Mindless Ones

Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. You can also read her Monday Morning strip here.

Click here to see the rest of the week

Contrary to what you might have read in some Paul Cornell comic, it’s not all about cosy moderation in modern Britain. In fact, anyone with a functioning TV internet connection set of eyeballs could tell you that the citizenry have spent much of the last year very loudly rejecting the actions of their current government.

See:

New Statesman columnist and freelance journalist Laurie Penny has provided the most incisive ground level commentary on these events. She also pisses all the right people off, so you can imagine how thrilled I was when I got the chance to interview her about geek culture and politics for this very site!

Click here to read all my Mindless questions, answered!

Cindy & Biscuit has just received an extremely glowing review from Forbidden Planet International’s Richard Bruton, which you can check out RIGHT HERE.

The FPI blog is a great source of info, reviews and all round comic goodness, so have a nose around while you’re there.

So if you haven’t already done so, you can pick up your very own copy of Cindy & Biscuit at  Milk the Cat. Hurry you fools!

A bit battered, spine ripped right off, but still – 44 years of existence, mine for a mere seventy-five pee.

Batman Annual 1967.

It’s all reprint, but the cover looks like original art commissioned in the UK – check the oddly Blyton-esque Robin, a schoolkid larking about like he’s in an infinitely cosy boys comic of the day, or an underage soldier, meat for the melodrama of a WWII book. Check Batman, smiley of face and cheeky of chin, with a prop-forward’s physique.

Let’s look at that again…

A mostly weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. You can also read her Monday Morning strip here.

Click here to see the rest of the week

Bryan Talbot creates Alan Moore, from Brainstorm Comix #1, 1975

Cheers to the Keeshman for the gimme.

Being: a speculative essay on the self-regulating limits of reality/a celebration of impurity/ a demonstration of the many sickening uses of human waste/ a manifesto for kinder, gentler wank fantasies/a failed attempt to write a feminist critique of The Filth/ and, finally, an embarrassed declaration that it’s time for something great …

1. In The End, Everybody Wins

There’s a moment in the last issue of Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s scatological sci-fi horror comedy, The Filth, which seems to me to perfectly capture the panic of the moment. Greg Feely/Ned Slade, negotiator for the covert organisation known as The Hand and weird, porno-drenched bachelor, has finally snapped. After twelve issues of black comedy and painful existential eruptions, Feely has had enough. His pet cat Tony has died, depriving him of the only love he knew, and now he’s taking his protest right to the very heart of things, to his superior officer Mother Dirt.

As he storms through The Crack, Greg is confronted by his fellow Hand agent, Miami, who reminds him that he has been recycled into the very system he’s rebelling against. Before he was Hand negotiator Ned Slade, she claims that Greg “wouldn’t want to know” what he was:

You, Thunderstone, Bemmer… the whole crazy gang of social activists… You were all gonna destroy the foundation stone of the world.

The system is perfect, Ned. It has to be perfect; it’s all there is. Attacking The Hand is like attacking your own immune system. [1]

Does this seem familiar to anyone else? As the foundations are shaken and explosions go off all around, a wide-eyed Miami tries to stop Greg by telling him, what… that there aren’t any other options? It’s a statement that would seem perfectly at home in our current political climate. Don’t like the way things are going? Think that terrible acts are being carried out in your name? Feel a bottomless pit open up inside you whenever you even think about Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Nick Clegg? Find yourself choking on your own sick when you hear Chancellor/arch bastard George Osborne give a speech to the Tory party conference in which he lays the blame for Moneygeddon (© Charlie Brooker & co 2009) purely on the (admittedly very guilty) Labour party, as though Blair and the boys weren’t just following Thatcher’s lead?

What about when he goes on to tell the poorest UK citizens that they’re going to have to pull their socks up, or claims that he “believes” in public services – does that make you feel like punching your own face off?  Well, tough! This is the way the world works now, history has ended and there are no alternatives, so suck it up or go home. If you’ve still got one, that is.

Vote Labour or Vote Tory, hell you can even Vote Lib Dem if you like. This is what you’re getting, this half-cut shadow life.  All other options have been deemed non-mutual, incompatible with life as we know it! And may the gods help you if you want to make any bigger changes – under the current system, your proposals cannot be countenanced!

And what’s Greg’s response to all of this? How does he react to this bold statement?

Well, he storms out, eyes blazing like a fucking demon:

But hey, wouldn’t you? [2]

Immerse yourself in Morrison and Weston’s Filth after the jump!

Day two of Kapow! in which we are hungover and get to talk with Shaky Kane and David Hine in an amazing interview where they give us some good news. This Podcast also contains a chat with David Lloyd about Kapow! and Cartoon Classroom.

Play here!
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kapow-day-2.mp3]
Click to download