Mindless Ones

Due to an obscure sentence passed by an unflinching god, the Mindless Ones will be at Thought Bubble 2024 in Harrogate this weekend. We’ll be at tables B3-4 in DSTLRY Hall on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November, trading hard drawn comics for hard earned cash, and shouting at tech bros whether any are present or not.

Scourge of Scotland’s east coast, the mighty Paul Jon Milne will be with us throughout the weekend. Paul is the sort of talent that comics have always attracted – a genius that can do anything except admit to its own existence. If the following interview leaves you with a desire to hear more from the man himself, we’ve blethered to him before here. If you want to check out his work – as all tortured aesthetes and muscle magic aficionados should – you can either pop round to Harrogate this weekend or visit his online shop.

Perverts who enjoy writing about comics are directed to my post on Paul’s “superheroes on the dole” comic Guts Power.

Anyway, enough of my shite. Let’s hear from the man himself!

1. Who are you and how did you get here?

I am Paul Jon Milne (He/Him) and I’ve been making comics and Art Stuff for ages, in Edinburgh and sometimes in Fife. Done all sorts of drawings for things. Drew some pics with a pal for a short film that had Gail Porter in it, a lifetime ago. Only saw it recently, via youtube. Was not mentioned in the credits. This is my ‘career’ in general.

2. What will you be bringing with you to Thought Bubble 2024?

Limit Formation Inertial! A comic about a wee lad who gets home from a space adventure, with consequences!!! 

These Aren’t My Brutes! A collection of fan-art pics I made this summer, now scanned in, printed and monetised.

Creep Heap 2025! A collection of drawings and comics from this year, mostly never seen before!!! Unless it doesn’t show up in time from the printer in which case no-one’ll see any of it.

Torse! Comic from 2023 about a training dummy. Nominated for ‘best art’ at The Selkie Awards (see question 4)!!!

3. What are you looking forward to at the convention?

Seeing pals! Avoiding the eyes of customers! Shivering and shaking as I try to handle money, hoping to god someone else can do everything for me as I try to become as small as possible behind the table. Also looking forward to sighting someone in fancy dress as Cole Cash, The Grifter.

4. We hear your Torso has been nominated for a prestigious award. How did that happen and what does it mean for the future of Scottish beefcakes?

I saw a tweet advertising a new awards thing and entered it as I am a very arrogant man. Doubt I’ll win but it’s nice to imagine I could. I’m hoping if I win it’ll lead to all the Scottish gym bozos reading Torse and seeing that being radicalised by a culture of joyless body fascism is a bad scene, and make being a musclebound oaf fun again.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: we were hoping to provoke Paul into discussing his own reputable Torso, rather than the (excellent) comic book Torse, but modesty and good taste have lead us elsewhere and who are we to deny those fine characteristics when they present themselves in this blighted world?]

5. What has been holding back despair when the inevitable disgust with all things comics creeps in during the dark of night?

Nothing, really!!! ‘LOL’! Been watching all the Alien and Predator films, though. I have the same opinions as everyone else about all of them except now I prefer Predator 2 to Predator 1, and Alien 3 (extendo edition) to Aliens. Dunno if this is ‘holding back despair’ but it’s certainly making me an interesting contrarian with a raised eyebrow and smug smile, ready for Discourse.

6. Which is the best Marvel vs. Capcom game and why? 

Difficult to answer!!! In theory it’s Marvel vs. Capcom 2 as it has one million characters, crucially including Cable and Marrow of the X-Men, and (yawn) Technical and Involved Gameplay. However, it also has shitey 3D backgrounds.

Was recently reacquainted with Marvel vs. Capcom 1 and while it has a tiny wee roster, it also has lovely 2D backgrounds and the ability to go two slightly different versions of the Hulk at once. It’s slightly less hectic than 2 for the most part and I feel more like I know what I’m doing. Also the end boss is Onslaught which seems a terrible idea but I’m very glad he’s there being legitimised by Capcom, one in the eye for the “LOL 90s amirite” crowd.

So MvC 1 is the best one. Maybe.

All I know is Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite is dog shit as it has no X-Men and stinks of ‘movie synergy’. No! No.

Comics?!?!?

For the first time since the last time, the Mindless Ones will be at Thought Bubble 2024 in Harrogate this weekend. We’ll be at tables B3-4 in DSTLRY Hall on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November, trading comics for cash and WNDRNG WHT YRTS.

Some handsome bastard called David Allison will be there flogging zines and comics in the hope of attracting the right crowd. His first big new release of the weekend is An Intervention, his second Pocket Chiller.

An Intervention is a tale of random encounters, submerged responsibility, and concrete angels. Like a chimp attempting to make fire by hooting at some twigs, David has made a crude trailer for the comic, which you can watch below.

