Mindless Ones

OK…OK…clearly given that it’s now a week since I said these essays would be going up one a day for a week, and this is only the fifth essay, I may have overestimated my own ability. If only I could go back and talk to my past self and warn him of this…

Before we start, a quick apology – I didn’t get to write a piece yesterday as I had planned. I tried to go to sleep on Thursday night, but just couldn’t – I ended up finally sleeping from about 9:30AM on Friday, and that for only three or four hours. Almost as if someone had extracted the chemical that promotes sleep from my brain…

A collaboration with Edinburgh based artist and ghost merchant Shaky Ghost, Cut-Out Witch contains twenty five pages worth of lost souls and lo-fi monster magic – imagine a teen goth Terminus and you’ll be on the right track.  Shaky Ghost provided the pictures, I added the words, but if you want to cleanse yourself with holy water after reading then I’m afraid you’ll have to bring your own bottle.

“Cut-Out Witch is really good… Lovely creepy stuff” – Twitter’s own James Baker

“Almost every page made me laugh or smile or feel things” – comics’ own Ales Kot

“You do seem to be able to dash such things off quite easily, I kind of wish I could do that…” – A Trout in the Circus’ very own Plok

You can buy the print edition here if you want to make a couple of lost souls happy, but Cut-Out Witch is now available for FREE in PDF format!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD CUT-OUT WITCH!

If you read the comic and enjoy it, please have a look at the Young Leith Ghost
site for more of Shaky Ghost’s work and consider donating some cash to the Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH).

Click here for a preview!

This is a difficult one to write about, in two different ways.

By everyone’s favourite Punisher expert and Garth Ennis scholar Maid of Nails aka Kelly Kanayama

For comics fans it can be discouraging to look out across the blasted wastes of The Discourse and see how much vitriol gets leveled against those who just want to try something different. Yet in this toxic landscape, there are still breaths of fresh air if you know where to search for them – such as the debut issue of Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s new comics criticism magazine PanelxPanel.

PanelxPanel combines analysis of soon-to-be-released comics by Otsmane-Elhaou with writings and interviews from critics and creators, all laid out in a pleasant color scheme. (I’m not using the word “pleasant” pejoratively here, by the way; it’s rare for comics criticism to make you feel more relaxed.) The aesthetic effect ties into Otsmane-Elhaou’s highly visual focus, which is oriented toward dissecting how the art of a particular comic creates its narrative, and which sets PanelxPanel apart from other, less visually focused comics criticism. Here, it’s all about panel layout, color choice, the placement of characters and objects in relation to one another: elements I know are extremely important in comics but which often have to be explained to me.

If all that sounds familiar, it’s because the magazine is an expansion of Otsmane-Elhaou’s Strip Panel Naked column for ComicsAlliance, where he did much the same thing in article format. Although this column-to-magazine expansion is what makes PanelxPanel stand out, it’s also where its shortcomings lie.

Going for a magazine format allows Otsmane-Elhaou to include input from other voices…

Doctor Who season twenty-two is not, as we saw in the previous essay, a particularly loved season, and its opener is no exception. It’s one of the most reviled Doctor Who stories ever, and in my opinion unfairly so.

A new comic experience as (very kindly) discussed in Kieron Gillen‘s latest TinyLetter email:

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

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

thanks,

David

It’s Doctor Who week here on mindlessones.com. Specifically, it’s Doctor Who Season 22 week.

Welcome back to Diane.

This week we explore the scorched desert of the unreal that is episode 8 of Mark Frost and David Lynchs’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Got a light?

Expect nuclear magic, atomic paranoia, cosmic trauma and the death – and birth – of the devil.

Apparently the silver mustang is the darkness within, so that just shows what we know :-/

Theme from Diane is by Mass Roman from the epochal Strangers from Birth.

For the duration of Twin Peaks: The Return, recap episodes of Diane will appear on Libsyn in a flash just 24 hours after UK broadcast.

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If this episode blew you away, think about heading on over to iTunes to give Diane a much sought-after awesome Five Star Review! (These really light up our days so thanks!)

You can chat to Diane here for as long as you like, here on Mindless Ones Dot Com – or in 140 charred chunks at @dianepodcast.

You can even go through the gate to that dread dimension of primal chaos known as tumblr.