Mindless Ones

Writer, The Wicked + The Divine (with Jamie McKelvie, 2014 – 2019), We Called Them Giants (with Stephanie Hans, 2024), The Power Fantasy (with Caspar Wijngaard, 2024 – present). Also writes a mean newsletter (not the kind that hurts your feelings), sometimes even talks about games.

Tell us about power.

Power is a fantasy.

Tell us about fantasy.

Fantasy is power.

I sometimes wonder what my career would look like if I just was happy to just release gnomic statements into the world and wasn’t addicted to trying to communicate with people. I suspect “I’d have more free time” instead of indulging my hypergraphic bullshit. Seriously, I was going to download a ridiculous amount of stuff in the microinterview before deciding that, no, Kieron, it’s Microinterview. Understand the brief. 

To actually answer the question, Power is the ability to make reality align with your preference. As such, all power is suspect. A lot of my work has circled back to the soft power of art, specifically to be suspicious about it – writing stories about stories fucking us up, writing the equivalent of the warnings on cigarette packets. I’ve concentrated on that aspect of power as it’s my neck of the woods – but also as it’s the one which is the first, necessary step to any other abuse of power. One needs to tell themselves a good story to be happy to kill someone. The power of art is to aim the gun of most other forms of power. 

I like to look at Fantasy through the lens of one of my pet theories – that art has no biological purpose and is just an epiphenomenon (or even a bug) of what nature’s given us. So music is really just our brains having developed in a way which they respond to certain bits of sound (as there’s no evolutionary pressure not to). Music is just hacking the brain with noise. Similarly, fantasy is an extension of the brain’s ability to imagine possible futures. Evolution gave us the ability to imagine where that wolf may be hiding in the dark. We use it to imagine what it is to be someone else. Pratchett said that fantasy was “almost a sea in which other genres swim” and I think (at least today) I’d go further – all fiction is fantasy, and capital-F fantasy is a sub-genre of that wider thrust. If you’re making shit up, you’re all playing the same game – it’s all just fantasy. And if Fantasy is also how we get stories, it’s also how how we create the things which point the guns in the previous paragraph. Fantasy is how we direct power. 

Fantasy is also a word I’m not great at pronouncing, apparently. There was this amazing interview I did, which was transcribed and every “fantasy” was written as “fancy”, so full of things like “Over time, I’ve realised with some embarrassment I’m a fancy writer.” This is both funny and true.

Tell us about the future of humanity.

Short, unless we can sort out this whole fantasy/power thing.

Tell us about your grandest of grand designs.

Heh. I just deleted about 1000 words. Look at me, editing.  

The short is: my ambition is, perhaps, to be less ambitious. WicDiv was meant to kill that asshole, and maybe it worked. Weirder and more intense is the opposite of ambitious, fired through my filter, btw – ambition implies an external world or audience who you are trying to influence directly rather than as a byproduct. Power. Fuck power. I certainly feel after WicDiv I have less to prove, which means the work is more relaxed – and probably better for it.

But I am aware that what I’m doing isn’t forever. I don’t work like that. I presently feel like I felt when I launched rock paper shotgun with my friends back in 2007 – I am half out the door, but I want to do something which genuinely helps the scene part of and still love before it becomes less core to my life. I spent 15 years  primarily  as a games critic, and I’ve just spent 15 years primarily as a comic writer. I’m 50 this year. 15-ish years to when I abstractly could retire (I won’t). As I’ve discovered twice over, you can do a lot in 15 years. I want to try and have a third act I found as interesting as the other two. 

So basically, my present goal is to try and leave comics in a better state than I found it (which is the reason I’m trying to do all the stuff I have been in terms of spotlighting folks work, etc) and then let it take a smaller part of my life and leave room for whatever else interests me. I have a few ideas.

In reality though: my dad died at 65. My grandest of grand designs is to live as long as I possibly can, as I have a daughter and I owe her every second.

Tell us about that guy Guy Debord.

Did you know he was a Game Designer? It’s the sort of thing I may get around to touching on in DIE. I’m certainly interested in all these figures who noodled with games on the side. I’ve just started reading a book on Surrealism at play, which opens with a Breton quote which talks about the quality that “stirred the hostility of idiots” being specifically that of play. Play is interesting. Game design is a way to make your fantasy more rigorous, to tests its assumptions, to make it live. 

I think you must have spotted me talking about Debord on the socials, which I was thinking about due to Morley’s book on Tony Wilson (which is a headfuck, in lots of ways – I still haven’t talked about the bit with me in it, as on some level I’m refusing to believe it). It’s been so long since I was the pretentious guy I was before I got into comics that I’d forgot the basis of some of my bullshit. Like anyone who read the music press (or was turned on by the bands herein) I was all over the Situationists, even if I was only taking the basic versions of their ideas explained herein (and practised by various bands and whatever), and then running with it. I mean, Situationists were namechecked when folks talked about the sleeve of Wannabe, right? They were everywhere, like slogans on the wall.

Situationist ideas  – the Spectacle – is one of the ones which is easy to catch and run with. The story which traps and distracts. I talk about Hickman’s work being about the Cage, which I think is the Hickmanian approach to a similar thing (how his stories are about structures of control while , at every chance he gets, does comics outside the paradigm of 32 page floppies with 20 pages of content? It’s the same thing, expressed thematically and formally. I digress.) The Spectacle is a good one to read about properly, but it’s also a modular atomic concept you can get and then run with. An idea small enough to be held in your hand, easy to throw and explosive – the opening of the Invisibles, basically.

One of my other theories was for kids like me, the music press were the liberal education we never got in school – all these namedrops you followed up on, and then realised that the Neitzche anyone quoted was the list of aphorisms, the cheats. You can see a certain strand of pop comic like that too, right? Invisibles as a gateway like the Manics or Public Enemy or whoever were. I’d like that.

I also, with my brain, used to always write “Situationalists” which is the sort of error which makes you know I’m autodidactic and fucking useless without an editor.