David’s other new release is The Grave and The Good, a Choose Your Own Adventure zine.

Here’s how David is trying to entice the unsuspecting this time out: “You wake up with the taste of earth in your mouth. Everything else about you is cold and damp, but you sense that you were on the verge of learning something horrible and true about the world. The only question is, can you dig deep into this feeling and survive?”

David will have copies of his previous Pocket Chiller, The Candidate, for sale at the weekend. If he gets his act together, he will also have a range of zines and mini-comics with him, including: Uncle Frank, Cut-Out Witch, and Mini-Witch (all illustrated by Shaky Ghost); Beyond Whiles (adapted from the work of Alasdair Gray); BARRY, or “The Robot”; and Grave Tidings, an eight page comic made of reprocessed art from The Grave and The Good.

In a startling turn of events, the Mindless Ones will be at Thought Bubble 2024 in Harrogate this weekend. We’ll be at tables B3-4 in DSTLRY Hall on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November, trading comics for hard cash and pre-chewed vowels.

It wouldn’t be a Mindless meet-up without big massive genius Gary Lactus aka Fraser Geesin in the mix, so we’re all delighted to know that we’ll be able to look upon the face of bad backs this weekend. This time out Fraser will be debuting the latest issue of Pricks, his ongoing collaboration with Laurie Rowan.

Here’s a Mindless micro-review of the latest issue, just to get yr receptors tingling:

Ever feel everything closing in as you flop about in next door’s bins trying to find a new accessory? Ever wonder what’s happened to your brand, and how you were convinced to have it burned into your flesh in the first place? Ever find yourself not mad but laughing, actually? If so, congratulations, Pricks #4 is the comic for you! If not, amazing, Pricks #4 has experienced all those things so you don’t have to! 

The previous three issues of Fraser Geesin and Laurie Rowan’s Pricks established a tone and a set of characters, none of them particularly stable. Just when you think you’ve got a grip on what’s going on with Darren – hunched in a slum property, dressed in only a rubber glove for warmth – Pricks finds a new shape to squeeze him into. This is high, horrible absurdity that will appeal to fans of Michael Kupperman and Steve Aylett, made all the more potent by the way Geesin’s art grounds even the book’s wildest gags in the everyday.

Pricks looks and smells every bit as routinely abhorrent as the modern world. What a miracle, then, that it’s also the funniest comic of the year.

Alongside all four issues of Pricks, Fraser will be selling the following hand crafted wonders this weekend: his ace autobio comic The Cleaner; Ikea-themed anthology Komisk; prints depicting Ikea Products From Hell; his collaboration with big pimpin’ Andre Whickey, Tales From 500 Songs; the Pocket Chillers Speckle and Ash and Jeff (the latter with Dan Cox); and Journey To The Surface of the Earth issues #1-2.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Fraser will be stripping off his civilian identity and going full Gary Lactus at the SILENCE! to Astonish panel at 2pm on Saturday 16th November in Panel Room 2.

Goodie Lactus will be joined in this endeavour by his trusty co-hosts, The Beast Must Die and “Affable” Al Kennedy, and by special guests Chrissy Williams, Ram V, David Brothers and Stephanie Phillips. Expect odd questions, inexplicable challenges, and totally unexpected and double plus special guests in this, the ninth occurrence of comicdom’s most pointless and shambolic panel show.

Birdland (Gilbert Hernandez, 1991)

(Originally published in a slightly different form on the now-decommissioned Vibrational Match blog back in January 2009.)

Ladies, gentlemen, those beyond the binary – I’d like to start out by informing you that this post is most definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK, not even if you work from home!

I’ve edited some of the following images down so that they’re a little more abstract, but it’s still not the sort of material you want anyone else to catch you looking at, you know?  Your cat would be unimpressed, and your father would only fall back into the arms of his priest to spite you.

Sensible souls that you are, I know you’ve probably closed this browser down already, or at least flicked back to a less grubby web page. So, having scared off those who still have their wits about them, let’s get on with it shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

As some of you might have already read, Mark Stewart – our own Amy Poodle and a member of the Diane podcast crew – died unexpectedly last month. There’s a crowdfunder running to support his partner and son, and I’d urge you to contribute if you’re able.

Most of the Mindless were able to attend Mark’s funeral last week. It was a raw day with howling weather to match the sense of rage this sort of loss can provoke, but the funeral ritual performed its dual function, showing us how much Mark there was out there in the world by prompting us to share memories, tributes, wild stories. The man’s thoughts were catchy like a cold, so it’s no surprise that variations on the phrase “he rewired my brain” were used so often on the day – looking at this site, everything from the naming conventions for contributors to the faces of The Amusing Brothers has Mark’s trace on it.

