Mindless Ones

Check this out. One of the greatest icons in the Mindless Hall of Fame and Mirrors writing a teeny-Beebies cartoon, with interactive online games and super-psychic timetraveller vampire detectives in a flooded future London.

It’s called Meta4orce, and you can watch the whole lot here (possibly. I gather some geographical limitations may apply to BBC stuff.) The intro graphics and that are nice, but the animation’s kind of flat and cheap, not going much beyond stand-blink-talk. However, the inevitable themes are all present and correct: gorgeous gamine adolescents unsure of their bizarrely sprouting new abilities and the wrenching existential crises wrought thereby. Violent introspection and doomed identities sure to follow, as well as some witty wordplay, a few crushing put-downs, and a lovely, tragic-romantic sensibility.

In case you are truly mindless and that didn’t give it away – it’s written by Peter Motherfuckingilligan.

Oh good, a new hobby horse to savage with my bugbear: No sooner have I finished blogging about how annoying I find a current half-trend of imposing pick-and-mix music decisions on the otherwise private stereoheads of readers, when it starts appearing all over the place. Okay, well, in one place only so far, maybe two if what I’m told about Lapham’s latest is right, but little bloggy subcategories have been built out of far less.

More after the jump

Mustn’t let the twenties pass without a mention of Casanova 14. Non-specific spoilers hereafter, about a spF 8, mildly alkaline spoilers.

The past few issues have established this book as a real star of the stands. Building on a run of at least two good issues, no. 14 is itself a huge step-up in quality even from the impressive heights it had reached earlier. Be under no illusions – it’s an intelligent, ambitious book, that manages to fizz the forebrain, thrill the adrenaline glands and softly touch the heart. It has action, romance, sex, fun, pain, and all manner of high strangeness, and puts them to work in a way that is currently unique. The layers of structure, delicate and subtle, make the reader sit right upright and engage with the text – a living thing with wise and curious eyes. Reading Casanova makes you Read. No other genre book out there today does that – Casanova makes you realise how complacent you’ve become, how prepared to put up with any old spandex-wrapped crap you are, and makes you ashamed of that state of affairs. It’s a good comic, and it’s good for comics.

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In another post Sean Phillips was described as having a telepathic drawing style. Not telepathic in the Zener card sense or even the psychic ninja-knife sense, but telepathic in the very simple sense that the reader can read the thoughts of the figures he draws. By this is not meant that Phillips has a particularly good grasp of how to draw realistic or communicative anatomy or body-language, but literally that something strange happens to his pictures where they somehow become imbued with a quality as yet unknown to science that transmits the thoughts of imaginary beings into the minds of any non-imaginary viewer. To demonstrate – the reader knows exactly what Miss Misery is thinking here:

Don’t you?

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Did you know that 2000AD is scoring* 8 or maybe 9 out of 10 at the moment?

That’s really quite a good score. Not as good as this:

but probably the highest the last surviving bastard of UK genre comics has managed since the Summer Offensive, back in the hot dog days of 1993, when Morrison, Millar and Smith were handed the title’s reins for a glorious 8-week silly season which took the comic back to its rollicking, inflammatory best. Last week, for the first time in too long, I put Prog 1581 down and that taste of wasted chances and pointless filler, the sensation anyone who’s picked it up lately must know, was entirely absent.

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Kick-Ass #2
The last comics I bought by Mark Millar were the quietly-released final issues of The Unfunnies. It ends **SPOILER** with an evil comic book creator literally writing himself into his own strip, free to rape and murder his characters as he sees fit, a life of fictive freedom being preferable to a life of reality on death row. It was an amusingly nasty take on Grant Morrison’s fond old hyperfictionsuit riff, but not one that added much to the idea. Or at least it didn’t until Kick-Ass 2, where it is revealed that at some point in the recent past Mark Millar evidently wrote himself into the Marvel universe, for real. As in, that’s where he actually lives now. How else to explain the contents of this issue, where realism apparently reigns supreme, but comes in the form of circumstances and psychologies that could only ever seem plausible to someone who really lives in funnybook land?

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If I have to make up a bloggy reason why this post was written, it’s recent noise from the Factual Opinion that Andy Diggle’s current run on Hellblazer is the best it’s been in years. I picked one up, saw with relish that the colour palette they’re using still contains every conceivable shade of mud, put it down. To say it’s currently firing on all cylinders isn’t saying much, as Vertigo’s old horror warhorse is a perpetual disappointment, which it shouldn’t, because the basic ingredients are so solid. It’s about the street-sorcerer John Constantine, magic, and a bit of London grime, all mixed together with a quip and a crafty fag. Despite these perfect alchemical elements something inevitably goes wrong with the final potion, which rarely drips the creep and splatter I hunger for from anything so keen to proclaim itself a horror comic.

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