Mindless Ones

In anticipation of this week’s UK release of Prison Pit Book Two, the follow up to Johnny Ryan’s psychopathically nasty but much-loved and lauded 2009 bio-carnage fightfest, let’s take a closer look at one of the many striking and remarkable panels we were so luckily and unapologetically offered by Book One.

Click to enlarge, and then again to go close-up – it looks great all blown-up and backlit.

Yeah yeah, so he’s called Cannibal Fuckface not Bloodhead like I had guessed before. It’s nice becasue it means a the start when the guard calls him ‘Fuckface’ he’s not being abusive, just calling him by his surname. It’s the only non-abusive act in the book. Oh, and I guess the CF thing is a Nu-Action in-joke. Cheers guys, hilarious.

Clint was found, after a little befuddled craning and turning while doing that exaggerated ‘I am looking for something’ look, not beside the sci-fi/movie/comic mags that the cover tries to pass itself off as, but a whole shelf over, next to the lads mags and Madgadget Monthly. Is this a local thing, slip of shelfstacker’s wrist, or deliberate placement, on WHSmiths’ no-doubt nationally co-ordinated layout plans? This seemed at first like a straight up simple mistake – word with someone in sales, get it sorted for the next issue. But after a read of the Great British boys’ comic’s best last hope… maybe not so sure.

Comics has a right to children

Of course, neither myself nor anyone writing inside the walls of this blog are going to have a problem with nonsense, be it outright nonsense, stupid nonsense, or nonsense for nonsense’s sake. It’s a Marvel comic, nonsense is what it does best, and it is the best there is at what it does. But what about nonsense mad enough to think it’s Important? Or nonsense sane and brittle enough to knows it’s nonsense but try to pass itself off as Important? Are both of those things not high art crimes?

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Sinatoro: It’s a roadtrippy movie due for global release in 2012, written & directed by the team of Grant Morrison (we heart 4evs) and Adam Egypt Mortimer (video director bloke man).

It was announced just the other week at the San Diego Comic-Con with an emphasis on obviously how rad-awesome-skill it’s going to be, but also promises of how original new, innovative etc. the whole production is going to be, from promotion to the shoot to the DVD commentary no doubt. (We’ll do that by the way: exclusive superfan commentary by us for the Blu Ray 2-disc edition, yeah? Who could say no?) What this means for a no-cash indie flick like this is, inevitably, crowdsourced marketing with a viral twist. ‘X-Ray Cinema’ someone called it, not the next step on from 3D with added cancer risk, but referring presumably to the avowed full disclosure & transparency from the production team that we’re told will be part and parcel of the movie’s gestation.

Here are the basics, spreading linkmulch around like the finest organic man-manure:

Web: Sinatoro.com
Faceplace: Facebook.com/sinatoro
Twitter: Twitter.com/sinatoro

(Plenty links on those pages above to some interviews at IO9, CBR and other places, which we’ll no doubt be referring to a bit throughout this post, some of which go in to the movie in some depth, given how nascent the whole project still is. The total disclosure thing seems genuine at least, although time will tell if this approach has been wise – I still want the movie to surprise me, ‘know? Whatever, good for them because they’ve been busy, putting the word out there proactively, which hopefully means they have been able to find backers, rather than the reverse. [which it might! – Zom])

So far so un-unusual ho-hum…. ah, who’re we kidding? it would be easy, too easy to be sniffy about this shameless grab to keep their promo costs down, but come on: this is Grant Morrison and his chum –  our hearts were theirs years ago. We’re going to take them at their word: stick the accumulated Sinatoro stuff through the usual Mindless Ones Dot Com reading machine, and see what comes out the other side.

That’s right, we’re going to take a poster and some interviews and smoosh them together and pretend they’re worthy of the same kind of analysis as a fully formed and complete work of art! What of it? As a wise Montell once said: this is how we do it, fucko!

M is the British comic creator’s surname initial par excellence.

You are nine months into the nineties revival! Do not let these pamphlets decieve you!

Note how reassuring Wonder Woman is trying to be here. Unfortunately, as a royal demigoddess, she always trouble staying this side of patronising, and her apparently innocuous choice of words betrays the concern she’s trying so hard not to burden the room with. All the ‘Black Alert… End of Time… Resourceful Batman’ stuff is common enough for Monday night around the Justice League dinner table, but certain words give you an indication as to the social subtext of this meeting. Everything from her serious eyebrows to her deliberate use of reassuring, gently authoritative keywords (‘Officially… Naturally We Don’t Want To Alarm Anyone… But We All Know… We’ll Have To Assume…’) says one thing: Don’t let the children think they’re in charge.

Because honestly, these days Tim ‘Henman*’ Drake is the kind of guy it’s impossible not to patronise.

*See what I did there with the ‘Henman’ thing? It’s double clever of me, because obviously there’s the Tim Henman: Famous English Tennis Loser connection, but also Hen-Man, which is an appropriately stupid name for a spurned ex-sidekick needily clinging to pointless avian themes for his choice of grown-up supername, unintentionally demonstrating just how unsuccessfully he’s ‘moved on’ from the whole, y’know, ‘abandonment thing‘ thing…

THIS IS HOW IT’S GOING TO WORK. Plenty blather in recent weeks about the reactionary impulses at work in DC’s decision to get rid of all its Bronze (I call it ‘Early Dark’ but ‘whatever, Steve Trevor’)/Dark/Prismatic Age legacy heroes and replace them with the resurrected Silver Age versions, in a bid to placate the SEETHING, ever-chubbier fanman and his desire for everything to be just like it was when he was a child.

(Minus the constant stream of free electronic NUDITY, I’m guessing.)

