Mindless Ones

Being: the first of two short posts building up to a third, hopefully more substantial one.

This series of posts is supposed to be all about mirrors and vanity, so what better way to start than by quoting something I said in the comments to this Phonogram review?  Cast your mind all the way back… to December 2009!

I like The Phonogram – it shows me something I like to recognise, namely, me!

I hate The Phonogram – it shows me how stupid that bit of me really is.

Which is why it’s good, and why I love it, and why this review gets to the core of The Singles Club better than any other (though Nina’s review was also very good, if far harsher). I’ll be happy to see more issues, and sorry to see it end.

Still, it’s a bit of a prick at times, The Phonogram.

Sometimes, I don’t think it likes me as much as I like it…

How does the song go? Oh yeah: “I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love/ Is to like the other slightly less than you get in return/ I keep feeling like I’m being undercut…”

Of course, much as I admire these tricky qualities in Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen‘s Phonogram, and much as I’ll always be grateful to them for dedicating an issue of their fanzine-as-fantasy-comic to a defiantly minor group like The Long Blondes, I’ve always known where to find the best example of this trick in all of comics.

Indeed, even back in December 2009, when I was young and naive and actually pretty cowardly about these things, I was still careful to give tribute to The King:

But then I thought of Alec – The King Canute Crowd: “yeah, all these books were written about you!” That Eddie Campbell’s a clever bastard, you know – I don’t think there’s a better laid trap in all of comics than that page.

And yeah, I’ll stand by that statement!

Wanna find out what’s through the looking glass? Click here and all will become clear! Well, mostly!

A 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

Here’s our next thrilling instalment, featuring Bobsy’s choice of Strange Embrace, Bulletproof Coffin and Monster Truck by David Hine, Kane and Hine and Shaky Kane respectively.  Incidentally, you can read the whole of Kane’s wonderwork, Monster Truck here, and it is strongly suggested that you do so NOW!

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click to download

Running this oldie again in the wake the Morrison making reference to it at SDC

Right, offline in the real world, I occasionally enjoy a pint with Bulk Meat. The Meat, incidentally, hates his name and to be honest we never call him it to his face anymore – the man’s a father, a successful careerist (tho’ no-one understands exactly what it is that he does, except for Zac Goldsmith), fiercely intelligent and handsome, etc., etc., blah – and to continue to do so would be churlish at best. But in my heart of hearts, I still understand him as one of those massive slabs of pig bashed around by sound effects artists in the 70’s and Scott Walker in the recording studio. For he is, amongst my scrawnier-than-a-Face-model-in-the-nineties but slightly pot-bellied friends, absurdly stacked.

More after the jump

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

Kicking off this latest round of rambling grumbles and incomprehensible cross talk is Amy Poodle who has a thing or two to say about Paul Cornell’s work, predominantly Action Comics.  Flanked by the cracked team of opinionizers, The Beast Must Die, Zom, Gary Lactus and Bobsy.

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click to download

A The Beast Must Die/Bobsy tipple.

Oy, Hawkman, stop playing with yourself and get me my fucking peanuts

He says.

Scott Kurtz, creator of PVP, asks the question about Jim Woodring’s Nibbus Maximus calculations and hears the best answer in the history of giant tools.

I should back up.

Some of you may not know, but the dark god Cthulhu is a HUGE Jim Woodring fan. So huge, in fact, that he flew all the way from R’lyeh (he flew Alaska, an AMERICAN airline; eat it, Mindless) to attend Woodring’s unveiling of the Nibbus Maximus. Natch, he invited me to accompany him. (FYI it was not a date, but we did have a splendid dinner at Seattle’s Ruth Chris stake house after the show. Cthulhu had lobster.)

Regrettably, Cthulhu refused to have his face/mollusk ponch photographed because he was having a bad hair day, but he did allow me to photograph his tentacles.

Check out the unspeakable things after the jump