Mindless Ones

For the transcript click here

Here’s a recording of a Grant Morrison interview concerning mainly his new book Supergods.  Bobsy did the interview with small interjections from Gary Lactus.  Here’s the nice picture on the back of the book:

Lovely

Thanks to Grant and the folk at Jonathan Cape for their help in setting up this interview.  Apologies for sound quality.

EXPECT:

Inadequate speakerphone with buzzing!

Intrusive street noise!

Phone line breaking up!

Phone and recording device falling over!

We need to do a transcript which will appear here soon but we thought you might want to hear the whole thing.

Click to download
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Grant-Morrison-Interview.mp3]

If you’re new here you might want to have a look around. We have lots more thoughts on Morrison’s work.

Amy Poodle on the Invisibles for The Comics Journal
Illogical Volume on the Filth
Batman annocommentations (probably quite different from anything you’ve read elsewhere)
Seaguy annocommentations
Amy Poodle on All Star Superman

And that’s just the tip of a very big iceberg.

Being: a speculative essay on the self-regulating limits of reality/a celebration of impurity/ a demonstration of the many sickening uses of human waste/ a manifesto for kinder, gentler wank fantasies/a failed attempt to write a feminist critique of The Filth/ and, finally, an embarrassed declaration that it’s time for something great …

1. In The End, Everybody Wins

There’s a moment in the last issue of Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s scatological sci-fi horror comedy, The Filth, which seems to me to perfectly capture the panic of the moment. Greg Feely/Ned Slade, negotiator for the covert organisation known as The Hand and weird, porno-drenched bachelor, has finally snapped. After twelve issues of black comedy and painful existential eruptions, Feely has had enough. His pet cat Tony has died, depriving him of the only love he knew, and now he’s taking his protest right to the very heart of things, to his superior officer Mother Dirt.

As he storms through The Crack, Greg is confronted by his fellow Hand agent, Miami, who reminds him that he has been recycled into the very system he’s rebelling against. Before he was Hand negotiator Ned Slade, she claims that Greg “wouldn’t want to know” what he was:

You, Thunderstone, Bemmer… the whole crazy gang of social activists… You were all gonna destroy the foundation stone of the world.

The system is perfect, Ned. It has to be perfect; it’s all there is. Attacking The Hand is like attacking your own immune system. [1]

Does this seem familiar to anyone else? As the foundations are shaken and explosions go off all around, a wide-eyed Miami tries to stop Greg by telling him, what… that there aren’t any other options? It’s a statement that would seem perfectly at home in our current political climate. Don’t like the way things are going? Think that terrible acts are being carried out in your name? Feel a bottomless pit open up inside you whenever you even think about Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Nick Clegg? Find yourself choking on your own sick when you hear Chancellor/arch bastard George Osborne give a speech to the Tory party conference in which he lays the blame for Moneygeddon (© Charlie Brooker & co 2009) purely on the (admittedly very guilty) Labour party, as though Blair and the boys weren’t just following Thatcher’s lead?

What about when he goes on to tell the poorest UK citizens that they’re going to have to pull their socks up, or claims that he “believes” in public services – does that make you feel like punching your own face off?  Well, tough! This is the way the world works now, history has ended and there are no alternatives, so suck it up or go home. If you’ve still got one, that is.

Vote Labour or Vote Tory, hell you can even Vote Lib Dem if you like. This is what you’re getting, this half-cut shadow life.  All other options have been deemed non-mutual, incompatible with life as we know it! And may the gods help you if you want to make any bigger changes – under the current system, your proposals cannot be countenanced!

And what’s Greg’s response to all of this? How does he react to this bold statement?

Well, he storms out, eyes blazing like a fucking demon:

But hey, wouldn’t you? [2]

Immerse yourself in Morrison and Weston’s Filth after the jump!

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

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

Sinatoro: It’s a roadtrippy movie due for global release in 2012, written & directed by the team of Grant Morrison (we heart 4evs) and Adam Egypt Mortimer (video director bloke man).

It was announced just the other week at the San Diego Comic-Con with an emphasis on obviously how rad-awesome-skill it’s going to be, but also promises of how original new, innovative etc. the whole production is going to be, from promotion to the shoot to the DVD commentary no doubt. (We’ll do that by the way: exclusive superfan commentary by us for the Blu Ray 2-disc edition, yeah? Who could say no?) What this means for a no-cash indie flick like this is, inevitably, crowdsourced marketing with a viral twist. ‘X-Ray Cinema’ someone called it, not the next step on from 3D with added cancer risk, but referring presumably to the avowed full disclosure & transparency from the production team that we’re told will be part and parcel of the movie’s gestation.

