Mindless Ones

Mustn’t let like the finest issue of Batman in years come out and not do a bit about it. Maybe some annotations, but honestly there’s a few good people doing that so I’m a bit annotated-out.

So we’re just going to have the big question and answer it, right before your eyes, with perfect accuracy. How this works is, we’re going to run through my favouriite suspects and ask the I-Ching who The Black Glove is, and then we’ll know. A couple of posts back Savage reminded me of the same Storm Shadow 6 page story story Morrison wrote for Marvel UK’s Action Force Monthly about twenty years ago, which was my earliest memory of anything at all I-Chingy. Genuine comics knowledge, one of those genuine four-colour epiphanies – that pedagogic element they always talk about. That was how I learnt of the I-Ching. The man himself has appeared in Morrison’s Batman’s run too, remember, so it all somehow seems appropriate. I don’t do the I-Ching much (going to call it Yijing from now on, I think that’s more proper nowadays), because Yijing is never wrong, and always eerily accurate. That’s a bit freaky, and raises a few questions I rarely have time to mull over these days, so I tend to leave it alone. But in all my experience of using it, it’s never wrong, and that means it’s sometimes been often useful, like now.

Hold tight!

More after the jump

These are not my favourite pants. They count, they’re in the collection, they get worn on the regular cycle like the rest, but these pants aren’t all that good are they?

The blue trim is okay, and they say ‘Superman’ on them, which is pretty bloody amazing when you think of the millions of billions of pants that don’t have any superhero’s name on them at all, but next to the mighty world of Marvel pants that we’ve been exploring this last wonderful week, the DC territory starts to look rather sparse.

More after the jump

Look at these. Not strictly a superpant, but the connection hardly needs to be explained.

There has been a few queries about where my favourite favourites have come from – In case you haven’t read the comments in the last post, the answer is in almost all cases H&M – I’d link to their site, only there’s little point – no online shop or even catalogue, except for in a few eurozone teritories that you probably don’t live in. Pants aside, I cannot unreservedly recommend the shop anyway – usually worth a look, but generally full of stock designed to appeal to sixteen year old crackheads, and on the weekends too rammed with said youths to be able to get what you want anyway.

More after the jump

It’s odd how many of the pants, upon the microscopic inspection they’re getting this week, carry art by the greats. You’d expect bad design and lame excuses to stick to these things like crabs. But with a couple exceptions the panels and pages used are great, not to say brilliant, just in comic art terms. There’s Miller, as we’ve seen, and lots and lots by Jack Kirby. That latter name is quite the one to conjure with these days the pencil strokes are deeper and clearer than ever before on the drawing board of current cultural life. How much of the pant selection was accident, and how much inevitable it’s difficult to tell. Did Merch Exec deliberately choose those becasue he had been told they were the ones to pick? Or did the natural quality shine through? I suspect it’s a combination of both, but look at these latest exhibits. No doubt put together by a true and loving believer, they are in all their gaudy, factory-made glory about as perfect and complete a pop artefact as you are ever likey to find on the High Street. Suitable for something that spends so long in the primal dark neath my nuts, they are also an ideal neo-primitive expression of the art of sequential narrative in full effect. Fit for a King, they are very truly my favourite pants.

Look at this motley bunch, these Tommy toting turkeys. (Though it’s obvious like a sausage down an alleyway, ignore the huge and mighty, roaring yet rubber-clad chopper wheel, slap bang in the middle there, if you can.) A more criminoid gallery of fizzogs you will not find in all Ray Chandler’s cheapest nightmares. (Pretend the crooks knobbly mugs don’t represent testicles.)

More after the jump

When James Joyce, modernity’s mightiest mind, was busy melting the conceptual cusp between language and music, he gave the following as the closest possible textual rendition of the melody of flatulence: ‘Pprrpffrrppffff.’ That fifteen-letter fart probably took him weeks to perfect. Cheers Jim, next one’s on me. Today, when I want to know how to capture the evanescent sonic resonance of a flatus* expelled through the anus, I have serendipity, pants, and The Incredible Hulk to help me out. Whaddayasay, big green?

Sorry mate, didn’t quite catch that, sounded like maybe you said ‘AAAAAARRRR’? Can you run that by me again?

Oh right, that’s what I thought you said. So just to check, that’s ‘AAAAAARRRR’?

More after the jump

Sorry, the pictures in this post are not in 3-D, it was just the first pun title that came to mind. As far as I’m aware it’s not even possible to do blog posts that extend beyond just the first two Ds. Odd really, you’d have thought they’d have worked it out by now – what else are all those boffins at NASA, Microsoft and McDonalds doing on their smoke breaks if not working out how to universalise multidimensional online entertainment? Blue and red contact lenses stapled to newborn babies’ eyes maybe? Get to it Gates, or if you’re not clever enough for the challenge, why not make way for…

More after the jump

Although we are now into the second post dark-age age of comics, yea verily is it a golden age of pants. As the comments on yesterday’s post have revealed, we as well as our children are living in a four-colour consumerist paradise where superhero pants for young and old alike are available almost anywhere. When I was a child such pantly treasures were impossible to imagine. Whither did this underwear wonderland come?

These next ones are my favourite pants. As you can tell from the fading, they’re the oldest in the set, the ones that really gave me the collector’s bug. These skids must go back to the heady days of, well I don’t know really, about 2005 or so? Makes these pants about three years old, which is about as long as I’m comfortable admitting to having worn the same pants for, I suppose. Is that too precious of me? Do pants last several years, decades even? Can’t be sure. The superhero movies summer blockbuster dreamland that we’re all living in was well established when these beauties were bought for me – without the big market driver there’s no way even the Herald of Galactus would have found his way to the local H&M. I wonder how many millions the first Spiderman movie had to clear before someone in the merchandising office shouted ‘Make some Silver Surfer Pants!!!!’

More after the jump

It had to happen. My underwear collection is famous throughout D-wing, and I am justly proud. Mr. Mackay says laundry privileges are out unless I humiliate myself before the internet. (I rely on him for protection from Fletcher and his mindless thugs.) So this is it. My pants. (EDITOR’S NOTE: in America, they use the word ‘pants’ incorrectly, mistakenly believing it to mean ‘trousers’. This post, and those subsequent, are using the word in its UK meaning of ‘underpants’. Clearly, a week or so of blog posts about superhero trousers would be ridiculous.)

To start with, here are my newest and favourite pants. Featuring both Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, they are the living, breathing blockbuster fashion pant of Summer 2008. At least until I get me some Batman ones.

More after the jump

Other comics that came out LAST week.

More after the jump