Mindless Ones

No brains out of 5.

Are you there Margaret? It’s me, John Constantine.

Long ago, far back in the primordial blog ooze, last month, we launched a competition.

Read all about it.

An ye winner be

1971-2010 RIP

The Weird World of Jack Staff #1, by Paul Grist (Image)

So how many relaunches is this for Jack Staff now?

Lots of competitions going on here at Mindless Ones Dot Com, the most profligate and undiscerning of all the comic blogs, fact,  so much generosity that some of it has started to fall off the front page. We thought it would be a good idea to do a quick recap.

Plus, good if completely arbitrary excuse to drop this picture, I mean just look at it – The Leopard from Lime Street , without doubt the spiffingest British Superhero of all time, as reimagined by the also-legendary Duncan Fegredo. Meow indeed!

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Astounding Weird Penises 258
by Alan Moore, Rational Comics/Dodgem Logic

Because of course the comic’s primal ancestor isn’t cave art – stop being so pompous – it’s the bored schoolboy’s notebook, the dirty little doodle hiding between the sums and spelling notes.

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Orality Unbound! We may not be the cleverest, we may not be the funniest, we may not be the quickest, the most thorough, or the handsomest (well, probably the handsomest). But we can at least make sure that we are the most generous website in the comics blogiverse.

Yes, it’s another Mindless Ones Dot Com brilliant competition giveaway.

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An interesting aspect in the reading and long-term appreciation of superhero-comics, one of few nearly unique to the genre-medium, is the impact that a single image of a single character can have. Few sights are more potent and electric than the basic dramatis-persona mugshot of the steroidal spandexophile (popular in the early Image-era which took the dynamic far beyond the realms of mere absurdity), poised four square to the camera, and his name. Plot, narrative, dialogue even, can all to a greater or lesser degree be shed, and the key meaning of the superhero, the immortal appeal, remains undiminished. All that is required is a strong image and a strong name.

The enduring popularity of the A-Z Handbook of the X?X Universe books are a testament to this – the costume, the name, the paraphernalia, the ‘vital statistics’ (so porno), and the stripped-back plot recaps that the Handbook-style entries offer are the pure flavour, the total hot- drug effect, of the strongman funnybook. The superhero, a figure without a background, exists perfectly well, separate to the superfluous storytelling and other dimensions the comicbook medium affords. After all, if it’s all about wish fulfilment and fantasy-projection, the other stuff just gets in the way – just show me, in crazy colours and moody lighting, the bare (oo-er) image of the proud superthing, standing erect, and let me do the rest of the work myself (stop!) All that you need is a cool, tight image and a few terse syllables of context (of which the name, both descriptive and directive in its ideal form, is the concentrate). and you  can have that uncanny charge the trueborn superhero fanman is always chasing.

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Well this. It’s a review of Joe the Barbarian #1 a new Vertigo comic by Our#1 Squeeze and Sean Murphy (who did that Hellblazer story with Jason Aaron a while back, the one with the bloke fucking a dead dog in it. I knew there was promise in that one.) It’s a funny bit of thing, the CBR review, vintage webstuff. Favourite by Mindless consent are the comments ‘holy shit you are a sad man in the internet’ and ‘Bendis could have done it in ten’.

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