Mindless Ones

Mustn’t let like the finest issue of Batman in years come out and not do a bit about it. Maybe some annotations, but honestly there’s a few good people doing that so I’m a bit annotated-out.

So we’re just going to have the big question and answer it, right before your eyes, with perfect accuracy. How this works is, we’re going to run through my favouriite suspects and ask the I-Ching who The Black Glove is, and then we’ll know. A couple of posts back Savage reminded me of the same Storm Shadow 6 page story story Morrison wrote for Marvel UK’s Action Force Monthly about twenty years ago, which was my earliest memory of anything at all I-Chingy. Genuine comics knowledge, one of those genuine four-colour epiphanies – that pedagogic element they always talk about. That was how I learnt of the I-Ching. The man himself has appeared in Morrison’s Batman’s run too, remember, so it all somehow seems appropriate. I don’t do the I-Ching much (going to call it Yijing from now on, I think that’s more proper nowadays), because Yijing is never wrong, and always eerily accurate. That’s a bit freaky, and raises a few questions I rarely have time to mull over these days, so I tend to leave it alone. But in all my experience of using it, it’s never wrong, and that means it’s sometimes been often useful, like now.

Hold tight!

More after the jump

Yes, that’s not the poster – I’m not sure British television in the 80s did posters. Especially not for a series as outright miserable and cheap as Day of the Triffids. Instead what we got were real suburban streets, sets hungover from the seventies, and parochial British accents. The show was so bloody scary because the world it inhabited looked and sounded so depressingly like our own. The triffids were like some vile full stop on the end of contemporary British life – we were defined by the moment of our extinction and we turned out to be parochial, small, insignificant and suffering. The fact that mankind was to meet its fate blind (after a freak meteorological event) just served to underline the point that the universe is merciless, uncaring, uncompromising, and alien to all human feeling. What better monster to take on the role of apocalyptic deathbringer than one which has no anthropomorphic qualities: that skitters along on it’s roots, and feeds on blood, that, as a consequence of its inhuman nature, negates the value of culture, thought and emotion?

Fuck yeah, triffids are nasty.

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So we thought we’d try linkblogging… I have no idea how Graeme McMillan or Dirk Deppey did and do do this on a daily; this is about a week or so’s worth of what I remembered to put in here, seemed interesting at the time…

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“It’s all my fault,” my Grandad told me, searching through his pockets for his pipe tobacco, “I should never have introduced you to Aubrey Beardsley.” There was a moment of silence before things slid into place, smooth as a Tetris block. My mind cast itself back over the last 15 years. 15 years spent hopping from books to records, comics to films. 15 years spent on my hands and knees shining torches into obscured corners and inhaling musty spores. The Unica Zurn I finished the day before, the Antonin Artaud the day before that. My first ecstatic discovery of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. My first viewings of Akira and El Topo. A host of patterns began to emerge, way-station lights twinkling the location of minor obsessions and remembered moments: Me and my brother were the only people dancing at the Boredoms gig…That gas mask was only a fiver…Fuck me The Invisibles is amazing, I haven’t thought about this stuff in yea…I hope Naked Lunch is as good as I’ve already told everyone it is…I’d kiss you but I’m on acid and I’m just not sure that my lips could stand it (kissherkissherkissherkissher).
Names combined and re-combined in the murk. Weaving together and separating like bacteria dancing – the mind altering fungus of the Tabula Rasa: Maruo and Hino, Blake to Brian Jones, Savoy, Sinclair, Huysmans, Cale. Answers to an Escher designed crossword filled in in Guinness by an ape with no more idea why he’s doing it than frogspawn does of its cosmic destiny. I was staring in to the Jet-black-streaked-with-vivid-crimson contents of my overloaded brain pan and it made. Me. Fucking. Hard.

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Let me get a few things clear: I don’t have a bloody clue who Talky Tawny is. I’ve never encountered an Atomik Knight before (either in the DCU or during a afternoon of live roleplay). Christ, I even know fuck all about the New Gods.

AND I DON’T CARE.

For those that do care, I say this: Why on Great Cthulhu’s soon to be trampled Earth do you give a monkeys?

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These are not my favourite pants. They count, they’re in the collection, they get worn on the regular cycle like the rest, but these pants aren’t all that good are they?

The blue trim is okay, and they say ‘Superman’ on them, which is pretty bloody amazing when you think of the millions of billions of pants that don’t have any superhero’s name on them at all, but next to the mighty world of Marvel pants that we’ve been exploring this last wonderful week, the DC territory starts to look rather sparse.

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Look at these. Not strictly a superpant, but the connection hardly needs to be explained.

There has been a few queries about where my favourite favourites have come from – In case you haven’t read the comments in the last post, the answer is in almost all cases H&M – I’d link to their site, only there’s little point – no online shop or even catalogue, except for in a few eurozone teritories that you probably don’t live in. Pants aside, I cannot unreservedly recommend the shop anyway – usually worth a look, but generally full of stock designed to appeal to sixteen year old crackheads, and on the weekends too rammed with said youths to be able to get what you want anyway.

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