Mindless Ones

YOURS IS HOLLOW SOUNDING, FRANKLY YOU’VE BECOME SUCKERS

Alright pod-monkeys! I recorded a chat with the extremely talented comic creator, friend of the pod and all right super-mensch, Gareth Hopkins about his amazing new comic Petrichor. As it’s me, we’re out and about, so you get the aural delights of the Barbican as a background for our chat. Gareth was gracious, eloquent and honest so I hope you enjoy the chat.

Pick up a copy of Petrichor here.

Normal SILENCE! Service will resume shortly.

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

Last time we caught up with the Hitsville boys, they were young and reckless, caught up in that pop life and looking forward to the end of their story. That end finally came with the publication of Hitsville UK #7 last year. Dan Cox and John Riordan are broken men now, no longer a pair of jolly cartoon heroes…

…but a couple of real live humans, with families and feelings:

As such, it didn’t seem right to feed them the same recycled Smash Hits interview questions we’ve used a few times over now. This time round we would do it right, with glib, insultingly stupid questions of our own.

As far as a general overview of what Hitsville is and why you should read it, I can’t much improve on what I wrote last time around:

More than any other comic about bands or music, Hitsville UK mimics the thrill and excitement of its subject.  Somewhat perversely, this comes from its overwhelming commitment to the comic book form.  Where other comics about music feel like extrapolations of zine culture or traditional adventure stories themed around pop stars, Hitsville UK actually feels like music.  By reveling in the joys of putting weird looking characters into even weirder situations, trusting that they can keep a rush of daft words and pictures coming and that they can keep it relevant, Riordan and Cox capture something of the hyped up love buzz of being into music.  A mix of wanting to keep up with the story and wanting to feel part of the moment as it happens around you.

What I will say is that the issues of Hitsville that have been published since then have had an increased sense of urgency to them. The boys may not have set out to create a fantasy of communal resilience in an age that seems increasingly under threat by undead attitudes, shambling zombie racism, and the endless monetization of your every passing daydream, but fuck me if they didn’t do it anyway!

Hitsville UK is great, kaleidoscopic fun. You should probably buy it.

But don’t just listen to me. Listen to handsome hunk Dan Cox and bedazzled urchin John Riordan, who were generous enough to give me their time while they were in the middle of preparing their lush summer survival bunker, rumoured to be located in the abandoned underwater garden of a shady octopus…

1. When the first issue of Hitsville UK was published back in 2011, David Cameron was out in the wild hugging unsuspecting hoodies and Malcolm Tucker impersonations were still just about socially acceptable.

Are you the same people you were back then? Have you switched faces? Traded names? Sold parts of your souls in return for those sweet comics dollars?

Dan Cox: Switched faces, traded names, switched back, rinsed and repeated. I’m pretty sure we’re back to being the other. It is depressing looking at our cameos as I go from this svelte long-haired snake-hipped lovely to a portly beardy man. Interestingly John hasn’t seemed to change much, I’m sure this is nothing to do with him being the artist and everything to do with healthier lifestyle choices and superior grooming regime.

John Riordan: Working on Hitsville has been like a nine-year version of Face/Off (NB. I have never seen Face/Off). My favourite review of the comic credited it to Dan Riordan and John Cox. I don’t think I bothered drawing us into the last two issues of Hitsville. Prior to the final issue coming out we both became dads and we now both resemble post-war criminal Tony Blair. I drew my baby daughter into a crowd scene in issue 7 instead. I’m fully embracing vicarious living through the next generation now.

DC: We were the DJ act opening for Gwillum!

<strong>JR</strong>: Oh yes, good point! See, my brain is crumbling as well as my looks.

Super November, directed by Douglas King, written by and starring Josie Long

Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson

“Rap critics that say he’s money, cash, hoes
I’m from the hood stupid, what type of facts are those?” – Jay-Z, 99 Problems

“Take the big key and open the door to the living, breathing past
The one you enliven over and over,

To the ship’s port, or the house of the welder;
To the library door of Donald Dewar.

Then picture yourself on the threshold,
The exact moment when you might begin again,” – Jackie Kay, Threshold 

Super November is a film of two halves, with a break in filming reflected by a jump in the story we see on the screen. People disappear from the plot along the way. Cameos in the first part don’t get the intended pay off. Haircuts change. The substantial details of the narrative are left largely unexplained.

The first part of the movie concerns a librarian called Josie who’s on the edge of what seems like a pleasantly boozy romance with a nice lad who’s in the Scottish Green Party. The influence of mumblecore is overt enough that it’s been built into the production and promo cycle of this low budget comedy, but Super November‘s endearing roughness highlights the interconnectedness of aesthetic choices and material possibility.

