Mindless Ones

In the comic book Jupiter’s Legacy by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely the shitty dialogue surges out of the characters’ mouths like a well oiled machine…

LISTEN TO THIS I’LL TELL YOU ABOUT THE HEARTACHE. I’LL TELL YOU ABOUT THE HEARTACHE AND THE LOSS OF GOD

<ITEM> A girl was sick on the bus on the way home!

<ITEM> It’s OK! I reached my stop before the stench got too overwhelming…

<ITEM> And it gave me something to start this post with, this post wot’s all about SILENCE!#79 innit

<ITEM> bobsy’s recent squat on Gary Lactus’ spaceship comes to an end this week so the boy’s go full blub and do some shoutouts to important chums and some other Mindless/Silence housekeeping before

<ITEM> Our tanned and rested bro (sorry for calling you bro) Beast Face Ghost Must Die Killah sends us a lovely message from beyond Bali and demands your listener love else he might not return – SILENCE! dies at dawn unless you touch him on the winky!

<ITEM> We spend a few mins flicking off bouncing Belgian Brecht Evens’ marvelous The Wrong Place (Graphic Novel! Not For Kids etc!) before shambling rudely into the Reviewniverse, where we have a good old look at

<ITEM> In no particular order: Batman Black & White #2, The Witching Hour one-shot, Hinterkind #1, Trillium #3, Solid State Tank Girl #4 (comic of the week btw), Marvel Knights Spyider-Man #1, Forever Evil #2, Swamp Thing #24, Batwing #24, Superior Foes of Spyider-Man #4, Iron Man #16, All New X-Men #17, Daredevil Dark Nights #s4 & 5, Infinity #2 and then a few of the week’s other floppies, but we rattle through them quite quickly.

<ITEM> Then Gary waves a lace hanky at bobsy as he wishes a fond farewell to – – yeah not really it’s fine you’ll enjoy it. Back next week with the big Beast!

<ITEM> Peace out cheers yo

click to download SILENCE!#79

click to download SILENCE!#79

Contact us:
[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. This was bobsy’s last time in the spaceship for a while so we (well, he) (well, me) went full swears on this, blue air all over the fucking shop, sorry Steve, love you X

Oh, and GOSH!

CHARLIE, DON’T WANT ANOTHER BEER, TONIGHT I’M GONNA DRINK MY TEARS

<ITEM> What is this disgusting Graphic Novel craze that is haunting the nation’s children?

<ITEM> Banish your shameful floppy addiction and get into the hardback stuff with this week’s rollicking and rambling edition of SILENCE!

<ITEM> This week sponsored a lot by Library – the greatest bookshop there has been or could ever be…

<ITEM> The lovable but sadly now fully attached (sorry gels) The Beast Must Die is flipping still on his holy honeymoon, meaning Gary is forced to recruit bobsy for more of his baneful civilising influence!

<ITEM> There are some riveting personal questions to be had and then!

<ITEM> Gasp as The Tall and his thrall batter their way into the reviewniverse, there to discuss the unique and neglected phenomenonenom of the Graphic Novel – a new type of comic that isn’t for kids! We cover such good’uns as Adamtine by local produce Hannah Berry, Cave In and Daybreak by the thundering Brian Ralph, Judge Dredd in Satan’s Island by Wagner & co, before swimming over to Fishtown by Kevin Colden.

<AND> the mysteriously entwined nautical pair of Set to Sea by Drew Weing and Black Lung by Chris Wright.

<AND> then into a brief and tenuous discussion of Nobrow #7 and the same publisher’s marvelous Jean Baptiste Baigorri 1: Cramond Island by Irkus M. Zeberio.

<ITEM> Normal service exists in the form of hasty reviews of monthly floppybooks Mysterious Strangers #4, Fairlaine the Goblin #1, Gambit #17, Sex Criminals #1, Sex #whevs, Wolverine and the X-Men and Jupiter’s Cheggersy before we suddenly realise we’d rather get on with our normal lives, for a bit, at least.

