Mindless Ones

Iain Banks – 1954–2013

Thanks for dreaming of better worlds.

Crossposted from Amy and Adam’s Mad Men tumblr, shesanastronaut.com

The Devil Rides Out was released in July 1968, shortly after the events of The Crash. Both feature a demonic presence marked by its sudden materialisation and the colour of its skin.

In many ways it’s preferable that this is a coincidence, fitting as it does with the uncanny atmosphere permeating The Crash. After all, it’s not as though TDRO is the only spooky text haunting the action. In fact this week’s episode is full of them, all crinkling the surface reality in unsettling ways. There’s the fourth episode of The Prisoner, Free For All, featuring a parody of the electoral process that holds a fun-house mirror up to Henry’s attempt to run for State Governor; Rosemary’s Baby, a story about a reluctant young woman’s satanically conceived pregnancy – a sideways look at Sally’s narrative, where she’s forced to play at being a mother before she’s ready; Alice in Wonderland, the tale of a girl who finds herself lost in a parallel world, rather like the SCDP offices in The Crash, where physics and logic are turned on their head; and The I-Ching, The Book of Changes, here deployed at change’s end, after a funeral*. Add to this noisome stew, mind altering drugs, Sata—I mean Stan’s 666 offerings to Mamm— uh, ad ideas; Creative’s battle with ‘the darkness’; the slaying of a martyr; a genuine child witch stalking the office’s halls; and the invocation that kick-starts the whole thing, the utterance of the magic word, the secret name of the Beast of Collisions, “SCDPCGC”, and its fair to say that this week Mad Men was positively beset by the otherworldly.

By her sign shall you know her.

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The following post is from She’s an Astronaut. Adam and Mark’s Mad Men Tumblr. http://shesanastronaut.com/

Afraid not, Mr. Burger.

Die-hard fans will already be aware that Mad Men high-fived 30 Rock this week. I don’t actually watch the Rock, but I wanted to write a piece about the drinks Peggy and Ted use to drown their sorrows after failing to snag Ketchup and it soon became clear that the latter’s tipple of choice doesn’t exist. It probably shouldn’t either. So for those of you who are slightly less nerdy, Ted’s cocktail, an Old Spanish, composed of a disgusting sounding blend of red wine, tonic water and olives, is a fabrication invented for the sole purpose of humiliating a character in another show, a show that, in the same episode where the drink debuted, made a couple of massive and rather funny nods to Mad Men. It was all an extended televisual love-in basically and most commentators have had nothing more to say about it than that.

But I have my remit!

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‘Nothing of note was to be inherited by her loved ones, and nor was anything ever expected to be. She was put to rest with exactly the same title as the one with which she was born. She never ruined anyone’s life and never once considered a career in the deliberate, violent immiseration of her fellow citizens.’

‘One measures a circle, beginning anywhere’ – From Hell

‘Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores’

‘I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell’s Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline… and also I would say that if you’ve got the Avengers movie as one of the most eagerly attended recent movies, and if most of those attendees were adults, which I believe they were, then if you’ve got a huge number of contemporary adults going to watch a film containing characters and storylines that were meant for the entertainment of eleven year old boys fifty years ago, then…’

‘We shall attack, we continue to wait… This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision. … The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis.’

‘BOMB ENTANGLERS DISENGAGED’

Here’s a brand new Cindy & Biscuit strip for you. I’m doing these on a semi-regular basis here on Mindless Ones. Check them out here.

Also, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of the brand new 56 page  Cindy & Biscuit no.3 from my shop at Milk The Cat. You can pick up my other comics while you’re there.

We’ll be writing about Mad Men over on our new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut.

Eric Saward hasn’t received a lot of love in these essays so far, but in the last full series he script-edited, Colin Baker’s first, he finally found a coherent aesthetic vision for Doctor Who. Whereas previously he’d been content to throw in as much violence and references to old stories as he could, by this point he had been converted to The Church Of Bob Holmes, and had come up with a semi-formula for the show that worked in the three stories that year where he could try it — comic double acts, vicious black humour, and a smattering of post-modernism with characters commenting metafictionally on the action. The fact that new companion Peri’s catchphrase became “all of these corridors look alike to me” gives a hint of the way Saward’s thoughts were trending.

Vengeance On Varos is the story where this style is taken to its ultimate extreme, and is by far the best Doctor Who story of the 1980s

Being an irregular series wherein I spotlight some particularly beautiful cover runs, from some comics you might have forgotten about, or never seen before. This time it’s Andy Helfer and Bill Sienkiewicz / Kyle Baker’s wonderfully gonzo and short lived 80’s version of The Shadow.

Of all the radical character reinventions of the mid-80’s ‘mature’ boom, the Andy Helfer helmed Shadow series was one of the most brazenly strange; quirky, black-hearted and surreal, with gorgeous art from Bill Sienkiewicz and a young Kyle Baker. Following Howard Chaykin’s controversial mini-series Blood & Judgement, that reimagined the steely eyed pulp vigilante for the smart and cynical 1980’s, Helfer took the set up and ran with it.  He also stripped out some of the weird misogyny and nihilism from the title, bringing in a healthy living sense of surrealism. This was a black hearted, New York art school comic, masquerading as a superhero comic, and it was thrillingly unusual as a monthly read. It lasted 24 issues, before DC pulled the plug on it, after facing severe backlash from ardent fans, and pressure from the owners of the trademark. It’s possibly my favourite of the slew of character reinventions from the late 1980s; it’s wild, creepily unsettling and beautifully drawn throughout.

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Playing catchup on all this really – various recent pickings, some shop, some library.

Not new though, not no more.