If the film feels like it was being put together on the fly, with everything from its dialogue style to its central narrative conceit working around the availability of certain players and locations, then that’s because it probably was.

Not Because of the People – the collected Looking Glass Heights comics.

***

PRAISE FOR LOOKING GLASS HEIGHTS:

“Classic British indie small press pamphlet, and a sharp burst of mood and ideas. It’s very much comics as poem – it’s the sort of work that Douglas Noble has been known to do” – Kieron Gillen

“A spooky zine… Liked this a lot. The writing is really strong and the art suggests just enough to make you uneasy – Sarah Horrocks

***

portal #1

portal #2

portal #3

portal #4

portal #5

portal #6

***

If you enjoy any of the LGH comics, please consider giving some time or money to Living Rent (Scotland’s Tenants Union) or another similar group closer to home –

thanks,

David

I KNOW YOU’VE ALREADY BEEN TOLD BUT LET ME SAY IT AGAIN, THINGS GET WORSE WHEN YOU GET OLD

Hey! Listen up! You wanna blurb? ‘Course you do! Everyone loves a blurb and this, my friend, right here in this box, is a BLURB! Know what I mean? Not just any old blurb, I mean a BLUUURRRB! Yeah, NOW you’re interested! You wanna see the blurb before you take it?  Sure, but I can’t show you here.  If I get this blurb out in public and people see it, we’re gonna have a crowd form in seconds and that’s gonna be a problem.  Say, why don’t you come down this dark alley and I’ll let you have a little looksee.  Okay, come on…

Here we go, let me just get the latch here… heh heh, it’s a bit sticky, hang on…  THERE!  FEAST YOUR EYES!  What?  Oh shit!  Sorry, wrong box!  That’s a turd i did in the shape of a cock and balls…  Sorry about that.  No, you can go, it’s fine, sorry.  Sorry.

<ITEM>It’s a very special SILENCE! with a palindromic number!  Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die quickly fail at podcasting only in palindromes.

<ITEM>Great informal chat including some Carmin and some chat about Work Guns.

<ITEM> The Family Beast’s visit to the zoo.

<ITEM> “Excitement” about the Titans show on Netflix

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse sticks its tongue in your ear and in morse code, taps out some quality chat about Conan The Barbarian, Kid Eternity, Batman Vs. Grendel II, Marvel Comics Presents, Crypt of Shadows and A Copy of the Comics Journal which is a Vertigo Special and it’s from 1992 so of course The Beast Must Die wants to talk about it.

<ITEM>Backmin, Outmin, Whateveryoulikemin in the form of The Beast telling you all about Alan Clarke’s Elephant (more harrowing than and unrelated to The Beast’s visit to the zoo) in a bit of SILENCE! (Because The Film’s Started).

<ITEM>

Let’s make SILENCE! pal, Simon Russell’s comics dreams come true by funding his The Marriage of Njord & Skadi Kickstarter.

TUCK IN!

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

Not Because of the People – the collected Looking Glass Heights comics.

***

PRAISE FOR LOOKING GLASS HEIGHTS:

“Classic British indie small press pamphlet, and a sharp burst of mood and ideas. It’s very much comics as poem – it’s the sort of work that Douglas Noble has been known to do” – Kieron Gillen

“A spooky zine… Liked this a lot. The writing is really strong and the art suggests just enough to make you uneasy – Sarah Horrocks

***

portal #1

portal #2

portal #3

portal #4

portal #5

***

Please consider giving some time or money to Living Rent (Scotland’s Tenants Union) or another similar group closer to home –

thanks,

David

Go-Bots #1-3, by Tom Scioli

You Can Be Anything™, by Sophie Bainbridge

You’ve mounted me and there you sit,
you rotten shit!
You’ve mounted me an there you sit,
but even that won’t really make me think like you.

For the horse thinks one way as he strides;
thoughts quite different from the one who rides” – Alexandre O’Neill, The History of Morality

“We are what we’re supposed to be
Illusions of your fantasy
All dots and lines that speak and say
What we do is what you wish to do” – Aqua, Cartoon Heroes

If I’m honest I never really gave a fuck about the Go-Bots. I was always aware of them, but only to the extent that the shapes Tom Scioli draws here are familiar from my childhood, albeit they’re not the most familiar shapes in their own comic:

As a measure of my unfamiliarity, consider the fact that I’ve had to edit this piece twice now because I got confused about whether I should be writing “Gobots” or “Go-Bots” throughout. Unlike Scioli’s previous work on Transformers vs. G.I. Joe, then, Go-Bots provides me with a deeply unsettled experience rather than a complex nostalgic one – where I was able to process that earlier series’ abundant exuberance as both a celebration and détournement of a lifetime’s worth of merchandising that I had somehow mistaken for my soul, this latest project has a more genuinely uncanny quality to it.

