Mindless Ones

1. Endtroducing

Flashback to 2011 and the world is ending. Again. The signs are easy to interpret now, when they require any interpreting at all: a news anchor blathers away on TV,  building up so much expectation that the large hadron collider, suffering from a fit of performance anxiety, unravels and takes reality with it; meanwhile, under the sea in a parallel Earth, an archaic supervillain announces that he has “hung a deadly necklace of deadly meta-bombs around the world like precious pearls“; on the internet, or rather in a dated parody of cyberspace that resembles nothing so much as X-Box live for “edgy” business folk, a rapidly mutating program tries to take over everything.

Responses to this are equally typical: standing in a futile crowd beside a fatbalding awkwardman, a disinterested woman holds up a sign informing everyone that “THE END is NIGH!“; a bloodied hero crawls forward, trying to save the world again, knowing that all he has to do is push a button, but that even this might be to much for him now; elsewhere, tough men decide to make tough decisions with predictable results.

I’m talking about Batman Incorporated and Indigo Prime here, because they were the two garish fantasies that played best for my (semi-informed, heavily solipsistic) sense of panic throughout 2011, that end of season finale of a year.

After all, if you feel like everything’s falling apart, sometimes it helps to be able dress these feelings up in twisted words and garish costumes instead of focusing on the garbled socio-economic truth.

Spacetime becomes jelly.

The walls of reality buckle and fold.

Higher Dimensions intrude into the supersymmetry.

Dark Matter condenses as worlds collide.

Mmmmm, yeah, that’s the stuff.

Come down with me.

Sometimes the best creative work comes from having to work within restrictions imposed from outside. The Mind Robber is a perfect example of this. The story before, The Dominators, was originally meant to be a six-parter, but had to be cut down to five (thankfully, as it’s the most awful mess imaginable from every possible standpoint).

For some reason the scene above is a favourite of straight men, but few others…

Yesterday, DC finally got around to breaking the news that was already broken: Yes they were going to publish Watchmen prequels, and yes, they had managed to find a group of creators dumb enough to work on them! Huzzah!

Now obviously The Comics Internet has already had a pretty good go at covering this topic. Hell, we covered this announcement in one of our Christmas podcasts before it even happened!

Still, even assuming you’ve already read Newsarama’s I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT SATIRE take and David Brothers’ elegant evisceration of the same, we figure you’ve still probably got room in that multiversal brain of yours for a very Mindless take on these announcements.

If so, rest easy True Believers. Here’s how it begins…

Bobsy: Someone said on the radio this morning that it’s the 50th anniversary of the smiley face. not sure how that fits with the ‘facts’ here, but it made me grimly reflect that if anything could turn that smile upside down then the Watchmen 2 announcement yesterday was surely it. The people in the shop were going crazy about the news, never been in there amid such animated chatter on a single topic before. Everyone basically positive too, saying they were going to buy it, looking forward to reading the characters again.

I can’t believe that we’re seriously supposed to think that the Kubert brothers are an adequate shadow of Gibbons, or that Azzarello, Cooke or (jesus christ) Len Wein are going to be able to produce anything that favourably compares with the original. I don’t even like Watchmen that much, but to go back to it seems to justify everything that Alan Moore has been saying for years about creative and cultural exhaustion.

I realise it’s a bit Canutian of me to wish for a different world, but the expansion into the Watchmen property strikes me as being a victory for capitalism’s oozing tentacles only, hence a defeat for the rest of us.

Find out why this announcement was pretty much DC’s way of saying Watchmen would be doing anal now, under the cut!

Um….

For some reason, probably because I found the Chief Man of Bats issue so meh and the following one bloody awful, and because I was in the Isle of Man, I didn’t pick up this, ahem, *special* (way to throw a cover together, DC art Dept!) when it came out a couple of weeks back, but I’m pleased I have now because this book’s back on track in a big way. We all moan about the Big Two, but DC aren’t stupid enough to completely overhaul one of their most popular titles, and, as with Snyder’s book, now that we know Batman Inc will stay pretty much on point after the reboot, I’m prepared to invest myself again.

Now that I know I won’t get hu….

DIDN’T THIS HAPPEN LAST TIME?

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.

Here it is! The end of Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. When Danny finally broke her fast, I was lucky enough to cover the event for Mindless Ones.  The trip to the Middle Farm cider emporium is documented here in all it’s terrible glory. 

WARNING:  Some of the tales told once the alcohol kicks in are not for the faint hearted

click to download
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/AYWCpod.mp3]

You can also read her new Monday Morning strip, updated pretty much daily here. Older work can be found here.
Click on the images to enlarge.

Click here to see the rest of the week and amazing photos from that magical day

For some reason, probably because I found the Chief Man of Bats issue so meh and the following one bloody awful, and because I was in the Isle of Man, I didn’t pick up this, ahem, *special* (way to throw a cover together, DC art dept!) when it came out a couple of weeks back, but I’m pleased I have now because this book’s back on track in a big way. We all moan about the Big Two, but DC aren’t stupid enough to completely overhaul one of their most popular titles, and, as with Snyder’s book, now that we know Batman Inc will stay pretty much on point after the reboot, I’m prepared to invest myself again.

Now that I know I won’t get hurt.

Sniff.

As was somewhat unsurprising, the second part of this story really divided fans. You know my take on this by now. There are problems with Grant’s writing, sure. I know all about them. I’ve been reading him since Zenith. But they have nothing to do with the writer being on bad drugs. If people want a more traditional take, they can read Snyder. If they want a more colourful one that’s not afraid to push the boat out, then Morrison’s the man for them. If you belong to the former group, you should know now that what you’re about to read is going to take it for granted that experimentation in comic books should be the norm rather than the exception. There certainly won’t be any time wasted on justifying such an approach.

So: annocommentations annocommence!

I’m back after an extended Christmas and not-being-arsed break! Only one photo this time though as my hard drive is knackered and I’m busy recovering all my files (have you any idea how difficult it is to recover a 2TB hard drive with about ten thousand non-contiguous bad sectors? Thank heaven for ddrescue). I could only get the one image before catastrophic failure.

Which is appropriate really…

Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. You can also read her new Monday Morning strip, updated pretty much daily here. Older work can be found here.
Click on the images to enlarge.

Click here to see the rest of the week