Mindless Ones

bobsy: My own and only objection to how Batman Incorporated is proceeding, amidst so far a hat-trick of rapid high impact 21st century superhero comics, is the slight familiarity of the beats as the overarching story begins to emerge. Though it wasn’t to be expected, more refreshing and radical than those ominous bell-notes as the latest cosmic conspiracy begins to emerge from the murk would be a comic that stands entirely on its own, 22 or whatever pages of unencumbered violence and costumes, a purity of blank abstracted spectacle that doesn’t even pretend to that common fallacy: that a wider world exists beyond the totality of its stapled covers.

Minor quibble best dispensed with early. This was a fun issue, and in the so-far absence of Annotations Goddess Uzi Mary, la belle annotateur sans merci, a few pages in particular require a closer look.

Click to find out why three pages of BatMinc3 are better than six issues of Knight & Squire

We’re back.

Round 2

Fight!

BOOM

…said Steve the shop. Luckily, I had the issue in my hand already, thereby narrowly dodging another cruel flechette of conversational shrapnel, saved from a fresh scar of shame and age gouged from the old character armour.

Candy covers – Pic’n’Mix (Woolies RIP)

If it hadn’t a been for Jimmy Jump

“It’s all my fault,” my Grandad told me, searching through his pockets for his pipe tobacco, “I should never have introduced you to Aubrey Beardsley.” There was a moment of silence before things slid into place, smooth as a Tetris block. My mind cast itself back over the last 15 years. 15 years spent hopping from books to records, comics to films. 15 years spent on my hands and knees shining torches into obscured corners and inhaling musty spores. The Unica Zurn I finished the day before, the Antonin Artaud the day before that. My first ecstatic discovery of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. My first viewings of Akira and El Topo. A host of patterns began to emerge, way-station lights twinkling the location of minor obsessions and remembered moments: Me and my brother were the only people dancing at the Boredoms gig…That gas mask was only a fiver…Fuck me The Invisibles is amazing, I haven’t thought about this stuff in yea…I hope Naked Lunch is as good as I’ve already told everyone it is…I’d kiss you but I’m on acid and I’m just not sure that my lips could stand it (kissherkissherkissherkissher).
Names combined and re-combined in the murk. Weaving together and separating like bacteria dancing – the mind altering fungus of the Tabula Rasa: Maruo and Hino, Blake to Brian Jones, Savoy, Sinclair, Huysmans, Cale. Answers to an Escher designed crossword filled in in Guinness by an ape with no more idea why he’s doing it than frogspawn does of its cosmic destiny. I was staring in to the Jet-black-streaked-with-vivid-crimson contents of my overloaded brain pan and it made. Me. Fucking. Hard.

More after the jump

In 2005, when I was 29, I underwent a second teenhood, and my flat at the time was more like a non-stop party than anything resembling a home. Seriously. You couldn’t get any sleep on a Friday night, and when you’re expected to go to work at 10 o clock the next day, that’s no fun at all. Having said that, I really enjoyed rolling in four hours afterwards and joining in with the drug-bleached bedlam. There’s no way, just three short years later, I could keep up with myself then, and that’s probably for the good, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a great deal of fun while it lasted. Obviously we had very little money, and we were all boys, so the flat was always a fucking state and the decor and furnishings were sparse and basic to say the least. Inspite of this, however, I was always fairly house-proud – I just had to figure out how to spruce up the living room cum kitchen on a tight budget.

So I raided my comic book collection and 100% came to the rescue.

More after the jump