Mindless Ones

I’ve — sort of — fallen out of love with comics.

I don’t get to the comic shop as often now as I used to.

Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of peace and ordered calm, protected against all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power. But this was to change. Suddenly, and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history…

I deny this reality. The reality is a computation matrix!

As previously mentioned, the Mindless dream team of The Beast Must Die, Illogical Volume and Andrew “Mandrew” Hickey made it down to Leeds for this year’s Thought Bubble comics convention. These are their recollections of the event, as distorted by the passing of time, sleep-deprivation, alcohol consumption, and the brain-scrambling dazzle of a white lounge suit:

Enter the Mindless (23 Chambers)

There are many, many reasons why I might be considered an idiot, but if you were going to make a list – and believe me, I’ve made a few such lists in my time – then I’ve got a fair idea of what the top three should look like.

I’ll spare you numbers one and two for now, but number three is easy. You see, I must be an idiot, because I don’t think I understood mortality until I watched Transformers: The Movie for the first time. Yeah, Transformers, “robots in disguise” that turned into planes and cars and tanks, and had their own crappy TV show. That was where my first intimation of mortality came from. Told you I was an idiot.

The realisation that all of this would one day stop had never sunk in at Sunday School, where the focus was more on old stories than on the possible absence of narrative. It hadn’t made any impression on me when various distant relatives had died – they had seemed like minor characters in my story, and their deaths didn’t truly register with me at the time. It didn’t even really occur to me in the early parts of Transformers: The Movie, despite the fact that whole planets were being destroyed and beloved characters were being gunned down like so many extras (with all weapons having been switched from tickle to mangle between TV series and movie, naturally). But OPTIMUS FUCKING PRIME, my favourite toy and childhood hero, dying on-screen, in an astonishingly drawn out manner? Yeah, I felt that, and it scared the living shit out of me.

See, here? One day your sentence will be up. Full stop. Story over. The end.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to Simon Furman in a minute!

Occasionally, certain men of a certain age will run out of things to say to each other. Conversation grinds to a dry halt, and the only course of action is to resort to a comfortable zone of the collective consciousness, and wallow in the soft haze of nostalgia, of endless Saturday mornings in pyjamas, and Robots in Disguise. Let us call this place the Transformers Room. If you crack the door open and gently peer in, you can see the Mindless Ones sitting around, comparing their first Transformers and touching their winkies with excitement. Awwwwww! Come on, let’s go and join them…

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‘thing is, i know we at mindless ones don’t really feel the need to justify these things or to bother kicking the argument about the way they might at, say, funnybook babylon, but i think the answer to the question ‘does bruce wayne work in cosmic scenarios? – in this PARTICULAR cosmic scenario?’ and the conversation one could have around it is probably an interesting one.

for geeks.’

But that’s okay, we know a few. And this is their home

Pree-zentin’ what will probably be the most comprehensive interview you read with Patrick Meaney, the director of

…this week, anyway.

Nobody sees the show, not till my heart says so/That special something, that you are hunting = under the cut

Well this. It’s a review of Joe the Barbarian #1 a new Vertigo comic by Our#1 Squeeze and Sean Murphy (who did that Hellblazer story with Jason Aaron a while back, the one with the bloke fucking a dead dog in it. I knew there was promise in that one.) It’s a funny bit of thing, the CBR review, vintage webstuff. Favourite by Mindless consent are the comments ‘holy shit you are a sad man in the internet’ and ‘Bendis could have done it in ten’.

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