Mindless readers will know that Mark is the best writer about Grant Morrison comics to have ever put his thoughts out there, so we were moved to see an acknowledgement of Mark’s passing from Morrison in their newsletter:

A moment’s silence for Amy Poodle, AKA writer and critic Mark Stewart, who died last week. Mark was one of the first young readers to completely grasp the underlying metaphysics of The Invisibles, and his breathtakingly erudite and distinctive interpretations of mine and other stories were a highlight of the Barbelith Forum and the Mindless Ones blog back in the day. I loved reading his work, I always learned something, and I’m very saddened to hear the news that he’s passed away at such a young age.  

Our deepest condolences to Mark’s friends and family, and to his partner Clare, and his son Dale.

Flame on, brother!

As Morrison notes, Mark’s writing on the sadly vanished Barbelith forums pulled the pin on public understanding of The Invisibles, and his subsequent explorations of the series for The Comics Journal still freak my nut out to this day, to get bit Danny Dyer about it. The following passage from Bomb Light in Faraway Windows has been haunting me today as I considered how to write about such a multifaceted person from my perilously limited vantage point:

Because in fiction characters aren’t bound by their pasts, they’re not fixed in place, and if their creator wills it they can be a violent super-ninja freedom fighter, a successful, totally harmless horror writer and a dimension hopping agent of Chaos simultaneously, their “true” self located only in whatever overlapping sites of meanings the reader cobbles together from each cover story, forever hidden in the gaps.

Invisible.

Mark was talking about imaginary people there, of course, but I’m aware that tributes like this can risk turning people into easy fictions. The “real” Mark couldn’t be sketched out by any one account, least of all one that focuses on his writing like this post will, but together we can strain our eyes to see a more multifaceted impression of the man, just as his work allowed so many of us to trace things we might otherwise have missed when we looked at stories and the world. As our Botswana Beast put it in a recent email:

my sort of banner points is – as much as you might be into something, and I already thought All-Star Superman say was unbelievable, but to experience Mark enjoying something – the best comics already anyway – to experience that made it 10x better *at least* (in a fashion that sometimes made me feel my own mundane eyes were basically just adequate) – I think what characterises his criticism, or indeed what he defined in our little sphere of comics criticism, was to be almost entirely – except where Mark Millar was concerned – additive (there is stuff in his All-Star write up that’s so exciting and you can feel this Quitelyesque world bubbling up around you; incredibly immersive)

Even stuff I might be mildly leery of; Dan Slott, or the MCU, or Immortal Hulk say – basically if Mark liked it I would too because I knew someone was into it in a way – swirling, psychedelic, extrapolatory – that I could only vaguely imagine.

The description of Mark’s writing as being “additive” has been echoing around my head since I read it. There was real magic to the way he could tune you into something only his equipment had picked up, whether he did it with a quick bit of absurd language – “runce” on Barbelith, “Blackest NICE” and “bulk meat” here – or by taking the time to light a story up from a previously inconceivable angle. The Muppets never looked the same after I read Mark’s post on how Crazy Harry exists at

the point where the madness reaches such a fever pitch that the show turns itself inside out, kermit green giving way to grey, where wacky fun collapses into its abject… Where the stage lights finally go down on all that colour.

I’d never considered “The Darkness when everyone has left the theatre, and the thing waiting for you in it” or at least, I’d never acknowledged the fact that these thoughts might be troubling me. We’ll break through to brighter horizons in a minute, but Mark had a real gift for lighting up the subterranean world, as anyone who read his Batmannotations or listened to Diane must surely know. I doubt I’d remember Daredevil #9 by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera if it wasn’t for Mark having wandered through that comic with a torch, talking about how the monsters lurking unseen in the dark caves of that story were an example of

Nostalgia veering into dread… From a certain angle the monsters look dumb and kind of friendly, but those ‘creepy cartoon eyes’ would make you sick if you were confronted with them anywhere outside the comic page.

Look again: was he wrong? do you want him to be?

Let’s double back a bit because this is not a moment for subtlety: like Botswana Beast above, and like Daredevil in that story, a lot of the time I was just registering the caves until Mark made the rest of it clear to me. There’s a real power in Mark’s ability to suggest the shape of dangers and worries we’ve not fully understood, but like a lot of people my intoxication with Mark’s work also had a lot to do with the way he could tune you into frequencies that seemed to come from a better reality.

