Mindless Ones

October’s Cartoon County meeting was lucky enough to play host to Nicola Streeten,, author of Billy, Me and You, an account of her experiences of losing her first child. Give it a listen.

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Nicola-Streeten.mp3]
Click to download
 

Cartoon County is an association of over 100 cartoonists and comic artists in the Sussex area. Our regular meetings are usually on the last Monday of every month at The Cricketers, Black Lion St, Brighton, from 6 til late. If you’re a cartoonist or a comic artist, or use those particular styles of drawing in your work as an illustrator, animator or storyboard artist, you are very welcome to join us.

Click here to see two pages from the book

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

It might seem odd to viewers nowadays, but one of the rules Sydney Newman, the executive in charge of Doctor Who at its beginning, put into place was ‘no bug-eyed monsters’. This rule was, of course, broken as early as the second story, The Daleks, but it signified something about the intention of the show when it started – that it was to be at least partly an educational series.

“So let’s all learn about human sacrifice and enforced marriage, shall we, children?”

The Faceless Mindless Collective are back and this time Patrick Meaney, film-maker and director of Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods, is in reach of their terrible teeth in their terrible jaws.

Patrick’s new documentary, Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts, focusses on the life and works of pop-comics very own futurologist, ‘Internet Messiah’, hard man auteur, and features extensive interviews with the man himself and a great many of his friends and collaborators. It’s well worth a watch even if you have only a passing interest in the guy behind Planetary, Transmetropolitan and the Authority.

Ellis turns out to be not just a true original, and maybe slightly scary, but also hugely loveable. Who knew?

We get stuck into it (Patrick, with our blunt fingernails) after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

As previously mentioned, the Mindless dream team of The Beast Must Die, Illogical Volume and Andrew “Mandrew” Hickey made it down to Leeds for this year’s Thought Bubble comics convention. These are their recollections of the event, as distorted by the passing of time, sleep-deprivation, alcohol consumption, and the brain-scrambling dazzle of a white lounge suit:

Enter the Mindless (23 Chambers)

If you don’t know who Marc Singer is then you’ve been doing something wrong. An academic by trade and one of the most rigorous and interesting critical voices to come out of the comics blogosphere, Marc’s writing is often mentioned in the same breath as Joe McCulloch’s (Jog) and Douglas Wolk’s, and has long been a Mindless touchstone.

To the dismay of many Marc took a step back from his blog, I Am NOT the Beast Master, a couple of years ago, but during that time re-focussed his energies into a book length critical overview of Grant Morrison’s work. We’re happy to say that we got an early look at the finished product, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, and that it’s honestly the best sustained piece of writing on Morrison’s work that you’re likely to find anywhere for some time to come. It’ll be published by University Press of Mississippi in paper back and hardback on the 6th of December just in time for your Christmas stocking.

In the meantime, as a little teaser, here’s Marc being interrogated on the subject of his book by the Faceless Mindless Collective. Don’t pity him too much: He can control animals ‘n’ shit.

Click here to read the rest of this face scorching entry, and to find out who ends up in the Shark Tank!

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

First of all, a confession: I’m not very good at computer games, in the same way that I’m not very good at telly, or at keeping up with my friend Jessica (whose collected editions of Uzumaki I eventually had to get The Boy Fae the Heed to return, due to my shameless ineptitude).

I don’t know why, but in my flailing attempts at adulthood, some things have ended up getting pushed to the side and properly playing computer games has been one of those things.  For perspective: I don’t think I’ve properly lost myself to a full-length computer game since the original Half-Life, or maybe Deus Ex.  I still play the damned things, of course, but it’s more of a social occasion or a light distraction – a little bit of Death Tank on the weekends with my pals, a wee bit of Arkham Asylum when I need to feel like Batman and eating Mulligatawny soup just won’t cut it.

So sure, I can admire the way Jason Rohrer tries to make the simplest game mechanics into little tests of your capacity for guilt and sentimentality, just as I can giggle when people take pot-shots at his work, but put something like Bioshock down in front of me and I’ll have to admit that I just don’t have the time for it.

I am a grown man, after all, and like all grown men, I’ve got comics to read!

So why is it that when I started to think about horror, about what I could possibly contribute to Notes From the Borderland, that I couldn’t escape from a pair of zombie computer games that I play for laughs with my friends?

Ah, well, maybe it’s the friends that are problem here.

What’s worse, after all – to stumble out into the borderlands on your own, or to do so with your friends, knowing that you’re going to betray them, or be betrayed by them, or that you’re at least going to let each other down when the real nastiness shit starts?
Click here 4 a little taste of that Borderland madness!

Yesterday was, as many of you will be aware, the forty-eighth anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. This means that next year, 2012, is the fiftieth year of Who’s existence.

Over the next year or so, on a roughly-weekly basis, I’ll look at one story from each of those fifty years, from 1963 to 2012. To start with, let’s travel back to that time just after the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky”