Mindless Ones

About fifteen years ago, I had the idea to write a comic script about a shapeshifting superhero, and in particular to have that superhero be trans. Perhaps they could be one gender in their secret identity, and another as their superhero identity?

Thankfully, a trans friend quickly persuaded me that this would be a really, really, really bad idea and that I should instead not do that, and do literally anything else instead, because I am a cis man, and I’d have ended up writing the most grossly offensive thing possible, in the name of “dealing with the issues” and performative allyship.

However, I’ve been very surprised that in the intervening years, especially with gender being an increasingly controversial topic, no-one in the superhero comics world has decided to do exactly that, or something very like it. It’s all too easy to imagine the angry twitterstorms as some cis man called Mark or Nick attacks all the “trolls” who “abuse” him by asking him “why are you doing this bad thing?”

Thankfully, we now have the first serious attempt to present a trans superhero, and rather than being that kind of hateful pseudo-wokeness, it’s actually rather good.

First, an apology that this post is so much later than the first six. Sadly, I had an arthritis flare-up that made it painful for me to type more than a sentence or two at a time, and which also made me too fatigued to even think for more than a week. The perils of chronic illness.

Still, my hands are working – more or less – now, so let’s have a look at the most-loved story (or to hear many people talk, the only loved story) of season twenty-two.

While widely reviled as one of the worst things Doctor Who ever broadcast, Timelash is in fact a masterpiece of postmodern avant-garde art…

OK…OK…clearly given that it’s now a week since I said these essays would be going up one a day for a week, and this is only the fifth essay, I may have overestimated my own ability. If only I could go back and talk to my past self and warn him of this…

Before we start, a quick apology – I didn’t get to write a piece yesterday as I had planned. I tried to go to sleep on Thursday night, but just couldn’t – I ended up finally sleeping from about 9:30AM on Friday, and that for only three or four hours. Almost as if someone had extracted the chemical that promotes sleep from my brain…

This is a difficult one to write about, in two different ways.

Doctor Who season twenty-two is not, as we saw in the previous essay, a particularly loved season, and its opener is no exception. It’s one of the most reviled Doctor Who stories ever, and in my opinion unfairly so.

It’s Doctor Who week here on mindlessones.com. Specifically, it’s Doctor Who Season 22 week.

While I was preparing my piece on 2000AD‘s fortieth anniversary, I was reading through the new edition of Thrill-Power Overload, the history of 2000AD (a genuinely excellent book, incidentally – far more willing to criticise the comic and its publishers than you’d expect from an official celebration), and I came across what may be the wrongest thing Grant Morrison (a man who I admire hugely as a writer, but who has made more than his share of wrong statements) has ever said:
“at least Batman also has Bruce Wayne, giving him all of two dimensions. Dredd is just Dredd. I think the character is now as relevant to the new century as Dan Dare was to the 1970s.”