Mindless Ones

Guitar/bass/effects/vocals: Guisers, Even Sisters, Blue Kanues… fukken hunners of bands, honestly (see below). You can enjoy Isobel’s patter here, and support her on the Vivarium Sounds Patreon or by trading cash for local sonics on Bandcamp. 

What are the best sounds you’ve made?

The stuff I’m doing in my band Blue Kanues each time we play together. No matter what song I bring to practice, the three of them Hannah, Laura and Mattie all come up with the most beautiful parts. We are going to record an album and will be playing a Glasgow show at the end of June (UPDATE: June 27th at Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, gig fans! – Ed).

What are the best sounds you’ve heard?

The best sounds I have ever heard was deep in Hangasjarvi when I lay down in the what seemed to be quiet forest and then after a few moments of silence there was sound coming at me from every direction.

What can you tell us about East Kilbride? 

Coming from Motherwell, East Kilbride seemed quite fancy when i would visit my uncle as a kid and when I was a bit older I played in bands there with my cousin and his pals and smoked a lot of hash with old punks and hippies and bams and listened to all the music they would play me, a lot of which was terrible but among the dross was stuff that really encouraged me to play more music

What can you say about Glasgow?

Glasgow is where I live just now. I like walking up to the flagpole in Queens Park and try and get up there to see the nick of the central belt every day. The buses are extortionate.

You’ve got a track called ‘Target: 2006‘. Which Transformers are best and why?

Target 2006 was the first big story in the UK comics after Dinobot Hunt for me. I remember reading it all before the movie came out so knew who Galvatron was in advance. My favorite Transformer is probably Ratchet. I had the wee toy of him and thought he looked really cool and then saw that the comic and cartoon representation of him was quite different to the toy. I really liked him sneaking about the Ark and recovering the Dinobots and then later the horror of him being merged with Megatron. Great cunt.

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a few things. The Blue Kanues album is the main focus but I also play bass in a band called Life with Laura who plays guitar in the Kanues. I just recorded a black metal record with Laura and it will be getting mastered and mixed by Robert Dallas Gray and we are going to look at having it come out as a physical thing. The band is called Spring and the record’s name is Forth.

I walk around with a microphone and make noises for Even Sisters with Robert. I do a band with my bf called The Loaning where we have been filling up cassettes with jams and field recordings all made on a portable wee fisher price cassette recorder. I have a country band called OPULENCE who plan to play one gig and record an album.

I’m also working away on a lot of songs I have been recording on my phone and then overdubbing on a 4 track and there are close to 30 songs on it. I keep playing guitar and bass, either or both every day.

From secret staging grounds on two of Cybertron’s moons, the valiant MINDLESS ONES prepare to draft some short comics reviews…

Metamorpho: The Element Man #5 – Steve Lieber (art), Al Ewing (script), Lee Loughridge (colours), Ferran Delgago (letters)

Issue after issue, Ewing and Lieber find new ways to turn the language of groovy “educational” comics into an invitation to play. My favourite individual example of this so far is in issue #3, a two page spread drawn like a maze puzzle for kids/timefuct beatniks, with inserts showing our heroes blundering through a series of traditional perils.

Without this fundamental conceit, and its perfect extension of “a solid chromium foot… one of the hardest substances in the human body” into a bespoke absurdist aesthetic, some of this comic’s barbs against “A.I.” would have felt like mere prompts for applause. As it is, they’re of a piece with the Mad Mod’s monologues, or this issue’s grand duel between solar avatars – carefully arranged incongruities set in opposition to the banal ones our culture is producing en masse.

Resistance is all about finding the space in between the circuits, you see. Easier for Element Woman and Andor than you or me, but don’t let that stop you trying, Metamaniacs!

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Annual 2025 – Dan McDaid (art), Christopher Cantwell (script), Mark Waid (story), John Kalisz (colours), Steve Wands (letters), Dan Mora (cover)

Let me pay this comic one of the highest compliments I know: having read it, I don’t need to read any of the other issues in this series. This despite the issue in question being part 3 of a 6 part crossover between this comic and Justice League Unlimited. Writing an entertaining single issue under these conditions is a distinct formal challenge, and Cantwell and Waid have a lot of fun with it here, loading up a villainous plan with a twist that is both skilfully foreshadowed and compelling in its own right.

Artist and friend of the blog Dan McDaid has been doing some great work over at DC comics lately, finishing up extended runs on Kneel Before Zod (with Joe Casey) and Shazam! (with Josie Campbell). Zod provided plenty of opportunities for McDaid to flex his big boy drawing arm while depicting rugged action against a series of classic sci-fi landscapes. Shazam, meanwhile, showed that he could provide moments of formal play and true menace in an otherwise amiable fantasy.

This World’s Finest annual is all about the villains, though, and its chief appeal – beyond the old school comics writing craft mentioned above – is the amount of fun McDaid has drawing these goons. My favourite moment comes in this panel, where Bizarro, Cheetah, Lex and the Joker contemplate their own dark futures.

I don’t know which detail I’m most fond of here, Bizarro looking like he am no shat his pants, Lex and Cheetah’s duelling eyebrows, or the Joker’s stream of consciousness slowing to a trickle as he doubts his life choices and the company he keeps.

The annual is full of wee bits like this. Plastic Man swamping the villains and the page itself; a fun collision between Superman and Bizarro; some impeccable disdain from Lex. The art of providing familiar pleasures is easy to underrate until you realise how seldom it’s done well.

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Issue six of our weekly newsletter went out early this morning, ft: Andor; The Blob; The Black Casebook; Andrew & Steven; Suede; PAAI; and Ray Vaughn.

This edition was put together by The Beast Must Die, Bobsy, Botswana Beast, Dan Cox, Gary Lactus, Illogical Volume and others. Previous issues have also featured work by Ad, Andrew Hickey and Paul Jon Milne. As Tegan O’Neil said, “Y’all need to pay attention whenever the Mindless Ones speak…“

ITEM

Tell just one person that you liked our newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

Best Batpod or bestest Batpod? You can support Walt on Patreon, or by getting your own rubber Batsuit made up and joining him as he patrols the city at night. 

You bring a lot of different theoretical approaches to comics in your show. Can you remember the first comic book that got your brain fizzing like that?

I first got into comics when I was in middle school thanks to an online friend with an FTP, so like any teenaged boy in the Aughts I gravitated toward comics with “Hell” in the name. It would be years before I understood the nuances of Mignola’s inking or why the Brits hated Maggie Thatcher so much, but the blend of folklore, pulp, history, and the occult in both Hellboy and Hellblazer instantly enchanted me.

(I’ll never forget reading the Newcastle issue of Hellblazer around the same time that I was first assigned Hamlet in school, seeing the demon say “Get thee to a nunnery,” and realizing that there was no inherent divide between fine literature and disreputable comic books.)

Was The Black Casebook always conceived of as a podcast?

Yep! It was inspired directly by my college buddy Nat Yonce’s show Collective Action Comics and Connor Goldsmith’s X-Men podcast CEREBRO, both of which I was listening to obsessively in 2021. Quietly fuming whenever Nat (playfully) slandered Batman had already given me the idea to do my own Batman podcast to correct the record, and when Nat reached out to have me do a guest episode about the politics of Batman—including fronting me the cash to buy a decent mic—my path was set. I finished recording my first episode directly after that interview. Blame him!

You’ve crossed over with Collective Action Comics, but do you feel part of much of a scene with other people talking about the form? 

I do, thankfully. Nat immediately welcomed me into his circle of lefty comics fans; Cole, Stu, and Nicole of the Marvelous! Or: The Death of Cinema podcast welcomed me into their MCU opposition movement; and more established writers like you Mindless Ones and Travis Hedge Coke welcomed me into the ranks of comics critics who like to do more than summarize new issues. I don’t know if it constitutes a scene, exactly, but I’ve been fortunate to join the somehow-not-insignificant quorum of Marxist comics fans on the internet. (Deniz Camp is actually a tulpa we summoned into existence a few years back—that was a fun afternoon.)

I’d like to get to know more folks in the industry itself, but I also don’t want to pull any punches for the sake of preserving connections or advancing my own career, such as it is. I never want to be in a situation where I have to tiptoe around, say, Tom King’s feelings in order to maintain access to writers and artists I admire.

Top 5 Bat artists? 