Back when I was reading Mindless Ones dot com instead of contributing to it, Mark’s Candyfloss Horizons posts seemed to me to contain all of the possibility of this magazine and the culture around it in its most potent form. Part 1 set the scene, and let us know that the scene would shift every time we looked at it, but Part 2 was the real trip. These posts found a way through superfiction to a world of abundance, a world of fluid images and meanings and sexuality that has little to do with the value that Disney and Discovery, Inc see in these fictional realities. On brighter days, I think that some of this explosive plurality may yet survive the cinematic age.

If we’re talking about hope, well, the Beast already mentioned Mark’s write-up of All Star Superman in his comment, and I’m not joking when I say that I think about it every time I’ve been beaten into a rut and need to imagine a way out of it.

Here’s Amy Poodle, talking about the expansive possibilities of ASS:

Most of us, if we’re lucky, will experience a time in the future, perhaps an extended time, maybe a moment or two, when we’re really taken out of ourselves. When the grey scales fall off our eyes. It could be at our child’s birth, it could be falling in love, it could just smack us in the ennui one day when we’re walking down the street, and this is the atmosphere, the internal environment, that All Star Superman is trying to reflect and catalyse in us – the best days of our lives (as THE ADAMS sang), when, as I said above, everything’s soft (because the boundaries between things needn’t be so rigid anymore), fairytale (because everything seems primal, mythic and illuminated with significance), permeable (because we want to interrogate, explore and know more) and malleable (because we’re an integral part of the whole thing). With this in mind, have a look at the landscape of ASS again. It’s all those things: Bric-a-brac colour schemes that lap at the eye; balloon-skin thin line work; an illustrative style that summons up bedtime and “Nan, can I see the picture…?!?”, a gentle three dimensionality rotating softly within and around itself. If Morrison’s preceding works have aggressively shoved the reader towards the kind of…err… magickal awareness he wants to provoke, then All Star Superman is a far subtler beast. It doesn’t rely solely on didactic screeds, or narrative thrust, or belligerently zany page layouts to make its point – it’s all just loaded into every panel, the mise-en-scene, the general tone. Superman’s got there already, and all he wants us to do is catch up, because sometimes it’s lonely on that cloud. The book is truly a collaborative effort. I’ve made every effort to include the artists in this little eulogy as much as I’ve included Grant, because everyone working on it contributes to the fiery nimbus that surrounds the piece, either by accident or design. It doesn’t matter. The spell just worked.

Sometimes it comes steam engines. Sometimes it comes All Star Superman time.

Reading back through pages of Mark’s writing today has been rough going. I’ve cried a couple of times, gutted about the fact I won’t get to hear from Mark again, grateful that I ever got to hear from him at all. Everything in Mark’s work seems to point me away from where my head’s at today, whether it’s his thoughtful approach to the evidence of our passing in Ghost World, the giddy thrill of Zenith showing that comics can broadcast from the edge of their moment, or the depictions of a virtual overlay of neglected physical spaces in his Batman 666 scripts.

As I get older I find that both hard times and days of real joy and comfort make me want to draw my world close around myself, to treasure what I have and hide from what I can’t control. These impulses are understandable on an individual basis and maybe poisonous socially, allowing those of us who can afford to minimise our exposure to the world and its horrors to do so. The best of Mark’s work asks me to be less of a shitebag than all that. It’s full of portents of what’s wrong [in/out] there for sure, but it’s also always reaching past itself after the next possibility, carefully tuned into the ways the world might yet bend into a new shape upon contact.

Ask yourself, in the dark of the year, under your duvet, sat bright by the TV screen, submerged in a bath of comics, out in the world, navigating by stars or streetlight, wherever you are – can we do less?

You can tell I’m not the real me from the fact that I didn’t know this book existed until I tripped over Tegan O’Neil’s review in The Comics Journal. As a lifelong Eddie Campbell enthusiast and someone who enjoys Tegan’s criticism, I would have been anticipating the book’s publication and would have read Tegan’s review the day it went up.

The fact that it took almost two weeks to catch up can only mean one thing: I’m not me. The author of this blogpost has been replaced.

The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell comes packaged together with 2006’s The Fate of The Artist, another autobiographical comic in which the author has gone missing. Back when it came out The Fate of the Artist felt like a big development in Campbell’s artistic style, with its watercolour textures and shifting art styles. Here’s Dirk Deppey writing for The Comics Journal at the time:

Campbell’s latest work, The Fate of the Artist, is a logical step forward. Using a moment of artistic doubt suffered by Campbell as a springboard, Fate weaves the lives of forgotten artists and artisans, autobiographical anecdotes in which the author is portrayed by an actor, faux comic strips, fumetti, and concludes with a faithfully adapted O. Henry short story starring Campbell himself. The work is as collage-like as Snakes and Ladders, but here the juxtapositions are between scenes rather than images. None of the individual parts ever fully connect to their surroundings; instead, each segment slyly comments on the implied message of others, building thematic inferences rather than a narrative storyline. Graphically The Fate of the Artist is more subdued than Snakes and Ladders, yet its conceptual underpinnings are more daring than anything its creator has ever before attempted.

