Mindless Ones

You could listen to the similarly titled Motley Crüe song to accompany this post, but I’d advise against it. Bit rusty, hold on:

It’s all been done before, of course.

First!

So I had a busy, shitty day yesterday and needed to unwind in the pub with some comics before heading home. This is the fruits of that labour, so forgive me if they seem a bit…slapdash.

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Just time for one last bite of the week-old bread before the supermarket chucks it in the dumpster, from where it will be cycled on to assorted tramps, birds and City sandwich-bar proprietors.

Which of those are you, dear reader?

Yeah yeah, Wednesday morning, what a surprise.

Comics I only bloody went and got this week, didn’t I.

Keep it neil yo

Hellblazer 251-253, by Peter Milligan, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Stefano Landini, Jamie Grant

David Peace (& Derek Raymond’s ghost) aside, Peter Milligan has to be the last best hope for finding John Constantine’s ideal writer. So far he’s had a promising, indicative five-pager in the Christmas Special Issue #250, and these three issues, comprising a single arc – SCAB. (And a new issue came out this week – will have a look at that over the weekend maybe.)

Take the wide road you big pig’s wank

Grant Morrison loves the Flash. That’s a fact. In fact it’s a Flash Fact.

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* Bollocks, knew I wouldn’t get this done until Twsday morning.

Whatever. This is me giving up superhero comics.

You can jump 8 times further there.

Sometime in the nineties the cry rang out: Marvel was gonna put the “character back into comics”.

This was news to me.

As far as I was concerned the Marvelverse, with the possible exception of the X-Men, was still firmly rooted in a pre-Watchmen era. It was only the energizing touch of the man Miller that rescued the company from my utter contempt. DC on the other hand, was, in my rather woolly analysis, the natural home of adjectives like mature, and visionary, the only company where character was likely to flourish. My case rested upon little more than DC’s willingness to publish The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, and Arkham Asylum, and the serious moonlight cast over the DCU by Watchmen, and the Vertigo imprint.

While I’m now well versed in the legacy of Marvel’s legendary creators, if I’m honest I remain skeptical about Marvel’s claims to the concept of character. I grant that Lee and Ditko’s willingness to subordinate super to man was likely revolutionary back in the late sixties, and that they quite possibly changed the landscape of comics, but the reality is that while character is certainly the focus of many Marvel titles the characters in question have seldom been allowed much more than superficial depth – the MU as a place of histrionics rather than history. That, even as its best, seldom produces character studies with more going for them than I’d expect to see in a well realized soap opera. Don’t get me wrong, I think good soaps have their own virtues, and, and this is important, I’m not sure that I want to see rigorous character studies in (many) superhero comics, but I think it’s worth pointing out that by treating the term character as a monolith, and not admitting to its multiple meanings – the different ways in which the centrality of the concept can be approached, from Dynasty to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe – Marvel, and its die hard fans, are perhaps heaping undeserved glories on themselves. I mean, we’ve all read the Ultimates, right?

Guess what? I actually talk about Born Again after the jump

Download!
[audio:http://mindlessones.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/vaultoftymbus2.mp3]

This week, Tymbus talked to me about the following very important subjects whilst I punished him:

• Dark Avengers #1
• Simpsons Comics #150
• The Strange Deaths of Batman
• Mr. Terrific

Some nice supplementary pictures after the jump…