(Honorable mentions: Matt Wagner, Marshall Rogers, Paul Pope, Frank Miller)

5. Norm Breyfogle

4. Greg Capullo

3. Tim Sale

2. Darwyn Cooke

1. David Mazzucchelli

Top 5 Bat writers?

(Honorable mentions: Steve Englehart, Archie Goodwin, Alan Grant, Paul Dini) 

5. Peter Milligan

4. Scott Snyder

3. Darwyn Cooke

2. Frank Miller

1. Grant Morrison

What’s next for The Black Casebook?

More episodes, God willing. 2024 was my Rick Wakeman iridescent cape era of unsustainably long, self-indulgent episodes, so I’ve been trying to figure out ways to get the show back down to a manageable length (and more satisfying release schedule). I’ve learned by now not to promise too much, but I do hope to incorporate more interviews and guest episodes so as not to deprive my beloved listeners. I’m also working on some creative projects where I can, but those are, to quote my friend Sid Hudgens, off the record, on the QT, and *very* hush-hush.

Finally, if you had to fight any Batman villain who would it be?

The Riddler. I’m not sure I could take him, but I’d love the opportunity to find out.

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A HARE CALLED LUCIFER!

The Drifting Reviewniverse gifts The Beast Must Die, Lord Nuneaton Savage and a rather muffled Gary Lactus the hands down, straight up, no word of a lie best comic so far in this chance-led odyssey, Batman and the Outsiders #8. The fearless reviewmonauts pour over every page until they run out of time. Part 2 is already on our Patreon.

Find Lord Nuneaton Savage on Instagram and on the Savage Beast Substack

Enjoy The Beast Must Die on his website

Gary Lactus also exists

Click more for gallery

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Guitar/not guitar: Life Without Buildings, Whin, Guisers, Even Sisters. His latest solo album, The Vallum, is released 20th June 2025.

What have you learned about making music since Life Without Buildings finished?

There’s a few different ways I could answer that. I was talking to a friend who’s a visual artist a while ago. He had stopped making art for a while, and I’d stopped making music for quite a long time, and we both found that when we stopped making things we went a bit mad. And so he was sort of forced back into making stuff, and in a way that helped with things like impostor syndrome, because he had the excuse that he had to make stuff or his mental health went down the pan. And it was a bit the same for me, I discovered I was actually just a lot more healthy when I was making music. I’d filled the hole with other stuff but it wasn’t really working.

In more practical terms, over the years I’d tried various times to get music theory to stick. I’m a typical guitarist, completely self-taught and I only had the most basic theory necessary to communicate to other self-taught musicians – you know, ‘play E here’ or whatever. So the Lwb stuff comes out of that post-punk tradition, which I think is a very rich thing where musicians really invented their own ways of playing.

But at certain times I’d found that to be a bit limiting – you tend to sort of plateau and start boring yourself. And I’d started to listen to a lot of jazz, and to want to understand more about it. I particularly wanted to understand how harmony works – how chord progressions are built, that sort of thing – so I started reading a bit about jazz harmony for the guitar. And quite quickly I came across these things called shell chords, which are sort of cut-down chords with just what you need to play rhythm over a band, like two or three notes. And the shapes were really really similar to a lot of the stuff I’d been playing in Lwb (although I used open strings to make sort of ringing drones alongside the notes that created the harmonic movement). So that was a route into understanding a bit of music theory, and from there I was able to build on that and develop a more confident understanding of what I was doing, what approaches I could take, how to teach myself stuff when I got bored. That’s been the major change I think, that’s most affected how I play and approach music.

A few years down the line, how do you feel about Lwb’s ‘The Leanover’ having its TikTok moment? 

Well in part it helped to buy the equipment I used to make the more recent records, so I’m grateful for that! But it was nice, it coincided with the 20th anniversary of the record, so there was a bit of press and stuff. I think the nicest thing was what Sue said about it: at the time Lwb were active, the music press and really the whole scene was very male-dominated. Sue got a fair bit of stick, and we got bored to death with people comparing her to Björk and Clare Grogan, as if the salient feature of what she did was that she had a high voice, you know. But for Sue, who has a teenage daughter, to see young women taking control of a piece of work she’d made and using it as a tool for self-expression was I think really nice for her, maybe even changed how she’d thought about the whole experience.