[Please note we fully accept the non-existence of the Legion of EviL Fan-Men stereotype. With the cultural dominance of the superhero over the early 21st century very well secure, these arguments, these embarrassments, are very much a relic of another age, and performed here very much in the spirit of a historical battle re-enactment society (and don’t get me started on those losers, with their ‘going outside’ and ‘hanging around with other people’ and ‘getting some fun and healthy exercise’). The caricature is being deployed in the current post merely for cosmic effect, a convenient and pitiful rhetorical ghost to lazily lob some poor jokes and manufactured anger at. To reiterate: It’s just a bit of fun. I am as ill-shaven and portly as anyone, and as will become all too apparent my opinions on superheroes are both delinquently partial and barely worth the (very) spare calorie it takes to type them. With those caveats safely in place, read on, if you’ve got the arse for it.]

It’s a World Cup of superheroes old and new, minus the tournament aspect, or any relation to football. Still, using the words World Cup in a post has got to be OK for the Google rankings at the moment, eh readers?

Shield 2 by Jonathan Hickman & Michael Angelo

I was very headwrong when reading SHIELD 2 and my memory of the first issue had been totally erased. I thought it was great, the height of pointless shouting and cosmo-drama in the Mighty Marvel Manner. It made no sense whatsoever to me but the scope of the action and the renaissance era Kirby design, all worked very well to leave me thrilled and confused. It was well mental though. A more sober reread last night made the whole thing seem a bit boring and studied. The NY kid was no longer a translucent standin for the universal recipient freak radioactive accident that used to empower us so, but a Parker clone (not literally) whose dad did something awful and amazing once. I remembered that the MIBs were Tony Stark and Reed Richards’ dads, which is crap (whatever happened to the Mighty Marvel Meritocracy? Why am I reading about aristocratic lineages? It’s un-American, da mit!)

Nemesis 2 by Millar & McNiven

I take back my recent sniffiness on this one. The action scenes were basically perfect, the straightforward stacks of widescreen panels hiding an octopoidal magpie at the heart of the story, reaching out from the panel borders into movies and manga to snag and squeeze their best bits dry. I still think the seam of ‘politico/economic consequences of the president’s kidnap’ would be a good thing to work into it – ‘Nemesis brings world to its knees’ kinda thing… A few screaming headlines or talky-head TV screens would ground it all a bit more, though in turn they might distract from the guilty, gleeful joy that this comic runs on – the bits with the main characters going ’Aha, I fooled you!/’No, I fooled you/’No, I foooooo’ etc., the tacit acknowledgement and disregard for the manufactured falseness of these narratalogical shifts, were priceless. I am already thinking of an excuse to drag the wife to watch Nemesis at the movies, and am already thinking about what I will say when the credits roll. ‘The action was a lot tighter in the comic…’

Pnshrmx 9 by Aaron & Dillon

Panmox was good – no fight, no big fight anyway, but it does have a nice dramatic pace nevertheless, and the plotting is so freaky and over-the-top that the pages almost seem to turn themselves. Good, tense scenes of Frank going too far, the Kingpin battling his deadliest enemy, and a never-better Bullseye messing with the freaky violence mojo (it looks likes like he’s kind of inviting the Punisher-spirit from Born to take up residence, which is probably not a smart move on his part.) The feeling is beginning to seep in that Aaron’s wilder, splattery grindhouse sensibility could amount to a Bold New Way to do the Punisher, somewhere free of the Ennis ghost, different to his successful comedic and ultrablack incarnations, but equally legitimate. The NY rooftops and shrill tone keep making me think of Larry Cohen, with the Kingpin, Bulls and my man Frank all battling to be the winged serpent…

Irredeemable 14 by Waid & Someone

The sense of menace, of bad decisions being made and of the consequences piling up in the future like a dozen car crashes, really sustains this comic. Even if they win, they lose, and they’re probably not even going to win. You can see bits of the past start to leak in – the Angel character has cut his own wings off, and you can see everyone thinking ‘Some razor sharp metal ones would probably help with this awful new age we seem to be stuck in’. The tarnish is all but come off the silver age shine, and the characters are consciously registering the shifts in their lives. It’s strangely touching, seeing these poor, small fictions, their made-up memories and selfless selves, visibly buckle under the stress of the sharp and nasty story Waid has plugged them into. These are our heroes, and they are dying off. Despite its costy pedigree and often deceptive packaging (Krause’s stiff but fitting art now slowly morphing in other guy’s hands into some steroidal, Liefeldian nightmare) Irredeemable is a bleak and bitter book, and every few issues a page or two snikts at you and cuts you on the eyelid to remind you of the pain it’s in.

Hellblazer #267 by Peter Milligan and Stefan Camuncoli

There is a pointed alchemical pseudo-mcguffin at the beginning, where a silver sliver of redemptive light presents itself, that we might beg to come back to later. There is a weakness in the reader, a clearly mistaken belief that despite the dimly-remembered arguments of 20 years ago the ‘anti-’ bit of ‘anti-hero’ should basically be swapped out to form ‘grumpyhero’. That every chain-swinging, chain-smoking, cheyne-stoking gritmeister from the last generation’s reboot of the comicbook protagonist is a mere modern gloss on the Gawainian pureheart formula. As was frequently reiterated even in Garth Ennis’ last, ultra-black run on the character, even the type’s posterboy Frank (in my house we call him Frank because ‘The Punisher’ is not a word that you want coming out of the mouth of a three year old girl) is basically a well-intentioned softy, dealing with a very nasty case of PTSD but whose faith in the innocence of sweet children is strong and clear enough to drag him back from the edge of brain damage every six issues or so.

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