Here are the basics, spreading linkmulch around like the finest organic man-manure:

Web: Sinatoro.com
Faceplace: Facebook.com/sinatoro
Twitter: Twitter.com/sinatoro

(Plenty links on those pages above to some interviews at IO9, CBR and other places, which we’ll no doubt be referring to a bit throughout this post, some of which go in to the movie in some depth, given how nascent the whole project still is. The total disclosure thing seems genuine at least, although time will tell if this approach has been wise – I still want the movie to surprise me, ‘know? Whatever, good for them because they’ve been busy, putting the word out there proactively, which hopefully means they have been able to find backers, rather than the reverse. [which it might! – Zom])

So far so un-unusual ho-hum…. ah, who’re we kidding? it would be easy, too easy to be sniffy about this shameless grab to keep their promo costs down, but come on: this is Grant Morrison and his chum –  our hearts were theirs years ago. We’re going to take them at their word: stick the accumulated Sinatoro stuff through the usual Mindless Ones Dot Com reading machine, and see what comes out the other side.

That’s right, we’re going to take a poster and some interviews and smoosh them together and pretend they’re worthy of the same kind of analysis as a fully formed and complete work of art! What of it? As a wise Montell once said: this is how we do it, fucko!

It’s probably an unbelievably bad idea to take DC marketing dept. at their word, but anyway. They have a difficult job, I guess.

Und so! Vorwaerts! The initial idea for this was a liveblog, but that would have involved promotion and shit, I am quite the most fundamentally lazy – physically, critically, intellectually – person I know, and also been a pretty fucking tortuous read, dying to turn the page, but having to bash out a satisfactory update before I could do so. So that didn’t happen; what we will have is the 7 pages in a polka-dotted reporter’s pad (I thought that shit was red, I was gonna give you a photo and shit, call this the Red Casebook but nah; I obviously did not buy this pad), my CASENOTES interspersed with some proper blogination. You can of course choose to believe these casenotes are an after-the-fact “ret-con”, as much a fait accompli as most Grant Morrison superhero scripts, even although Mindless Ones is the very definition of elegant verité and bold realism, and that’ll be a mystery too. Do what you like, I won’t stop you.

But one day, tomorrow, peoples will be reading Batman #700 on their infoSlates, their powerTablets, and it’ll be my polka-on-grey casebook anno’s there first; that’s my dream, and it is definitely good to have dreams. FUTURECOMICSSS.

We begin; welcome to MindlessOnes.com for all your Grant Morrison Batman needs. Choose MindlessOnes.com

PAGES 1, 2 & 3

One of the reasons Morrison loves working on Batman, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is because the character’s rapid response time, both intellectually and physically, suits his high velocity, compressed approach. Here, the guy, who I should probably add is experiencing catastrophic memory loss, has been booted thousands of years across time and half drowned, but does that slow him down? No, the fuck. He launches himself into the scrap with the uprooted sarlac pit (more on that guy later) without a second thought.

I’m fairly certain the idea that there’s a connection between Gaelic and Cthulhu-speak/fifth dimensionese isn’t an original one, and I wonder if Grant was thinking about the connection here. Annie is a first generation immigrant after all, and a pagan at that, so it would make sense that she’d speak some kind of aboriginal british tongue. Also, I’m choosing to believe she’s intoning a healing spell, which is interesting and a nice twist because lovecraftian magic is generally considered the blackest of the black. There’s the implicit suggestion that it was only later on, once the puritans were done with it, that the Cthulhu mythos gained the negative associations it has today.

The talismans represent the latest movement of Grant’s superheroes as gods theme, but because this is Batman there’s a hard(ish) sf explanation as opposed to the more fantastical noodlings of Flex Mentallo or ASS. They are pregnant with the idea, however, what with the DC pantheon zipping around the timestream like they’re popping down the shops or something, that should she clutch his sigil hard enough and whisper his name, even a slave in ancient Rome could summon Superman to her aid. Some future Superman I’m going to write in the future will definitely have this omni-hearing, that’s for sho’.

Amy beyond the end of time continues after the jump

We’re going to take a look at some FUCK YEAH!* moments and see what makes them tick, and, you know, hopefully get all FUCK YEAH! about ’em all over again/for the first time. Needless to say, here be spoilers. Many, many, many spoilers. Sensitive children may wish to avert their gaze.

Now then, let’s have a look at the Morrison penned, Porter pencilled JLA #3, and a seriously bat [sic] dose of arse kicking

*Credit is due to Dave “Longbox/Society of Dave” Campbell for coming up with the concept

More? FUCK YEAH!

We’re back.

Round 2

Fight!

BOOM