In 2023, The Fate of the Artist looks like a work from the traditional side of Campbell’s career. An artist with a classically appealing style, all hand-scratched lines and careful depictions of light and posture, Campbell has spent the past couple of decades restlessly experimenting, often with the aid of his computer. In the past ten years he’s added digital colouring to the immaculate Victorian picture making of From Hell, written a book about sports cartoonists, and put together an anthology of odd romance stories with his wife Audrey Niffenegger.

The autobiographical work that followed Fate, 2012’s The Lovely Horrible Stuff, saw Campbell integrating photography into his hand drawn and painted art to uncanny effect. In keeping with Campbell’s experimental impulses, the book’s style wasn’t always as pleasant to look at as the artist’s earlier work, but none of that discomfort was wasted. The Lovely Horrible Stuff‘s subjects – the bonds of cash, the bonds of family, the power of abstraction – demanded an approach that constantly disturbed the reader’s sense of what was familiar and what was strange.

High on this sense of uncertainty, in my review of the book I speculated that nothing in the story was true:

Once the illusion of Yap fell away from eyes, I started to see everything else more clearly.  You see, there’s no “Eddie Campbell” either, that’s just a pseudonym Alan Moore uses when he wants to get away from ideaspace for a while, a secondary life he pretends to have lived, inky li(n)es trailing off into nothing like the hair on his face. The people you see in the book, claiming to be Campbell’s friends and family? Actors, all actors, and as such there’s no reason to worry about their drama being traded in for the cold taste of coins.

If you think that seems a little too giddy you might be on to something. In the end, this feeling was so intoxicating that I started to doubt my own existence along the way:

Me? I don’t exist either.  All of my financial worries are fake – did you really think it possible that I could propose to live off my thoughts alone if I lose my job?  Thankfully, Illogical Volume is just a work-in-progress, a computer programme designed to vent words and neurosis on an irregular basis. This blog is a dry run for deliberately useless AI; thank you for participating in the beta test.

Which brings us to Campbell’s most recent autobiographical novel, which I would have known about in advance if I was really here. The qualities that were uncanny in The Lovely Horrible Stuff are now the baseline of Campbell’s reality, worn proudly on the artist’s face in one sequence:

Campbell has Niffenegger comment on this shift in style in the body of the comic (“It’s like he’s trying to find a way of faking it. He’s even sneaking photos into his drawings, hoping no one will notice”), and discusses it in his afterword in the dazed tones of a man who has only just remembered his crimes (“But on casting my eyes over aforegoing pages, I see the laptop everywhere in them”). The absence of Campbell’s hand-scratched letters provides an opening note of dismay in O’Neil’s TCJ review (“I have now felt that same shock of utter betrayal. I have cracked the spine on Eddie Campbell’s latest and found computer lettering staring back”), but her later comment on where she places the book is more revealing:

Ugly as sin, yes, but so is a great deal of Chris Onstad and Jerry Moriarty. Which is sort of where I’d place Campbell right now: halfway between Jack Survives and Achewood, as far away as possible from the meticulous penmanship of From Hell. Never sitting still, our boy.

Like O’Neil, I suspect, I’d rather be frustrated by a favourite artist than bored, so while I find myself missing certain effects of light that Campbell used to conjure from a haze of ink, there are moments where I find new pleasure in his work. Like this bit of business with a cat:

Or this sleepy fantasia, the first in a series of dream sequences that punctuate the story, and the first in a series of scenes depicting some sort of covert skulduggery:

This second image is a bridge back to Campbell’s past: its looseness is new, but in conception it winks at the “Honeybee” newspaper strips that cut through The Fate of The Artist. The sequence where Campbell wrestles the cat has a different feel to it, or rather, it gives fresh form to something Campbell’s long been after. It doesn’t have the sense of the air he’s traditionally sought through painterly effects, but it conveys the same sense of life in the moment as some of his earliest work in The King Canute Crowd. I’m thinking of the way Campbell catches the soft bends of the body in this bar scene:

If that seems too restrained in comparison to what the cat’s doing in the new book, consider those moments in the earlier work where Campbell tried to catch the movement of a pub brawl:

Of course, the world in which Campbell made his earlier works no longer exists, so maybe a shift of technique was required. The Second Fake Death is, as its subtitle points out, “a pandemic graphic novel”, and when I read the new book for a second time down the pub, a comics artist of my acquaintance expressed equal surprise at the change in art style (“It’s like looking at David Hockney’s iPhone drawings!”) as he did at the way Campbell was drawing himself (“Does he look like that now?”). He does, as this video interview will attest!

