Mindless Ones

This post has moved to Adam and Amy’s new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut, the new home of all their Mad Men posts.

http://shesanastronaut.com/post/47391522503/the-other-woman

This post has moved to Adam and Amy’s new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut, the new home of all their Mad Men posts.

http://shesanastronaut.com/post/47303588128/lady-lazarus

Being: the third in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

I know one thing – they’re out there and I’m in here. Or rather, we are. Burrowed into precariously rented homes, needing increasingly mutilated services, awaiting mail that brings nothing but threats and bad news, painfully aware that social participation is as demanding of contacts, salesmanship and resources as much as livable employment, vaguely bewildered at a city that announces NOT FOR YOU from every corner: This is the Condition of the Working Class in Bizarro Town. Occasionally supermarkets, burger bars and pasty chains beckon for our devalued labour; if we can demonstrate the ‘right attitude’ (note: I can’t). Failing that, providers of job-seeking ‘services’ extract their own value promising to train us in the ‘right attitude’ and mandatory salesmanship. Otherwise we can shut the fuck up, get off the streets, and watch TV shows informing us that we’re scum. Or, as far as one’s amour propre can allow, talk to faceless strangers on machines that mine and collect details of every careless utterance. This is how neoliberalism ends: Not with a bang, but whimpering, numbing Dystopian cliche. A design against life.

(Pere Lebrun, A Hungry Gorge)

Click here for extra added haunting!

Botswana Beast: A lot of folk seem to be wetting themselves about the quality of this episode, which – I mean, I liked it obviously, Pete Campbell being a prime turd and getting an unlikely comeuppance, but it didn’t seem so tightly structured or to have so much of an “aboutness” to it? I guess last ep was maybe – arguably – a bit too on the nose for some of it, this was more about just the characters? (My favourite MM ep is still the first season’s closer, just for frame of reference).

Amypoodle: Oh The Wheel is a very good episode. Very sad, amazing ad pitch, etc. So people are getting excited over this one? I can see that. I mean, I preferred last week’s (despite on the noseness), but that’s a personal thing to do with liking ghost stories/Joan, but Signal 30 was still pretty bloody good. In some ways it was very traditional fare with its alcohol greased dinner party in a suburban dream home and Pete Campbell acting like an ultra dick (which is of course going to be the main focus here, isn’t it?), and it came complete with lots of nods to the past, particularly the first season, so it’s exactly the sort of episode someone who likes Mad Men should like.

But it very definitely was about something: Status. Status and Power.

More on status, power and Pete Campbell’s Don Draper meltdown after the cut!

Being: the second in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

If you’re going to talk about Cradlegrave, you’ve pretty much got to face up to this image at some point:

Stripped of context it’s just a doll, just a tired horror-movie prop, a signifier of terror rather than something actually terrifying. In context however, this dull prop seems far more potent:

The sense of surprise, that feeling of “what the fuck is that face doing in the middle of this conversation?”, is enough to give the image some fresh charge here.  The last panel of the sequence hints at the answer, but for the duration of the two panels before it you could be forgiven for thinking you were in another, more Lynchian kind of horror story.

Still, even the most bewildering emanations in Cradlegrave trace back to fleshy, non-Lynchian sources, so it’s just as well that there’s more to the this sequence than  lifeless eyes and startling incongruity.

Look into these eyes, and tell me what you see…

Or Flex Mentallo: A Moonrock Murder Mystery!!!!

Okay, as you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo is a very good comic by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, a four issue Dennis Potter style drama in which a young man who [may or may not] have taken an overdose of paracetamol looks back at this life through the lens of superhero comics.

As you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo hadn’t been reprinted until now because of various preposterous legal issues.

Now it’s finally been reprinted in a very handsome hardcover package, you [may or may not] be aware that it’s been the victim of a strange recolouring job, the sort of recolouring that transforms Flex Mentallo’s greatest foe The Mentallium Man from a Jolly Rancher nightmare…

…into the grayest daydream you never had:

Now, I’ll throw a couple of kind words in the direction new colourist Peter Doherty in a minute, but it has to be said that anyone who thinks that a character called the Mentallium Man, who is an exaggerated parody of an old-fashioned comic book villain, needs to look all clean and boring like that is just plain wrong.

Actually, thinking about it, I’d go so far as to say that anyone who prefers this new incarnation of the character needs blasted with all five types of Flex’s own Kryptonite-derivative “Mentallium” at once:

Sadly we never find out what the fifth type of Mentalium, “Lamb and Turkey”, does to The Hero of the Beach, but I think we can take a guess and that our guesses will all be equally delicious.

