Mindless Ones

Our Andrew Hickey reviews Before Watchmen

 

 

Hi gentle Silencers! Sadly once again this is a Silent SILENCE! week due to our big, busy, bulging schedules. We promise not to let Earthly concerns get in the way of our Cosmic mission ever again…and we’ll be back next week with a show stuffed full of comics giblets, so just hang on to your happy hats till then.

In the mean time, why not check out the  Nintendo version of ‘There Will Be Blood’:

Milkshake!

Or the Pingu version of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’:

MacReady!

And if that’s not enough you could do a lot worse than reading Michel Fiffe’s cracking interview with a take-no-prisoners Tony Salmons over at The Factual Opionon:

Comics nourishment
 

Fiffe is probably my favourite comics critic writing at the moment – he writes with intelligence and passion about comic art without bringing his ego into play, and has tremendous taste in picking out artists that you may have forgotten about or overlooked. His pieces on Trevor Von Eden, Ty Templeton, Larry Stroman and others are absolutely essential reading, and you can add this Tony Salmons one to the list – what a phenomenal, explosive artist! See you next week!

For those of you who don’t know – probably all of you – some of us Mindless like Mad Men a whole lot, and I think now that the new series is underway it might be time to get my thoughts down about it. The general format of these posts is presently undecided, so it’s difficult to give you an idea of what to expect. Whole screeds, mini essays, round robins with the other Mindless – all are possible. Whatever, these posts will be dense, but hopefully enjoyable if you’re familiar with the show, and, I’m sure, in some cases even if you’re not you can even enjoy it.

Today it’s Botswana, Ad and myself chewing the fat.

Give me skeletons over zombies any time.

Zombies have no charge for me anymore. I mean, I get it. I understand completely why everyone obsesses over them, what they *mean*, but it took watching that sequence from Mean Streets again recently, where the drunk, bullet riddled barman continues to lurch towards his would be assassin even though he should’ve keeled over and died five minutes before, to make me feel horrified by the undead again. All the hallmarks of the zombie were there, the shambling flying dutchman of an un-person complete with lolling eyes and outstretched arms, persistance of movement and ‘mission’ inspite of massive structural damage…. But this time I needed a real body, something more literal, less of a symbol (and, now, not just a symbol for scary stuff we’d all rather not think about, but a portal to a whole genre of entertainment/fandoms/an industry, etc. – a tangled mess of associations, many of which I find boring/slash annoying), to make me re-experience the supernatural horror of undeath and thence the very real, physical body-horror it points to. It was an assbackwards way to get there, but it worked.

But we’re here to talk about skeletons, right?

This is the first in what will probably -HAHAHAHAHAHAHA – be a series of regular, if shortish posts about good, scary moments in superhero books.

This week:

From Dante’s Inferno and Fungus the Bogeyman to the much maligned, because capriciously fatal, Chasms of Malice the megadungeon has, for me, an eternal appeal. But because I’ve always found it such a comforting fictional environment, films like 127 Hours and Touching The Void really fuck with my head. They take the safe, endlessly sheltered, endlessly contained and controlled space and aggressively insist it’s anything but. The endless shelter, the roofing, becomes nothing but a granite sky as uncaring, if not moreso, than the one in the stock quote. Because unlike the sky above us it can cave in, trap arms, pulverise shins. Can go on forever…. until it tapers into a little hole where the star of The Descent is still trapped, alone, left to rot and go mad in the dark. Dungeons jostle about like this in all our minds, I think. Humans seek refuge. We instantly anthropomorphise enclosed spaces. Potential homes. But they may resist us. Perhaps they *are* homes – but not ours. Filled with… things.

Or perhaps they’re not homes at all.

In this third awe-inducing installment, the Beast risks life and limb to broadcast live from a Mega City 1 Iso-cube, while a tired and slightly hungover Lactus lounges on his inter-galactic sofa high above the statosphere!

In a dodgy English accents spectacular, discussion ranges from Azzarello’s Xena, warri…sorry Wonder Woman, Batman (Owls!), Daredevil, Byrne’s FF, James Sturm’s Unstable Molecules and we have a long chat about John ‘Blimey Guv’ Constantine and Hellbla..sorry HECKblazer. More importantly The Beast unveils his theme tune to a proposed Hellblazer TV show!

Can you stand it? Do you dare listen??

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence003.mp3]

Click to download

Elephantmen #33, by Richard Star King and Shaky Kane. Gregory Wright on colours. Image 2011.

Despite his brutal murder in the final issue of The Bulletproof Coffin, Richard Star King, undead and loving it, is still making comics from beyond the veil.

The Cut.

I’ve been a pretty bad Mindless; I haven’t been posting so much lately, because I’ve been busy working on that other thing, and my comrades here have been so exceedingly patient. While I was over there, doing that, I had an angry thought. See, some people said some nice things when I was talking about Metal Gear Solid, and since I’ve been playing those games a bit lately, I’ve also been reading what others have written, and somewhere or other I saw a statement that didn’t make any sense to me. “I just wish,” someone wrote, “that the games had something interesting to say about stuff in the real world, rather than just about video game design.”

So this made me think about Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man.

What our imaginary friends sometimes have to say.

Not going to waste your time too much here – one of the very best animated shorts ever. I saw this when I was very young (and the retro BBC 2 logo at the start of this is a representation of exactly when it was) and it scared the living shit out of me.

I’ll just be quiet and let you all enjoy a little late night spookiness for Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas Mindless Ones…