adventurer when we first met her, is now retired and living in isolation on “some remote island”.  The story frames her status as a figurehead for “upheaval and revolt” in Latin America as being liberatory, but by this stage in the game enough of a sense of reality has crept in to acknowledge that you could never trust that everyone else would agree with this assessment.

More importantly, the story reunites Maggie with Tse Tse, who appeared in these early stories as an unreconstructed innocent – another sampled cliche, basically.  It’s not just that ‘La Maggie La Loca’ shows Tse Tse as a successful woman with a career that lets her travel the world on her own terms, it’s that in doing so it suggests a novel tension.

Is Tse Tse an old friend who’s come to visit Maggie, or is Maggie a fondly remembered guest in the new Tse Tse comic?  The narration points one way but the other story seems plausible despite the burden of learned perspective.

The islanders Maggie interacts with have a jaggedness to them that is equally convincing, and the idea that the island itself might serve as a background to an outsider’s story is explored with double-edged irony:

You see during this particular reunion Rena thinks everyone’s living in her story, while Maggie is convinced they’re all stuck in their own.  Neither of these perspectives matches what we see in the comic itself – that narration again! – but the easy acknowledgement of these difficulties is yet another distance travelled in these pages.

Another thing about ‘La Maggie La Loca’…

Here’s the 2nd episode of STAR RIDER!  Will you telephone Andre Yeats?  Will your relationship with Richard deepen?  Will you finally get a bloody drink?!  Find out here!

This was previously only available to members of C-Unit, the crack team of special elite laser force warriors who fund the SILENCE! Channel on Patreon.

Series one has ended and Dan and Fraser are now onto book two, Riddle Of The Runaway.  If you’d like to catch up on what has turned out to be the most fun Dan and Fraser have had in ages, you know where to go and what to do.

Normal SILENCE! should descend soon, thank you for your patience.