Mindless Ones

BRAKKA-DAKKA-THADOOOM!!!

Two  amazing podcasts!  One explosive post!  All these comics and more!

In #10 we look at the Marvel Heroes Power Lucky Bag that we bought in the pub along with a host of publications found in the recent reordering of the vault.  We select/reject gems/germs like Ultimate Fantastic Four, Mystery Men, Duplex Planet, A1, Hup, and more!

Click to download VOT#10

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/vault-of-tymbus-10wav.mp3]

With #11 we review some recent comics including Wildstorm’s Red Herring#1, Marvel’s Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers, DC’s Red Circle: Inferno and Doom Patrol #1. Then, lucky listener we look at some old copies of Buster from 1980 which Tymbus goes on about at such tedious length I’ve had to put a musical bed underneath it to sweeten the shitty pill.

Click to download VOT#11

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/vault-of-tymbus-11.mp3]

Click for more pics and a whole episode of the brilliant Leopard from Lime Street…

A short, compressed piece on memory and Enid Coleslaw.

Falling…falling…..

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

As adults we forget how strange things are. Take caves, for example.

On a recent holiday, my wife, son, and I found ourselves on a guided tour through a cave system. The group was large, and the cave as well lit as the intersection between health and safety and the management’s sense of theatricality would allow. The guide’s patter was honed and confident, glinting with comfortable jokes that didn’t require laughter, and just the right blend of folklore and history to keep us interested. The package offered no reason this side of phobia to feel unsafe, or uncertain. No-one was going to get lost, and no-one was going to get hurt, even boredom was unlikely to be much of a problem given that the tour was, quite sensibly, rather short.

But somewhere in the darkness beneath the spotlit consumer experience the real appeal rustled. Awe. It went unspoken of course only ever hinted at or skirted. The guide spoke of a gigantic network of which ours was but a fragment, of divers who had squeezed their way through small spaces in the deep and discovered gigantic caverns, one of which was thus far inexplicable to the geologists and engineers that had pored over the photographs, the mega-tonnage above the vast cave roof apparently unsupportable. The guide also spoke of deeper passages still, of underground lakes and streams, and of tunnels yawning forever into the earth. Even the history of the place hung like a heavy shadow. The caves had been sacred to the Celts, who offered up sacrifices to the dark. Later the Christians came and banished the old religion, a conflict hinted at in the local legend of a witch turned to stone by a priest. The guide showed us the rock where, if the light is right, the witch’s petrified profile can still be seen glaring into the blackness, and claimed, as a good tour guide should, that late at night her mordant laughter can be heard echoing in the depths.

Perhaps from sub-level 7, perhaps deeper

Down, down, down…

• Still thoroughly brain-blown by last week’s viewing of Adam Curtis’ latest film, ”It Felt Like a Kiss’, I’ve gone a bit doolally and found links for a whole Curtisathon. Old hat, good hat:

• First, two recent bites from Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe/Newswipe shows. This one covers the abasement of  TV journalism as a career path for people who like to bear the sight of their own reflections; and this one on the geldoffisation of event politics. When people say Live Aid killed Rock ‘n’Roll, previously the world’s last best hope of cultural salvation, this is what they mean, and why it matters. (b)

• And going back a bit further, The Living Dead from 1995 (Parts One, Two, Three), a haunting three-hour tale of WWII necromancy and voodoo propaganda, a political Zombie fest of the lowest order. (b)

All that and some links to comic related stuff too!

Hey you! Go check out my blog.

When he woke up he thought he’d dreamed about a movie he’d seen the other day. But everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it didn’t necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and that if the movie he’d see was the real movie, then the other one, the one he had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare, he thought as he washed his face in the apartment where his mother’s body no longer was.

– Roberto Bolaño, ‘The part about Fate’, p.234, 2666

This was originally notionally a piece called ‘Justify yr pull-list’, but I can’t seem to think of a more absurd enterprise than that, on reflection.

Hobbies include: pitying fools

Watch out ’cause we’re back! Actually there’s no need to watch out.  The  whole disagreeable affair can be preemptively avoided by not choosing to listen to Tymbus and I talk for around 36 minutes about Wednesday Comics and the first volume of Prince Valiant from Fantagraphics.

Click to download VOT#9
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/vault-of-tymbus-09wav.mp3]

Further pictures of Prince Valiant are available should you wish…

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.