What’s been the most surprising thing about your more recent collaborations in Whin, Guisers and Even Sisters?

Really just that collaboration can be such an enormous joy. I remember when we were doing the Whin track ‘Kris‘, very early on, we thought it needed something else and I asked my friend Fritz Welch, who is a percussionist and improviser, to contribute something and he sent us this absolutely incredible percussion track. I was literally jumping about the room with joy when I heard it. That’s happened a lot with Whin – we’ve used other musicians a lot, especially a guy called Craig Mulholland I know who’s a visual artist but as obsessed with music as we are. He’s contributed a lot of amazing synth parts; he’s always quite nervous about it because he has no musical training at all, but they’re always amazing. He also produced the Guisers version of Patti Smith Group’s ‘Easter’, which I absolutely love.

The core of Guisers is me and Isobel McKenna, who’s also my bandmate in Even Sisters, which is a very purely collaborative thing and can be really exhilarating when it takes off.

This is maybe a bit tangential, but there was a sort of ‘aha’ moment in Whin when we played the track ‘Morning‘ together. I’d never considered myself a good enough musician to improvise with other players, but I’d sort of realised that even if I didn’t have a lot of control over melody, harmony etc, I could control things like touch, pacing, timbre. And that opened up the more directly collaborative stuff, like Even Sisters (even though I don’t play guitar in that project). 

You’ve talked before about playing music as meditation – can you say more about the sort of space you’re trying to create?

I should say I’ve never done any sort of ‘formal’ meditation, so I don’t want to be presumptuous. I mean meditation in a couple of senses: one in that particular pieces quite often start as sort of meditations on something, a chord structure or a little melody; and two that the experience of music both as a listener and a musician has always been about that feeling of being ‘inside’ it, for me. So that’s what I’m chasing, really – can I disappear into what I’m playing, be emotionally moved by it, be carried along. So I suppose that’s the kind of landscape I’m trying to create for listeners – something immersive, deep, involving. 

It’s harder to talk about, but there is a sort of devotional, sacramental aspect to it as well. There’s a moment at the beginning of Mark Hollis’s solo record that I’ve spoken about before – about 20 seconds of silence where he’s just … preparing, I guess. And that feels really important to me, that you would be mentally, spiritually preparing yourself to engage in a sacramental act. I think that came out in at least a couple of tracks on The Vallum –  a devotional aspect, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious.

I don’t always want that though, of course! Once I’d finished mastering the new record I’d pretty much had as much Serious Music as I could take and I just wanted to listen to really lightweight, fun stuff for a while.

How does your new album, The Vallum, develop your approach? 

There are technical developments, in that I’ve got more confident in my playing, and that I have a beautiful amp that my Whin bandmate Martin Henry built for me (in the chassis of the Fender Concert that I used in Lwb). So I think there’s a bit more power and assertiveness in the sounds and the playing. There are also overdubs on almost every track – there’s only one ‘solo’ guitar track. I got a Hohner Pianet and a Yamaha YC20 combo organ and they’re used a lot on the record, rather than the VST instruments that I used for the overdubs on The Rain Room; there’s something really attractive about playing and recording real, old instruments. I also got a 1962 Dynachord tape echo, so that’s on there a fair bit as well.

Other than that I think it shakes out quite similarly in terms of the shape and content, but it’s sort of taken further in each direction: there are quite highly-worked things and then things which are very pure performance on The Rain Room, but on The Vallum that equates to something like the track ‘Spiral’, which is very long, very worked-out, lots of overdubs, and then something like ‘Witch’, which is about as pure a performance piece as you can get, almost a Fluxus thing really.

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AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT MEANINGLESS UNTIL I REALISED YOU WERE SERIOUS

The drifting Reviewniverse brings Gary Lactus, Al To Astonish and His Bleak Majesty Douglas Noble in close contact with Ex-Mutants #3 (vol. 2) from Malibu, 1993. Synergy! Action sass! Batteries! Bottoms! Dive in!

Find Al To Astonish on Bluesky and at House To Astonish

Find His Bleak Majesty Douglas Noble HERE

Bother Gary Lactus HERE

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