The figure-work here is similar to Scioli’s previous work in this arena, similarly true to ’80s toys and box art, the (crayon? pencil?) colour tones still evocative of everything from old tie-in comics to the adventures you’d draw yourself if you were an abnormally talented kid. As in TF/Joe, there’s a sense of play to every page of the comic, the sort of play that thrives on the creation and destruction of relationships – any order that is established is soon found to be ripe with chaos, and all chaos comes complete with the threat of latent order.

This drama is played out in Scioli’s page layouts, which tease the possibility of a break from the two-dimensionality of the comics page…

…while also constantly reveling in the expressive possibilities of that same flatness, stacking images on top of each other, keeping just enough of a sense of narrative coherence while pushing ever closer to the joyous impurity of collage:

Given the nature of these franchise comics, their origins as indifferent product, this flatness extends to the narrative ruptures and inversions. Are the Go-Bots loyal friends or alien monsters? Is treating them like chatty tools justification for a bloody revolution or yet another example of bad dating etiquette? Are any of these binaries any more real than the shite we were sold as children?

Like the best of Scioli’s TF/Joe work or his Super Powers strips for Young Animal, Go-Bots creates the illusion of real freedom for the time it takes to read any given page.

Not Because of the People – the collected Looking Glass Heights comics.

***

PRAISE FOR LOOKING GLASS HEIGHTS:

“Classic British indie small press pamphlet, and a sharp burst of mood and ideas. It’s very much comics as poem – it’s the sort of work that Douglas Noble has been known to do” – Kieron Gillen

“A spooky zine… Liked this a lot. The writing is really strong and the art suggests just enough to make you uneasy – Sarah Horrocks

***

portal #1

portal #2

portal #3

portal #4

***

Please consider giving some time or money to Living Rent (Scotland’s Tenants Union) or another similar group closer to home –

thanks,

David

LIFE I LOVE YOU, ALL IS GROOVY

Listen can you do me a favour? I just need to nip out for a bit…no not for long. I’ll be real quick. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s actually really, really important that I go. Yeah. No, I honestly wouldn’t ask unless…y’know. Important, that’s right. You will? Oh mate that’s brilliant…honestly you don’t know what a favour this is. So I just need you to just literally sit here and do nothing till I get back. Yeah, I’ll be so, so quick I promise. Ok, so just like…just sit there, that’s right. Yup, just there. And that’s it! Till I get back. Okay? Ok cool.

..oh wait, there is just one other thing. If anyone turns up asking about a blurb, can you just whip something up? Ok great.

<ITEM>BOOOOOOOOOOM> NEW YEAR NEW DANGER! It’s only Bloody SILENCE! coming up on 2019 like a masked intruder! Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die are here and brimming with new year’s resolve. And you’re going to get it, with barrels. Hot comics pottage, in that wily old SILENCE! fashion. AND IT”S NEARLY THREE HOURS LONG YOU TW@S!!

<ITEM>Bit of post-XMAS admin? Why not. As if anyone gives a rat’s chuff about that anymore! Probably some Dadmin, some sponsorships and a bit of chat about Adventures in the January comics sales.

<ITEM> Big chunk of Sadmin about the recent passing of Mega City One architect Ron Smith.

<ITEM> Gary talks about the Raymond Briggs Snowman exhibition, The Beast wants to tell you all about the Charles Schultz ‘Peanuts’ exhibition at Somerset House, and he also NEEDS to tell you all about Penda’s Fen too, in SILENCE! (Because the Film Has Started).

<ITEM> Have you heard that Gary Lactus Prunes? No, Well listen up…

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse uncurls it’s sticky paw and reveals some top quality chat about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Fantastic Four Wonderful Wonderful Wedding Comix, Klaus: The Crying Snowman, Lodger, DIE, Justice League Europe,  GoBots, Thirteenth Floor and probably some other stuff that both of us have forgotten.

<ITEM> BONUSSSSSS! There’a a meaty chat with Tom Oldham of Breakdown Press, talking about Joe Kessler’s Windowpane, Jon Chandler’s John’s Worth (1-4), Beserker and a whole lot more, including some quality Todd McFarlane chat.

WELL WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR SWEETHEARTS? YOU WANNA LIVE FOREVER???

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]