Mindless Ones

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Download our LOEG Century 1910 annocommentations (pdf)
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Part 2, Part 3

Interview with Kevin O’Neill here

Zom: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with its backstreets of reader memory, association and personal experience, along with its grand shared-universe vistas, is a sprawling city of a fiction, and as such actively encourages our meandering annocomments. Expect a few references, yes, but also commentary, meditations, criticism and reminiscence.

So pull down the seat in mindless hackney cab, guv, and prepare for a long, strange ride.

Part 1 of our Century 1969 annocomments over the jump

How could he be the Judge? Him of all people? His face! the acid! Terrible disfigurement!

If a Judge Dent was possible, then in this crazy upside down world anything was.

But it didn’t stop there.

This time – oh noooooes- we UPSET THE LEGACY.

Before we get into this.

Zom constantly upbraids me for caring about such things, but I’m just too irritated by the internet’s monthly refrain of  ‘it was too all over the place’, often followed by ‘it was too hard to understand’ not to have a moan. It’s almost the stock criticism of Morrison these days and it’s simply a question of who will be uttering it this time around. One month someone over here is complaining that the writing is too ‘scattershot’ and dense while over here someone else is defending the comic as a shining example of Morrison at his most accessible, and the next the roles are reversed, a tango unto death. I say balls! to this and hereby usher in the long overdue Age of The Three Rereads. From now on no one is allowed to utter the words ‘hard to follow’, ‘confusing’, ‘unrelated plots’ or the like without having read the comic three times. We all know it takes a while for the massive info-dump to settle, so it’s only fair we behave accordingly and give the comic room to breathe after a breathless first hit. Obviously this rule doesn’t apply if you’re a casual reader, but critics owe it to themselves and their readership. My general feeling is that the tonal shifting and fizzing ideas add to the reading experience, creating contrasts, generating depth and a sense of length and substance. And isn’t this super important in the case of a twenty page comic (not that this one is, mind)? It’s not density and narrative commotion I’m concerned about, but slightness, and although you can’t fashion positives out of negatives it’s hugely refreshing for me that Morrison’s books never suffer from this problem.

Sure, it’s not as simple and streamlined as Inc’s first two issues, but just to be clear, this comic, inspite of some of the negative press out there, isn’t very hard to understand and will be remembered fondly. I’d hate to be a critic of DC comics generally, I really would. There really is no comparison between a book like this and most of the crap that gets produced. The measure of its goodness is completely different and an undifferentiated grading system that doesn’t take this into account is just nonsense.

So there.

Running this oldie again in the wake the Morrison making reference to it at SDC

Right, offline in the real world, I occasionally enjoy a pint with Bulk Meat. The Meat, incidentally, hates his name and to be honest we never call him it to his face anymore – the man’s a father, a successful careerist (tho’ no-one understands exactly what it is that he does, except for Zac Goldsmith), fiercely intelligent and handsome, etc., etc., blah – and to continue to do so would be churlish at best. But in my heart of hearts, I still understand him as one of those massive slabs of pig bashed around by sound effects artists in the 70’s and Scott Walker in the recording studio. For he is, amongst my scrawnier-than-a-Face-model-in-the-nineties but slightly pot-bellied friends, absurdly stacked.

More after the jump

In no particular order.

1.

Some of this stuff came out last year, but only an anally retentive comics fan would care about something like that.

In which I throw up some random, barely organised/edited thoughts about a couple of comics I think you might’ve read.

Here’s a few thoughts. Not many. Not enough time this week

‘thing is, i know we at mindless ones don’t really feel the need to justify these things or to bother kicking the argument about the way they might at, say, funnybook babylon, but i think the answer to the question ‘does bruce wayne work in cosmic scenarios? – in this PARTICULAR cosmic scenario?’ and the conversation one could have around it is probably an interesting one.

for geeks.’

But that’s okay, we know a few. And this is their home

What follows is probably incredibly obvious to anyone who’s been reading Morrison’s recent Batman and DC stuff and is familiar with Morrison’s obsessions generally, but I think someone needs to get this down and explain everything already. Here goes.