Mindless Ones

A bit battered, spine ripped right off, but still – 44 years of existence, mine for a mere seventy-five pee.

Batman Annual 1967.

It’s all reprint, but the cover looks like original art commissioned in the UK – check the oddly Blyton-esque Robin, a schoolkid larking about like he’s in an infinitely cosy boys comic of the day, or an underage soldier, meat for the melodrama of a WWII book. Check Batman, smiley of face and cheeky of chin, with a prop-forward’s physique.

Let’s look at that again…

Bryan Talbot creates Alan Moore, from Brainstorm Comix #1, 1975

Cheers to the Keeshman for the gimme.

bobsy: My own and only objection to how Batman Incorporated is proceeding, amidst so far a hat-trick of rapid high impact 21st century superhero comics, is the slight familiarity of the beats as the overarching story begins to emerge. Though it wasn’t to be expected, more refreshing and radical than those ominous bell-notes as the latest cosmic conspiracy begins to emerge from the murk would be a comic that stands entirely on its own, 22 or whatever pages of unencumbered violence and costumes, a purity of blank abstracted spectacle that doesn’t even pretend to that common fallacy: that a wider world exists beyond the totality of its stapled covers.

Minor quibble best dispensed with early. This was a fun issue, and in the so-far absence of Annotations Goddess Uzi Mary, la belle annotateur sans merci, a few pages in particular require a closer look.

Click to find out why three pages of BatMinc3 are better than six issues of Knight & Squire

A Tuesday review of Rumble Strip by Woodrow Phoenix, Myriad Books, 2008

It doesn’t seem so obvious until you start reading this book, but the visual language of roads, the set of consensual signifiers that give punctuation and meaning to the otherwise meaningless grey expanses, the easy-to-read fluency of the roadsigns and road-markings, the minimalist and directly unambiguous design principles they adhere to – are an almost too-perfect subject for interrogation via the comicbook medium. When Rumble Strip starts to accelerate, a few pages in, and the road and its cluster of accepted meanings start to vanish in the distance ahead of you, before their inevitable return, renewed and redefined, permanently mutated… You realise Kerouac, Ballard, Kraftwerk – if they had really wanted to nail this thing down, they should have been doing comiks. And they should, impossibly, have done them as well as Woodrow Phoenix.

Crash here to read on

• Phonogram Book Two: The Singles Club #7. By Keiron Gillen, Jamie Mckelvie, and Matt Wilson.

• Getting this post done is probably the only New Year’s Resolution I will stick to. Shame then that I haven’t, crucially you might think, thought of anything good to say or interesting to add* to the established critical consensus, let alone a structured, witty overview, analysis and pithy summation of Phonogram. (Which was a great, perfectly imperfect comic that lived in the zeroes and died in 2010, and whose passing should be marked.)

• In the absence of trifling little entities like Form and Content, we will therefore be going with the randomish bulletpoints format again, fire up a few bad jokes, misapplied anecdotes, predictable gimmicks, attic junk, and creepy sextalk, and see if anyone makes it to the end.

• There’s not a prize or anything.

• *Like really I haven’t, this comic’s been out for so long, it’s pathetic I haven’t thought of anything good to say about it by now. But we proceed – Singer’s Law be hanged bedad!

• Oh but, I’ve just read it back to myself and by god this is probably the most annoying, which is to say @@nnnnyyoyyyeeeeiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnng, review of a sweet, innocent little comic book that you will have ever read, so if you’ve the guts to go on, be warned – it gets a little unreadable out there.

But will I get it done by Xmas Eve, Eve?

Shit me

‘Wearing this wig reminds me that if Kane is Batwoman, she must wear one too.’

Oh right, that’s interesting Bruce, because seeing you in that perm-wig (and accompanying IT salesman goat-beard), that absurdist eurobaddie nightmare of a disguise, has made me remember – love you, missed you, glad you’re back alive and all that – remember just what a massively weird bloke you are.

‘Syrup of Fig’

Marineman #1 by Ian Churchill (Image)
Splash

As part of our commitment to ensuring nothing that occurs on this blog could ever be construed as ‘journalism’, what follows is a scrambled and unattributed sample of snippets – only very slightly tweaked to make a semblance of sense – of recent backroom chatter by all (or nearly all) the Mindless Ones on Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ recent cockpunk horrorbook Neonomicon #2. Some extracts may be recognised from other websites and/or previous publications.  Nothing agrees with anything. All opinions are rubbish.

“By refusing to exclude rape from his depictions of violence and power in action in my view Moore is fulfilling an important function. While ninety nine percent of popular fictions are happy to present us with a picture of violence that excludes most of the troubling bits, a violence that is fundamentally fun and entertaining, Moore is prepared to go to much more uncomfortable places and thank God.”

Putative primal ‘innocence’ hopelessly bespoiled by the vile means-of-production that have oppressed Moore so awfully all these years

YOU WILL NEED:  Card, scissors, all that shit, a rainy afternoon with fuck all else to do, and a shitload of blutac to make the cunt stand up.