Tasty tasy dogshit, mmmm!

This week we’re out in force. We’ve now got Illogical Volume added to the roster of mighty discussonaughts (‘Tremble before our discourse!’) So, yeah, they’re definitely a cast iron weekly thing now, these Mad Men posts.

Amypoodle: Although I haven’t checked, I think I can safely guarantee that over at Basket of Kisses there’s a debate genteely raging wrt whether or not this episode was fattist.

Illogical Volume: “Don’t you want to get back into that incredible closet of yours.” – American tv shows do love to fat up their pretty people, huh? It’s everywhere, from Monica’s fatsuit in Friends (“lol, remember when she was too fat to be in this TV show”) to Fat Lee Adama’s temporary command of Battlestar Galactica, in which fatness is a sign of weakness, something to be overcome on the road back to becoming a proper character.

Betty’s fat period is probably closer to the latter than the former, but we’ll see how it plays from here. Mad Men is a more nuanced sort of show, so – hopes, I still have them! To be honest, I found it hard to focus on that element of this episode because of the way it blurred into the “I found a lump” plot. It was almost too much drama for one episode (which is also very Betty somehow, plus it really amplified the sense that she’s frozen in her new life, that the skills she’s been told to value might not be much use to her if her body won’t oblige), you know?

Still, Betty’s… it’s hard not to empathise with her current situation. Plus while “I found a lump” stories are easy to overdo, they’re also scary stories to which we can all relate, sadly. And then you get to “your mother is obese” and “it’s good to be put through the ringer to find out I’m just fat” and it’s… ooft, the lady, she deals with horrible situations in some horrible ways. It was fashionable to slate January Jones’ performance in Sex-Men: First Class last year, but she was pretty great here, I thought. Her face conveyed just the right mix of blank terror and blank huffiness in pretty much every scene she was in.

Ad Mindless: Has everyone noticed that Betty actually lives in a castle now?

Click here to read the rest of this monster roundtable. There’s princesses, castles, and fairytale princes, so even bronys should dig it!

Don’t worry, despite the title, this isn’t an attempt to take on the SILENCE! boys at their own game – if I was trying to do that I would have sabotaged Gary Lactus’ spaceship while he was up visiting me in Scorchland, then suggested myself as a replacement for the podcast while “comforting” The Beast Must Die. What’s the point in playing if you’re not playing to win, right?

Right.

Talking Comics is an attempt to reanimate that stinkiest of walking corpses, the comics review post. Now I could have called in Mister Attack aka The Eurythmic King of Nowhere aka The Boy Fae the Heed aka Flippant She-Creature like I have the last couple of times in the hopes of making these grizzly bones dance, but I decided to place my faith in technology.

So: rather than writing reviews of last week’s comics the old fashioned way, with fists, I decided to speak my brains into twitter via my smart phone and see what happened.  Unfortunately, since I’m a Scottish, and since the Scottish are natural enemies of voice recognition technology, the results are a little scrambled:

Daredevil #10, by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera, Javier Rodriguez and Joe Carmagna.

See, told ya!

More nonce-sense follows!

Being: the first in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

ONE – If you didn’t look past this cover-cum-promotional piece for Cradlegrave, you might think that it was telling a very specific sort of story, the sort of story you might describe as being either “tabloid shit” or “a bit Jamie Delano” depending on which of those two targets was more worthy of disdain.

When I first discussed Cradlegrave back in December, regular comments thread contributor Thrills said he was looking now that he’d got past his concerns that it would “be like that Denise Mina Hellblazer where ‘hoodies’ are ‘demons’.”

Ah, so it’s tabloid shit that smells like Jamie Delano.  The worst of both worlds.  Fuck.

TWO – Despite the fact that the “Fear they Neighbour” text is missing, the cover of the collected edition still aims to make a similar impression:

To my eye, there’s something less real about the four hooded figures in this reformatted cover though.  The overly harsh, pixelated light that gleams off of their shoulders is even more unnatural when set against an all-black background, a background that now seems to expand outwards from the empty spaces where four young faces should be.

These are absent phantoms, not flesh and blood monsters, and while I wouldn’t want to pretend that they’re being deliberately undermined here I still find it hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously.

The only fear in this image is the fear you bring with you, be it fear of “savage” yoofs or of dehumanising right wing rhetoric…

Click here to drink the black milk… IF YOU DARE!