Mindless Ones

Mister Attack: So, Illogical Volume and I concur that High-Rise was excellent. I have to confess to not being familiar with Ballard or Wheatley, but this was pretty much up my alley. (As someone currently spending far too much time painting up a flat of his own, and discovering more and more problems, I can relate.  Well, that and living in a classist nightmare of horrible bastards with ‘good’ intentions).

It took me a while to unpack that the satire is at once broad as fuck, but has these layers. It’d be fair to say I was not all in the building at work on Friday, I was off in Royal’s tower.  Every bit points to something, although perhaps some of that was the damaged foundations I brought into the cinema with me. Sometimes it’s subtle, as with our protagonist’s namesake not being immediately to hand, and with others it’s screaming from the rafters.

There’s this British sitcom going very wrong feel – like someone should be watching this in the background of The Filth. A comedy of manners, except the manners devolve to the best way to lie in wait to bludgeon the neighbours. Hiddleston plays straight man to a mix of sitcom and soap opera grotesques, trying to act like all this is normal, with his own mania creeping around. A hollow man with a shallow inner life he’s trying to create for real.  Except, well, he’s not that straight.  Illogical Volume mentioned Brazil as another touching point. He’s not wrong. The conflict of hierarchies and shallow men trying to fill the void with what they think they need is the same, but the farce is played straighter, less panto. The difference is manifest in the likes of Bob Hoskins yelling about tampered ducts for the benefit cheap seats, versus Reece Sheersmith tetchily complaining that people aren’t following the rules about the bin chutes.  That said, both movies feature protagonists who are at odds with their surroundings, but Hiddleston’s Laing embraces the new paradigm, whereas Pryce’s Lowry is engaged in defiance by ineffectual escapism.

What? What’s all this?

Why it’s only The Beast Must Die and Mindless-affiliate Lord Nuneaton Savage discussing the recent film that some of you may have heard of. This was straight from the advance screening, and the boys retreated to the pub to try and recombobulate… It’s 40 mins of unbridled chat about Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice. There are a few minor spoilers for those who care. Welcome…to SILENCE! EXTRA

As Lord Nuneaton himself put it

“We sound like victims of head trauma”

And who could ask for more than that?

Also, when you’re done listening, if you haven’t already get yer self over to The Quietus to read Savage’s official review of the film (in his human identity of Mat Colegate)

click to download SILENCE!#182.5

MUSIC TO QUIET THE MAN MADE OF METAL AND BRICKS

“I say” said Bunty, as she shone her torch at the corpse. Maggots writhed beneath the beam. “What a jolly disgusting mess!”

“Yes,” I agreed “utterly rum!”

“Nanny must have slipped and fallen down the cellar steps. Look at the strange angle of her head!” Bunty wrinkled her nose in disgust. ” I suppose this rather explains the smell coming through the floorboards”.

“Rather!” I trilled. “And I suppose that this means we should call the police too?”

Bunty shot me a crafty look. “Well…we could. Or we could see what Nanny tastes like?”

<ITEM> It’s a new day, which means that it’s time for another cracking edition of the comics lifestyle magazine show SILENCE! with your hosts The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus, puffing and wheezing through the motions. But what motions!

<ITEM> Admin, sponsorship and all that jazz. Bookplate editions and food on slates. We got it all.

<ITEM>SILENCE!…Because the Film Has Started with a Batman V Superman: Gaze Upon the Face of Justice and Despair! special.

<ITEM> The Beast Must Whore! He’s been putting it all about town. First an interview at the fabled comics critical establishment The Comics Journal. Then waving it in the direction of Kraken, the internet’s second best podcast.

<ITEM> Finally The Reviewniverse is breached and the jaunty gents chat at length about Daniel Clowes’ Patience, Ted McKeever’s Pencil Head amd 2000AD.

<ITEM> Gary Lactus vs The Scorpions

<ITEM>And let’s not forget…THIS!

click to download SILENCE!#182

The Beast Must Die likes to put it about, eh?  Last week, it was an interview with The Comics Journal.  Now, it’s a special guest appearance on the Kraken podcast, where he takes a break from discussing comics on SILENCE! to talk about… Batman.

