Mindless Ones

I can only apologise if the title offends; it’s not intended to, but it does seem a little risque and I’ve kind of realised I’m not so sharp as I had thought on racial politics this week. The implications for me, sexual orientalism and gender bias are pretty disconcerting therefore. (Secret origin: my username is actually derived from the country of my birth.)

The notion here has its genesis in Douglas Wolk’s initial SavCrit review of the latest installment of Batman, #678 – it’s true! Mindless Ones covers really all your Batman and Grant Morrison needs several times over. Tune in shortly for more BatMoz coverage than you can possibly handle. I then get irked in the comments and Marc ‘I am NOT the Beastmaster‘ Singer talks me back off the ledge of flipping out, saying some shit I don’t even believe and schools me, unabrasively, on how it be. I invite him here to extend the conversation and it’s a blogversation or some other hideous neology. A blogover. In the interests of making it a blogevent, here’s Jog’s review (which I’ve already invoked not once, but twice) and our own amypoodle‘s. Here’s Tucker Stone’s, just for fun.

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It seems like an awfully long time since we found ourselves under the Ultimate Man’s protection. Think back. Waaaay back to the mid-90’s. The comics industry was beginning to drag itself out of a self-inflicted slump of pointless speculation and multiple foil variant covers. Chains and guns were beginning to lose their appeal and the world was rotating towards a newer, shinier vision of superheroes. Pop, rather than Metal was going to be the order of the day in the lead up to the Millenium it would seem. Superheroes were going to be fun again. No more torturing paedophiles or deacpitating rapists. At the forefront of this movement we have Waid’s hyper-fun Flash and Impulse comics; Busiek’s Astro City with it’s progressive nostalgic vision of meta-comics; Robinson’s Starman that sought to build an engrossing and believable mythos for his pet character, whilst never forgetting that being a superhero is first and foremost fucking skill. Moore was shaking off the dust of self-publishing and gearing up his ABC assault. Miller’s DK2 lurked on the horizon ready to introduce his bezerko psychedelic bigfoot parable on the world. And somewhere lurking at the sidelines was Morrison and Millar’s AZTEK.

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And I am that beholder.

Comics bought and read on Saturday the 5th of July 2008.

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I’m very definitely not the best choice for a weekly reviewer. I’m extremely narrow in terms of the number of comics I’ll pick up each week (prefering to buy trades and graphic novels as opposed to individual issues), and I really dislike most of what passes for superhero fiction, so I’ve opted out of sharing any responsibility for our regular (!?!) review section, but it doesn’t look like anything’s going to emerge this week unless I man up…

And here we are.

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Comics bought and read on Saturday the 21st of June 2008.

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Comics bought and read Saturday the 31st of May

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So, after a very quick web trawl I came across some of the images that’ve inspired Mr Grunt Morigund’s bat-novel.

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Lingers on comics bought and read Thursday the 15th of May

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What could be more relevant to the pissed up youth of today’s binge Britain than an absurdly over produced reprint of ‘Demon In A Bottle, the story of one billionaire superhero’s descent into alcoholism, collectably timed to coincide with the release of Iron Man (reviewed below, with spoilers aplenty), the first of this summer’s movies to claim the title of blockbuster.

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