<ITEM> Oh, and at the start we talk about Saga #14 too. SPOILERS: only liars and the brain-damaged like Saga, but if comics needs another TV show – and soon – in order to keep the concept farm open for another year then yes, by all means give it another award.

click to download SILENCE!#78

Contact us:
[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. There are quite literally almost zero swear words to be heard in this episode of the world’s finest comics podcast.

Oh, and GOSH!

COME ON IT’S A NICE DAY TO START AGAIN

<ITEM> There is no such thing as Disembodied Narratorbot-Xetc.

<ITEM> There is just a happily married man having a nice pretend.

<ITEM> Human-ape intelligence is fantasy. Robot intelligence is a holocaust. Human on human is brain plus.

<ITEM>There is no The Beast Must Die this week, while he licks his honeymooning lips with Tyra and the Next Top Models crew in Bali

<ITEM> So Gary Lactus summons from his box the poor substitute indeed of bobsy mindless, to join him for the first ever CUSS FREE edition of SILENCE!

<ITEM> After a bitterly begrudged birthday song for a listener who’s having an absolutely horrid time in the famously awful island paradise of Hawaii, Gary and his less charismatic new sidekick get on that comics thing

<ITEM> With the air between them crackling with Belgian chemical energy and technical shittery all over the place our aging boyoboys tackle such comics as ZERO #1, Mars Attacks Judge Dredd, Resident Alien, Superior Spider-Man, Thor God (not Prince) of Thunder, Batman ’66, Dial E #1, FBP #3, Magic Whistle #13, Uncanny X-Men, Infinity, New Avengers, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, 2000AD and The Phoenix.

click to download SILENCE!#77

Contact us:
[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. There are quite literally almost zero swear words to be heard in this episode of the world’s finest comics podcast.

Oh, and GOSH!

or

If a white wealthy talented American male can make it out there, so can damn well anyone!

Readers of good conscience peek at their Paul Pope comics through tense and cringing fingers.

Because yes, you’ll be pleased to know, it’s important to note, but when it comes to fighty, flighty, punchy-jumpy, there is still no one who springs into mind (maybe Rafael Grampa but let’s not even) who can do that great comicsy Pope trick, that thing, the rugged and robust capture of action-motion he can do, that stack of photos falling through the panel skin while you look, but still solid and full of weight,  thing.

It is a shiveringly good signature move that makes your fan man go into a full hard, and it is still there in this Haggard West comic. (West as in The West, Haggard as in haggard – the title is a double entendre, minus one, see below)

But you have to read it through your fingers. Anyone with a more than passing moody pout out of a car window on the desert (or is it a city?)  highway familiarity with his work is always going to read his comics tense, knowing at any given second the author is going to interrupt this uniquely rendered and quite marvelously flowing scrap to embark on an exploration of the somewhat laughable but also cruel, sadistic, economically and historically illiterate and sadly popular political philosophy (guffaw) of libertarianism, made famous and fashionable in the US several decades ago by accelerationist Soviet deep agent Ayn Rand.

You might have read Haggard West and thought to yourself, ‘Hey, there were no characters in this comic called Yahek or Mon Vises, so he left the politics for babies out of it this time!’ If so, a) you don’t exist b) you can’t be that dim c) what comic were you reading again?

Haggard West is dead!

Who can save the city? Who can save the superhero now?

We’ve been here before, in an not-identical but broadly analogous form, after the crash of 1929. How do we reinvigorate the tired and emotional economies of Anglo-American capital? Legalise booze, sure, bring that revenue back into the mainstream – that’s a no brainer.

What apparently is a bit more of a brainer is promoting an idea of virtuous militarised aryan youth to inject the necessary vim and vigour back into the enfeebled action men of the shiny city. No one would be daft enough to make an icon-fetish out of muscular fighting Nordic virtue and try to frame it as the mythopoesis of a viable political subjectivity, would they? Not again?

BLOODY HELL COMICS WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU LATELY?