This shift in technique isn’t limited to line, lettering and colour, any more than the new haircut represents the limits of how much “Eddie Campbell” has changed in this story. From The King Canute Crowd to The Lovely Horrible Stuff, Campbell’s autobiographical work has shown a tendency to the poetic and the anecdotal. Chapters that trace the way people move around in moment-to-moment detail have tended to be matched to sequences where the text provides the through-line of a tall tale, with the images highlighting key moments or providing literary or humorous counterpoints. The hand lettering Tegan O’Neil mentions is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of Campbell’s work, and the accompanying narrative voice is right there with it, from “Alec MacGarry never forgets things said” to “And then he’ll replace the old maxim with a new one: MONEY is TIME”.

The Second Fake Death is unbothered by such narration. Its dreamtime fantasies, trouser-related misadventures, pop art detective stories and tales of pandemic life are all drawn in their own unique way and dominated by different voices, but they share the same real time rhythm. There’s a sense of shrinking scope here, the ultimate expression of which comes in scenes where characters sit and talk to each other through carefully individualised masks:

The above example is particularly extreme, but the overall effect is to create “real world” discussions that feel a lot like blether between social media avatars. “I see the laptop everywhere,” you might say. I worry that my description risks making it sound like the book is an anti-lockdown rant, when part of Campbell’s technique here is to track the way that physical constraints of lockdown living are matched by an increased sense of futility, a sense that railing against the forces that allow the pandemic to thrive is a hopeless task.

Campbell’s skill for arrangement is a clear point of continuity between The Second Fake Death and his earlier work – as O’Neil puts it in her review, “Campbell is clearly trying to draw lines between diagrams” – and it’s in the way the different layers of the story interact that 2023’s Eddie Campbell can be found. The Fate of the Artist was constructed as a paradox, mocking Campbell’s tendency to search for some grand unifying principle while also fulfilling it through grand, playful collage. If its many detours often seemed to lead the reader down the garden path, the digressions in The Second Fake Death hit roadblocks from the get go. The story about the wife commissioning an investigation of her husband – an echo of an earlier Campbell/Niffenegger collaboration – is presented as being one of Campbell’s stories within the text, and even then it’s called off halfway through the book. The dream comics are entertaining diversions, but we see Campbell declaring that “the idea of a book of them isn’t going to work” a mere two panels after they’re introduced. As for the “Covid’s-19” strips, the Eddie Campbell of the main plot is even more scathing about those, calling it “another one of my failures”.

In the end, it all adds up to something though. The light never quite goes out on the “Royler Boom” detective strip, and its hunt for a missing artist (the real Eddie Campbell) and climactic chase through traffic have their corresponding parts in the top level of the story. There’s also a punchline in there about what happens when the years no longer have pants, heavily trailed throughout the book, but it’s better to let you trip over that one yourself. The bit of real world detective work, in which Campbell, Niffenegger and @BarnaclePress work out the identity of the artist behind “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye”, reminded me of the way Campbell changed the ending of How to be an Artist for the Alec omnibus. In the updated version of that story, The Comics Journal printing another artist’s work in its obituary of Stan Drake is used to suggest that posterity might not have much interest in your grand artistic journeys. The Second Fake Death is less depressing: despite ending with the “real” Campbell meeting death after he’s been uncovered, there’s more weight to the idea of another artist being uncovered after his death.

Which brings me to a question: given that it’s the story of creative and social life that has been scunnered by circumstance, why does The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell end up feeling more cheerful than the book it’s coupled with? Well, to get there, we’ll need to get lost on another of our wild tangents.

One thing that stuck me while rereading The Fate of the Artist is that the photograph of Campbell walking Monty is no longer waiting for you at the end of the book.

If memory serves – and it rarely does – Campbell once claimed that this author photo was the last panel of The Fate of the Artist. In this light, the book had a happy ending. Campbell was home and happy, out walking the dog, perhaps even cured of his need to turn life into story. Of course, given that we read this in the form of a story… well, perhaps it wasn’t quite as settled as all that, even with that lovely picture of Monty at the end. This note of disharmony brings me to Chloe Maveal’s typically excellent interview with Campbell for Gutter Review, during which the artist looked back on his earlier work:

But you know, sometimes I look through some of my older books, or like The Lovely Horrible Stuff or Cul-de-Sac, which I did for a Humanoids anthology, and I think “This is monstrous! Is that really who I was? Who I used to be?”

