Mindless Ones

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 Spare 5. 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…“

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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

Read the rest of this entry »

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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