There could be super dark black irony at work here of course, forming an effective and bold historical critique, drawing a neat parallel with the current moment…

…but it’s not very likely really, is it? END

Appendix 1-

The suspicion – forlorn hope – that there might be a sardonic commentary at work is prompted by the Battling Boy preview pages. Our plucky young lad – with superpowers, the son of a god remember – is sort of given a solo challenge, a stand on your own two feet neanderthal rite of passage thing, face this by your own mettle tested or fall, all that shite. But the god of adventures has packed a trunk full of priceless godly adventuring shit for you – you don’t even have to pack it yourself!

On reflection, it is unfortunately impossible to imagine even in the fullest depths of drugged reverie a libertarian with that kind of self awareness, or a sense of humour. This from the class of thoroughbred free market idealogues whose inherited wealth conveniently never remembers the Marshal Plan…

Appendix 2-

Battling Boy is out soon! Preview pics below…

etc.

The pleasure here comes not only in having some beautifully textured visuals to help you through the awkward, self-serving language; but also from the strange tension in seeing one of medium’s most idiosyncratic and defiantly independent artists work with a text that both belongs to everyone, and in some sense lies at the root of so many commonly held social and cultural structures. Crumb has spent several lifetimes somehow convincing the world that by sticking to his personal vision – repellent and antisocial as that so frequently was- he was somehow serving a greater collective good, by clearing space where the pure freedom of the artist might flourish. No matter how arseholeish the art he’d fill it with, that space itself performed a transcendent function – a dream of freedom, even a freedom to support racist or misogynist repression – that many sections of postwar Western culture sincerely believed it needed to have. Maybe they were even right.

Strange to pick Genesis then, a book that justifies its own archaic madnesses and hardcore rhetoric of obsolete social evil by appeals to divine authority and the vicissitude of historical longevity itself. Crumb takes its toxic content (and legacy) and tries to turn it into pictures and words alone, as if they don’t touch or connect to anything, as if this book, like his own back catalogue, should only ever be understood as harmless marks on paper and nothing else. If Genesis, with its holy massacres, its hatred of women and nature can be redeemed on artistic merit alone, maybe Crumb can too.

And if he just wanted to turn a new audience on to a founding text of the occidental canon, then maybe he could’ve picked a book that wasn’t such a cunt, y’know?

Despite all that, two points of genuine brilliance worth mentioning:

The limb-rocking, pre-curse serpent in Eden reworked as cosmic horror and Sitchinian(?) paranoiac scifi:

And perhaps the funniest panel Crumb’s ever drawn – the looks on the guys’ faces as they’re queueing up to go into the tent. Oh yeah, all us dudes have got to be circumcised from now on, God says, ‘kay?.

Were those later Cerebus issues that I never read as good as this?

Brief and hasty thoughts after listening to this rather interesting Roundtable Discussion from 2011 on Romero’s Dawn of the Dead…

[You already know if vague meanderings about zombie movies are your thing so stop here or shuffle on as you prefer.]

Ballard (Mentioned in discussion c. –40 mins)

An interesting avenue of conjecture lies in imagining a conclusion to Dawn and it’s central private shopping mall utopian imaginary, minus the aggressive intervention of Blades, Sledge and the rest of the biker gang (see below) which provokes the films dramatic finale. The inevitable outcome here is mentioned already during the roundtable: pure Ballard.

Left to fester in the mall, the survivors’ molecular neosuburbia would have atomised rapidly, losing its structure to the dissipating pull of mathematical entropy as our survivors retreated further and further retreating into their private dystopian interiors:

Francine behind the false wall of their enclave, nursing her baby, perched upon a nest of ripped-up cardboard boxes.

Peter burrowing ever deeper into the mall’s guts, crawling the ventilation shafts and access hatches, digging at the walls and chewing the electric  cables.

Stephen with his weathered flight jacket, binoculars and empty rifle, stalking the rooftop, unable to return to the plastic vaulted sky below.

The shops lying terrifying and empty again, except for when the moon is full and Fran and Pete would meet on the main concourse to fuck, while Stephen peers through the skylight.

