Mindless Ones

I wrote most of this a month ago, but have spent most of the rest of the month extremely ill, and never got round to finishing it and posting. Whoops. All the Easter stuff in here seemed a lot more topical at Actual Easter rather than May 1. Oh well. The next one of these will be published in a week, to get us back on to schedule with them…

And so we get to the point in the crossover where the exciting new characters are introduced for the first time.

YOU KNOW THEY DON’T GIVE A F*CK ABOUT ANYBODY ELSE

Well, it’s a right ruddy great anniversary for the SILENCE! boys innit? 250 years of podcasting! Not only that but they invented podcasting. And the internet  – they invented that too. Did I mention listening? Yeah, they invented that. Invented the bloody lot they did. 250 years ago.

So why not join those two gentlemen, hellbent for leisure, Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die as they invite you into the inner sanctum for some verite, fly-on-the-wall, dogme 95-style podcasting. Ot’s a 2.5 hr epic that will test your patience to the very hilt! And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Talked about are Marvel 2-in-1. The Immortal Men, Captain America 700, Legion, Xerxes, Oblivion Song, Eternity Girl, Megahex, Lockjaw, Walking Dead, Wonderful World of Tank Girl, Punk’s Not Dead, Tap-dance Killer, Action Comics 1000, and Highest House. All recorded in majestic ‘SIGHT ‘N” SMELL-ORAMA’!

AND PLUS The Beast and speshul gest-schtar Bobsy have a good old chinwag about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

So checkitowtonetimewon’tyou?? And raise a glass to 250 glorious more years of the world’s premier lifestyle podcast…

(all together)

SILENCE!!!

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

Hi there, this is Callum, I’m the new intern here at SILENCE! My first real task is to write a blurb for Gary and The Beast. I’ll try to do as good a job as I can because I love SILENCE! and the Mr. Die and Mr. Lactus have promised me a well paid job if I perform well. They’re great guys and are always joshing and laughing. They laughed loads when they told me about all the money I’ll be making here at SILENCE! after my 4 year apprenticeship comes to an end. So first we start with a song lyric.
I CAN FEEL IT COMING IN THE AIR TONIGHT OH LORD
Hope they like that one, it’s one of my granpa’s faves.

Then it’s basically a list of the things they talked about in the episode but you have to make it interesting somehow as the blurb is the most important part of the podcast; everyone reads it and it’s really important. So, my brilliant bosses did a really great episode of SILENCE! this week. They did lots of really funny talking and are great guys. I liked it when they talked about sponsorship and the very exciting special 250th issue of SILENCE! which is just around the corner. I liked it when Mr. Die talked about Maria Bamford and Mr. Lactus talked about Daniel Kitson. Then I liked it when SILENCE! Because the Film Has Started with Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther and Lake Mungo.

Then I liked it when The Reviewniverse with Mister Miracle and Ice Cream Man and Crawl Space and By This Shall You Know Him and Vampironica and Dry County and Tailgunner Jo then I liked it when it ended and then I went home for tea.

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

THAT WAS PATROL, THIS IS THE WAR

Listen, can you do me a favour? It would really help me out if you just imagined that there’s a really good blurb here. Something wry, funny and a bit surreal. Something to cause a smile to flicker across those cherry lips of yours? Becuase frankly I just don’t have the time today to put the necessary graft in. So it would really help me out if you could just cut me some slack this once, and just scrunch your eyes closed and just…imagine. Imagine that this is the blurb you’ve always dreamt of.

<ITEM> It’s a SILENCE! And not just any old SILENCE! but a SILENCE! featuring your old pals Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die. Come to drop a comics plopsy right in your tea.

<ITEM> Admin, Dadmin, sponsorship and some honest to goodness SILENCE! News?? Right here effendi. Hot takes on the latest Rob Liefeld and Neil Gaiman announcements.

<ITEM> Suddenly… THE REVIEWNIVERSE! Comics old and new are ingurgitated: World Without End, The Beef, Shade The Changing Woman, Ragman, The Highest House, Gideon Falls, Oblivion Song, The Spider King, Prism Stalker and more. Plus hot news about the John Higgins-painted Cronenbergian body-horror Batman comic that simply does not exist.

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

Sorry for the slight delay on getting this post out — we’ve been busy on here with the MINDLESS DECADE, and I was also busy getting my most recent book out while coping with chronic illness flare-ups.

Anyway… Crisis on Infinite Earths issue three.

AND I STILL LOVE THE GIRL FROM BENNINGTON

This is it. We’ve worked for so many years to get to this. Years squirrelled away in the lab. Years banging our heads against a brick wall. Years when it all seemed so bleak..so utterly pointless. Great minds came and great minds went. Some cracked and crumbled under the awful weight of it all. I saw at least one certified genius snap and run screaming from the insurmountable, impassive wall of the task at hand. But yet still. Here we are. We brave few. Through sheer tenacious bloody-minded perseverance, we stand before you clutching this tiny vial. Inside this fragile glass container we have the essence…the pure distilled very essence of podcasting. If I take this pipette and draw out one tiny drop and…

<ITEM> It’s only a right ruddy new epidose of SILENCE! It’s the life-style comics magazine for the discerning gad-about-town, with your smiling friends Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die here to steer your little ship into the cool calm waters of…podchat

<ITEM> I Reckymend brings The Beast’s latest obsession, the horror podcasts Shockwaves and Killer POV

<ITEM> Glad aboy admin? It’s gladmin! Take that gladmin with a spoonful of paternal responsibility and you have Dadmin!