That’s a pretty intense way of describing it! Monstrous? What’s monstrous to you about it?

The acceptance of— well…hm…I guess the anger. There’s an anger there almost all of the time. Usually it’s an anger about money. Looking back now, now that I’m out of that, I managed to — for two decades — I managed to bring up a family as the breadwinner, somehow. We were never delinquent. Everything came out right and everyone came up right. There was never any embarrassment about the car being repossessed. The bills were paid on time. And I think…why was I so angry all the time? Everything was pretty good. Everything came out alright in the end. I don’t know why I was so angry. I would have been a much happier individual if I had just taken a second to notice that everything was working out. Or as my wife had said — “I don’t know why you worry about this stuff all the time! It always comes right in the end!”

Somehow it all comes right in The Second Fake Death in a way it doesn’t in either version of The Fate of the Artist. To quote a recent “anti-memoir”, M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, “All anxieties contain their own mirrors, and you’re always looking for some space to inhabit between the two.” The Second Fake Death exists between anxieties: that Eddie Campbell is still here but in a reduced form, or that he has been replaced. This sounds like a downer but by playfully tracing the flux between these possibilities, Campbell finds a strange freedom. His hybrid aesthetic creates a space where jokes, daft ideas and family members can all breathe easily. If there’s a better description of a comfort in the current moment I’ve yet to hear it, and it’s as good an argument for Campbell’s ever-shifting style as you could ask for.

I would say that though. After all, I’m just another digital phantom.

If the plague era has taught us anything it’s that the power of raw delusion should not be underestimated.  With Future Crimes #1 we set out to prove that anything can be a holiday if you’re suitably alienated from yourself.

• In Personal Development, we explore how being grilled by your boss can be a gateway to conspiracy!
• In Your New Bookshelf: A Lover’s Guide, we explore the previously underappreciated erotic potential of mass produced domesticity!
• In Return to the Borderlands, ex examine the distances you can travel just to get a peak at the back of your own head!

If theme isn’t your thing, Future Crimes #1 also hosts a brief outbreak of poetry and a previously unseen page by Leith-based artist and spirit wrangler Shaky Ghost, who will return with a full strip in issue #2!

UK readers can buy the print edition here, and anyone who’s interested can download a free PDF copy here!

KIND WORDS FROM HANDSOME STRANGERS…

“Inventive, impressive, and surreal” – BrodyQuixote

If you’re in Harrogate for Thought Bubble this weekend, why not stop by to say hello to Mindless Men at tables 27b-28, Comixology Originals Hall?

THIS IS A TEST!  Those who are in attendance but who do not want to stop by our table must submit their answer as to why in the form of an essay.  2000 words on the button.  Those who fail will be subject to sanctions so foul they would make Darkseid wince.

This goes double for SILENCE! to Astonish Live, which will be held from 15:30-16:15 at ROOM 2 on Saturday 13th November, and will feature special guests Al Ewing, Becky Cloonan, Hannah Berry and Rachel Stott alongside your usual hosts Al Kennedy, Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die.

Anyway, if you want to stop by our table, here’s who’ll be lurking there and what they’ll have in store for you…

DAN WHITE AKA THE BEAST MUST DIE

You read it here first, but from tomorrow onward you can carry it around with you like an unusually lush grudge.  We’re talking words, we’re talking pictures, we’re talking a series of gag comics that might curdle the very milk in your eye – that’s right people, we’re talking about the new hardcover collection of Terminus.

As discussed on SILENCE!: Inside the Wanker’s Studio, Dan’s reworked some of these old strips to tighten up early episodes, which have been bound in a beautiful package by the legendary Comic Printing UK.

Dan’s also returned to comics’ favourite double act with Cindy and Biscuit: Year One, a newspaper format comic detailing the early days of our heroes in a series of neat, Bill Watterson-inflected adventures.

Here’s what Broken Fontier’s Andy Oliver, who you still worship as a god despite prior warnings, had to say about it:

With previous Cindy and Biscuit editions all available digitally, Cindy and Biscuit: Year One is a perfect print edition entry point into their world and is entirely accessible for new readers. This time White has adopted a Sunday Comics broadsheet format to take us back to an earlier point in Cindy’s life when she was not much older than a toddler and her relationship with Biscuit was just beginning. As such, these six stories are mostly far more light-hearted in approach, stripped of much of the ever lurking melancholy to be found in her (chronologically) later misadventures and paced more to build up to punchline endings (small excerpts of strips only here!). For those more versed the Cindy and Biscuit universe, though, the foundations for what is to come are very much in evidence in a one-shot that both parodies and celebrates the whole “Year One” comics publishing stunt.

