Mindless Ones

In today’s cranium crippling cast we hear the beer taking hold as we each proclaim exactly how Batman we are right now. At the time of recording, Batman #679 had just come out and the movie was still pretty fresh in our minds.

Look! There’s Bobsy reading Batman #679 on the balcony of my spaceship in space where I fly around wearing my excellent space hemet!

Download!!!!!! (NSFW)[audio:http://mindlessones.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/mopodcast003.mp3]

Woah, new comics, new (importantly, much as I was surprised/appalled to find myself thoroughly enjoying Legion of Three Worlds last week. Oh, Geoff Johns, I’ve hated you for so very long and now… I don’t even know any more) Grant Morrison Final Crisis tie-in. It is the excite. I have no money.

(Which cover did you buy, Dimensioneers? Story cover is best, I find. Iconic pose cover is dull.)

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Welcome weary travellers. Come rest yourselves a while in the basement. Mind that mildewed copy of Razzle and that box of broken Transformers. Sit yourselves down between that crate of warped vinyl (can I interest anyone in some vintage James Galway? Or maybe a copy of Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’?), and that decomposing Garfield, and I’ll delight you with some recent treasures from the Beast’s Bargain Basement…

In order to overcome the trauma of shelling out £2/$3 for a new comic (but wow, ain’t it just worth it with all the time and money they’ve put into that turd-polishing computer colour!?!), I have recently returned to the blessed womb of cheap-as-fuck back issues, and it’s got to be said, found some true gems. And some shite. But it’s cheap shite, and that’s what counts.

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Mustn’t let like the finest issue of Batman in years come out and not do a bit about it. Maybe some annotations, but honestly there’s a few good people doing that so I’m a bit annotated-out.

So we’re just going to have the big question and answer it, right before your eyes, with perfect accuracy. How this works is, we’re going to run through my favouriite suspects and ask the I-Ching who The Black Glove is, and then we’ll know. A couple of posts back Savage reminded me of the same Storm Shadow 6 page story story Morrison wrote for Marvel UK’s Action Force Monthly about twenty years ago, which was my earliest memory of anything at all I-Chingy. Genuine comics knowledge, one of those genuine four-colour epiphanies – that pedagogic element they always talk about. That was how I learnt of the I-Ching. The man himself has appeared in Morrison’s Batman’s run too, remember, so it all somehow seems appropriate. I don’t do the I-Ching much (going to call it Yijing from now on, I think that’s more proper nowadays), because Yijing is never wrong, and always eerily accurate. That’s a bit freaky, and raises a few questions I rarely have time to mull over these days, so I tend to leave it alone. But in all my experience of using it, it’s never wrong, and that means it’s sometimes been often useful, like now.

Hold tight!

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So we thought we’d try linkblogging… I have no idea how Graeme McMillan or Dirk Deppey did and do do this on a daily; this is about a week or so’s worth of what I remembered to put in here, seemed interesting at the time…

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Let me get a few things clear: I don’t have a bloody clue who Talky Tawny is. I’ve never encountered an Atomik Knight before (either in the DCU or during a afternoon of live roleplay). Christ, I even know fuck all about the New Gods.

AND I DON’T CARE.

For those that do care, I say this: Why on Great Cthulhu’s soon to be trampled Earth do you give a monkeys?

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“How long would you say Heroic Ages last, Wally?”

– Jay Garrick, the Flash (I)

“Twenty years, according to Jones and Jacobs. The Golden Age lasted until 1955, the Silver Age until 1975, but the Dark Age just ended in ’95. That’s why it’s still too early to say what this new age is going to be called yet.“

– Wally West, the Flash (III)

Flash #134, cover-date Feb 98, script by Mark Millar & Grant Morrison

It always comes back to the Flash, in the end: from a purely DC pantheon angle, it’s easy to see how the missing middle mantle above, Barry Allen, and his death (“outracing the tachyon at the heart of the Anti-Monitor’s anti-matter cannon…[he] became one with the other side of light.” – so impossibly romantic, that) resonate with the term “Dark Age”, certainly as used pejoratively.

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I can’t actually believe it’s been 15 years since we last had an actual Ambush Comic on the shelves. Barring a few minor cameos the last comic fully dedicated to Irwin Schwab was 1992’s Ambush Bug: Nothing Special. The best thing about this new mini, is that Giffen & co. have picked up exactly where things were left. Same supporting cast (Cheeks! Argh!yle! Jonni DC), same relentless punning and bad gags, same irreverence for the DCU at large (the best joke involves literal women-in-refidgerators, and gives DC editorial a rightly deserved kick to the balls).

Giffen’s art is relatively unchanged – slightly looser perhaps, which might in part be due to the fact that he’s spent the last decade doing breakdowns for other artists. But it’s a joy to see him on full art duties, and the Bug brings out the best in him. Also Robert Loren Fleming is back on dialogue. Where did he go? Do you think he left comics in pursuit of *shudder* artistic credibility? Well this should put the kibosh on that…

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Aww, who am I kidding? I always loved the jokercopter.

Especially in the first issue of Grant’s new run. Now I don’t know if it was included as a direction in the panel description, but there’s something so Outer Church about the blank, *eyeless* goggles the pilot wears. I couldn’t help wondering, ‘Who is that guy? Where did the Joker get him from?‘ But it wasn’t in some wanky, anally retentive comics fan kinda way, it was more, uh…*fearful* is probably the right word. The dude was just plain creepy and his anonymity made the whole thing that little bit more delicious. Ditto the copter itself. No backstory. No explanation. Just like in the old days. We’re expected to just take the thing at face value. It’s the Joker, he has special supervillain vehicles: nuff said. But this is the post-DKR age and everything needs a rationalisation, doesn’t it? Providing a mature readers-style take on this shit has become so important over the last decade or so and it’s got to the point where things have come full circle. In this reader’s estimation, mystery has, once again, become the most important ingredient in any good superbook. Modern comics readers/stories are so overburdened by the weight of our need to justify and apologise for all the sumptuous, childish conceits (spandex, superhorses, Robins, etc.) that flooded the superstories of yesteryear, that in the end the only antidote for this exhausted trend has to be ? cranked up to the power of n.

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