Zombie children (c. –23 mins)

This scene is recapitulated in 28 Days Later, in which Cillian Murphy’s character walks through almost exactly the same scene, killing a rage-infected child, out of sight of his fellow survivors. Boyle/Garland choose this taboo-within-a-taboo as a key turning point for his character, beyond which he kills no more of the infected victims, choosing instead to identify with them and eventually adopting their methods as a means of overcoming the remnant militarism of dead Britain.

This seems to suggest dead children as given cause and justification for the entwined problems/solutions each film poses and represents: GET MAD=GO ZOMBIE

Bikers (c. –15mins)

Led by Tom Savini himself, who used the …Dead movies  to transfigure his traumatic memories of Vietnam War horror into celluloid spectacle, thereby changing the decomposing face of cinema forever, the biker gang within the film’s model represent the coming intrusion of post-Fordist labout and neoliberal capital, crashing the postwar party of settled and endless bourgeois plenty.

The bikers are literally deterritorialised – piratical and nomadic – and better adapted to survive within the available niches of the postapocalyptic ecology than our bored and barricaded survivors: they are playful with the undead, having developed new perversions and sexual subjectivities with the zombies (and mannequins) as their focus.

Despite their anarchic surface and apparent disdain for the commodified desires and familiar comforts of the hastily re-improvised nuclear family, they are only interested in the mall for what they can extract from it. Their belief in might-makes-right and reinscription of archaic gender roles makes the vision of a human future where they are most fit uncomfortably primitive…

Answering! the gjallahorn blown by a respected campaigner of old. Scorning! the gnarled admonishing finger of grumpy teach and his selfblind pretensions to impartiality:

Jupiter’s Legacy is really a very dull, very poor indeed, comic, F-minus, forced, tired, artificial, very disappointing, get the fuck out of my house. Sapped of all grace and mana by over repetition of zombified tics and gestures: laughably inept in its socioeconomic analysis: not even pathetic in its yearning for the world of five years plus past: idolatrous in its devotion to the never-there assurances of the old American century? Everything you’d expect of its famous author-shyster. These few years, no one with a soul to save or a clue about anything important has stepped across the threshold of number 10, and no honourable man could ever drop his knee before the Queen of Evil.

But don’t take Frank Quitely’s drawings with you, for pity’s pain.

a) Fancy a drink captain, you unprofessional fuck? What drink? The one in your hand! Look really closely. Yeah there, take a sip. You can’t? It hasn’t been set up properly? The continuity and detail of this scene is entirely tossed off? Forget it cap, someone can go back and draw it in your hand later, sfine.

b) Magic sliding towards you wall? Is that? I mean, these are new, fashionable glasses, so maybe I’m, but come on, really? When Quitely was alive he’d nail the 3D modeling and that tricky perspective. It is possible instead nails have been run in to his poor dead hands prior to commencing work on this comic.

c) Sometimes I wonder if the dialogue in this comic could be any more dogshit? As for the pictures, don’t worry about any kind of aesthetic clarity, and for fuck sake make sure you don’t get any rough energy in there either.

PS – no nudery, just prudery. More fucking blood you prick, this is for kids!

Mark Millar’s writing is so bad it makes the art go bad, basically. Here’s hoping by christ for a resurrection of Frank Quitely before he has any more high profile superhero work coming out…

‘Nothing of note was to be inherited by her loved ones, and nor was anything ever expected to be. She was put to rest with exactly the same title as the one with which she was born. She never ruined anyone’s life and never once considered a career in the deliberate, violent immiseration of her fellow citizens.’

‘One measures a circle, beginning anywhere’ – From Hell

‘Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores’

‘I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell’s Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline… and also I would say that if you’ve got the Avengers movie as one of the most eagerly attended recent movies, and if most of those attendees were adults, which I believe they were, then if you’ve got a huge number of contemporary adults going to watch a film containing characters and storylines that were meant for the entertainment of eleven year old boys fifty years ago, then…’

‘We shall attack, we continue to wait… This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision. … The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis.’

‘BOMB ENTANGLERS DISENGAGED’