One day the whole world will want to hold this comic.  You can do so tomorrow – what a treat!

FRASER GEESIN AKA GARY LACTUS 

In his top secret alter-ego of Big Massive Genius Fraser Geesin, Gary Lactus has created Purple Hate Balloon in collaboration with Laurie Rowan.

Since I am still obliged to crawl to Andy Oliver as the whole town of Bedford Falls was obliged to crawl to Potter, I will once again quote from his Broken Frontier review:

Purple Hate Balloon is the story of Roger and his pet Susan, the first of a breed of new genetically engineered floating animals known as Labralloons who feed on anger. Given this, Roger has had a valve fitted to his head to let off the excess pressure of being in a state of perpetual rage to satiate Susan’s hunger. Susan’s soothing flatulence on digesting anger though is manifested in the comforting aromas of fabric conditioners, freshly baked bread, and satsumas at Christmas, providing a sense of catharsis for those around her…

You can certainly look for social commentary in Geesin and Rowan’s story, or even project some on it if you want. I’m sure there are parallels and analogies to be drawn. Or you could just absorb it at face value as a self-contained tale with a darkly comedic appeal that is both sublime and delicious in its delivery. This is also some of Geesin’s very best cartooning to date with often cramped panels and slightly distorted characters adding to that skewed sense of a world like ours that has gone off-kilter.

Fraser’s art has been getting better and better over the past few years, and this looks to continue that trend in a suitably ludicrous style.

Best to find out about the fuss and ruckus before it finds out about you!

ANDREW HICKEY AKA ANDRE WHICKEY 

Fresh from his appearance on BBC’s Top Gear, Andrew will be in town to podcast live into the faces of friends and enemies alike.

Know him.  Love him.  Fear him.  Support him on Patreon.

In an effort to avoid becoming so bland that he stopped registering on the average taste bud during lockdown, Illogical Volume (stop writing about yourself in the third person! – ed)  has kept himself busy making comics and zines.  The following three projects will be making their Thought Bubble debut this weekend…

Not Because of the People 

Four stories about abandoned places and the people who live there.  Walk around a series of landscapes that may or may not seem familiar, maybe even real.  You are not alone.

Previews available here, here, here and here.

Future Crimes #1

If the plague era has taught us anything, it’s that the power of raw delusion should not be underestimated. Future Crimes #1 proves that anything can be a holiday from yourself. Building a new bookshelf can be an erotic adventure.  Being grilled by your boss can be a gateway to conspiracy.  Actually going on holiday can be a dull day staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror.  Believe.

Bad Poetry

Like good poetry, bad poetry knows no boundaries. Unlike good poetry, bad poetry doesn’t really have any sense of what it’s doing.

One for the true aesthetes in the audience, we’re sure.

DAN COX AND JOHN RIORDAN AKA THE HITSVILLE BOYS

Fresh from their adventures through heaven and hell, Dan and John are back in the building to flog Hitsville UK, the cult musical-pop-art-soap-opera comic book collected in 240 pages of psychedelic colour.

Follow a carnival of angel-voiced grotesques, monster-hunters, imaginary robots, hip-hop agitators, faded 80s starlets, 60s throwbacks, drug-addled producers and demonic accountants as they try to hit the big time.

“Like comics and music? Then get Hitsville UK” – Stuart Maconie, BBC 6 Music

John will also have copies of his gorgeous illustrated guide to Music’s Cult Artists on sale if you really feel like treating yourself this weekend.

FAIR WARNING: THIS POST IS PROBABLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK UNLESS YOU ARE CURRENTLY WORKING FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM

When it comes to the space between desire and action in these comics, the only thing that speaks as loud as money is its absence.  Okay, that’s not quite right, the presence of the devil also speaks pretty clearly in some of these stories, but we’ll get back to those stray shadows in a minute.  Right now I want to talk about a certain kind of freedom.  Right now I want to talk about what’s going on in all those rooms.

When money first makes itself known in the Locas stories, it’s distorting life elsewhere, in another country – and well, you know how that story goes.  The fact that Penny Century is introduced in this same story is almost certainly coincidental – Hernandez was still finding his way at that point, after all – but it doesn’t feel that way when you look back on these early scenes.  Penny’s brand of expressive, ultra-femme fantasy will be synonymous with questions of money and power book throughout its run.  Here as elsewhere she is not necessarily the source of this influence, but she knows where it is and where she hopes it might take her.

Before Maggie the Mechanic has closed out, Maggie has come home to Californian poverty and life with her punk pals.  Money is now something that lives with Penny, away in the labyrinthine halls of H.R. Costigan’s house:

Despite the horns, Costigan isn’t the devil but like I said, we’ll get there eventually…