<ITEM> SILENCE!…Because The Telly is on brings us the new Tick series, the old animated Tick cartoon and Hannibal.

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse reaches out through the mirror and pulls us back in with it. There’s some chat about Giffen & DeMatteis’ Justice League, Milk Wars, Spectacular Spiderman, and the We Told You So: The Story of Fantagraphics. More for sure, but I’m blowed if I can remember. Trust me though – all gold.

<ITEM>Stick around for our greatest show-ending ever!

CAN I GO NOW?

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

Or “What’s A Bottie Beast?” – A Love Story

Illogical Volume here, writing a wee introduction to an ULTIMATE CLASSIC! post by another Mindless because…. well, almost two years down the line, I’m still stuck on the Botswana’s Beast‘s last post on Multiversity, still trying to get a feel for what it’s doing, how it works.

It has something to sell you, sure, but it also wants you to ask what you’re buying.

It’s a bit like the comics themselves that way…

Some of the questions raised by this post still haunt me, primarily:

• Who the fuck is the Botwsana Beast, Duncan Falconer, the Dead Demon Rider?
• What’s the shape of our relationship?
• Why do I care?

These are transposed thoughts about my relationship with Multiversity‘s primary architect Grant Morrison, I think, though the process goes both ways – any increase in my familiarity with one seems to magnify my sense of intimacy with the other.

All of this is basically just me allowing myself to ask the standard English Lit question – “Who is this bastard and why is he lying to me?” – on a level that is disgracefully familiar. Having called him a bastard and accepted that he is probably lying to me at least some of the time – because hell, we’re all probably lying to ourselves at least some of the time – the challenge is to take this process to its unnatural conclusions…

Why do I care about Duncan?

Because he was on the Barbelith forum, where he was obviously Scottish, properly narky and endlessly left wing

Why should any of that matter?

Because it suggested that he was just like me, basically, but with better jokes.

Is that really all you wanted from the world, to go out and meet yourself in it?

No, and I won’t settle for the promise of self-knowledge either but hey – it might be a start!

If this seems like a fairly flimsy basis for letting someone into your mental space, making them a part of your consciousness and letting yourself worry about their happiness, ask yourself – who else have I made time for? Does writing some Animal Man comics provide better grounds for letting someone into your heart? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean we should write the whole thing off.

Nor does it mean that we should stop questioning what shapes we’re making ourselves into, how what we’re doing with our networks is allowing those networks to change us.

When I think of these comics, and the people that we’ve met through them, there are two words that keep coming to me, a worldview implicit within the mess of friends and fantasies I live in: “anguished materialism”, of the sort that might be understood by people who have tried to change the world using art and sigils alone and come up short. Because if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to trade in fictions that promise to rebuild the world around us, please let there be materialism in the mix. Please let there be an understanding of how bodies are exploited and turned again themselves, of how we’ll have to trade our best intentions for rent money once our spirits have been broken. Please let there be an awareness of the forces of production, but let there also be some anguish in there, let there be a determination that we can’t keep going on like this.

The sigil kids have had enough. They know that things don’t have to be this way, and that our times call for determination to fight and space to dream.

This is what I think about when I think of Duncan Falconer, the Botswana Beast, the Dead Demon Rider, without whom I would never have written for this website.

This is what his last post on Multiversity engineers, piece by piece, through its appeals to shared knowledge, to all of us… a machine built to contain the worst of the world in which it was created, but which is also designed to amplify the best of it, to give our hopes some form that might survive in the worlds yet to come.

Endtroducing…

HOW TO PASS THROUGH A PORTAL

Here, the map is the territory.

This is about to get seriously earnest, adjust your sets… I’ve read Grant Morrison comics from the age of 7, on and off (I was too much of a wimp for 2000AD as a teen and Batman: Gothic shat me right up), starting with this one and pretty much consistently every one for the last near twenty years (I didn’t get Final Crisis: Secret Files, a decision which haunts me still, and haven’t been keeping up with 18 Days, which is just barely a Grant Morrison comic), since semi-rediscovering him through The Invisibles.

“Yeah. I guess the fighting never ends, does it? It never ends.”

I often find myself being drawn into arguments where I know almost every example of the thing I’m defending is bad yet still feel compelled to argue for what I believe to a worthy principle.

“Text section in comic books” is one example. People can tell me that they’re often bad (they are!) or that good comics writers aren’t always good prose writers (they aren’t!) but no matter how many pointed examples they come up with I’ll still find myself determined to argue that they’re closing off possibilities we can’t afford to lose.

Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder provides a good, if typically atypical, counterargument.  Every time I read the comics sections I find my brain racing in a million new directions, lost, determined to find answers to questions I’m struggling to formulate.  Every time I read McNeil’s annotations I find myself presented with answers to a whole other set of questions, all of which are equally mysterious to me.

This shouldn’t work.

It does.

Finder is two different comics every time I read it…

A few years ago I was asked to provide a back-up strip for a notable sci-fi comic that Image was publishing at the time. It didn’t end up being used but I thought I might share it with you for this whole Mindless Decade shebang. Enjoy!