As to what The Beast will be up to next week, just keep an eye on that that decrepit old castle round the corner from your house, that’s all I’m saying.

Through a fit of massive laziness on my part that I’m going to try and pass off as deliberate timing, this podcast is the first in a series of crossovers between Mindless Ones and Kraken , the next part of which should appear on this site later today!

If you don’t know Joel (or to give him his Mindless name, Go Complex!) from his work on the Kraken Podcast/London Graphic Novel Network, that’s okay – this is the first of three guest posts so you’ll have plenty of time to get used to his chatty, digressive style!

What I’d say about him – this is Illogical Volume here, hi! – is that in addition to being a nice guy with a lovely face, he’s also the sort of person who makes things/thoughts possible that might not have occurred without him.  Joel arranged the SMASH comics events that The Beast Must Die and I spoke at, and when he’s not bringing Ellis bros and Maid of Nails into conflict over whether the portrayal of Kaizen Gamorra is racist or exposing a hundred plus folks to the wonders of hurricane Ramzee, he frequently manages to make me want to pick a fight with my phone while I’m in the middle of the street just by having opinions about things.

If this sounds like a diss, it isn’t. Even when I find myself arguing with Joel – whether this happens in my head or in real life on the internet – it’s almost always productive, so regardless of whether I agree with him or not I’m always glad to have encountered his brain.

Anyway, that’s enough of my blether – take it away Joel!

Have you read Prophet? Brandon Graham?

Basically: it’s the perfect metaphor for the current state of our capitalist entertainment complex. Or whatever. Neo-liberal blah blah etc.

Speaking of which: Let’s talk Star Wars.

(Altogether now! “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”)

My two cents: The Empire Strikes Back is Batman. Return of the Jedi is Superman. And The Force Awakens is Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man (Miles Morales not Peter Parker).

Truth be told: I’ve never really been all that into Star Wars. I was always more of a Star Trek kid which makes sense because – come on – science fiction is way better than science fantasy, right?  Mostly, the J.J. Abrams Star Trek not included, Star Trek is actually about stuff  (even if it’s not exactly what you could call subtle) while Star Wars is simple, clear-delineated between battles of good versus evil.  (One of the many many things that would have made The Force Awakens would have been just Finn actually saying “Wait – are we the bad guys?”) Which is nice and everything but doesn’t really give you all that much to sink your brain teeth into – we’ll leave aside for now how thinking of terms of people being good or evil is basically at the root of a lot of our problems as a species because you already know that already right?

Saying that – I do have memories of watching the Ewoks cartoon a lot as a kid, and I’d like to imagine that was my first contact with the Star Wars universe if only because – how cool would that be? You grow up thinking of the Ewoks as their own separate contained universe, and then the first time you actually watch the Star Wars films and you get to Return of the Jedi and Endor you’re all like “wait a second – are those The Ewoks?” And then your mind is blown and nothing is ever the same.

I’m not saying that didn’t happen (and that sure would explain a lot) I just don’t have any real memory of it.

CDon’t worry. The Ewoks are coming back in a bit.

Our very own Dan White (aka The Beast Must Die) has been interviewed by Matt Colegate for The Comics Journal!  Colegate talks to The Most Handsome Mindless* about Terminus, Insomnia, Cindy and Biscuit, writing for this site, and the development of his art style, and it’s all well worth a read if you like what’s best in life.

A teasing excerpt:

When did you start noticing that your style was developing? Was it an incidental discovery or was it something you were working towards?

There’s a hodgepodge of influences that I can see in everything I do, but it’s nice that a style has formed. When I’m doing a brush stroke I’ll be thinking  “the way I’ve drawn those bushes is really Bill Watterson.” The style also came out of admitting that I didn’t have to do figurative art work. I could still tell stories that I liked by using cartoons. I should say that the biggest influence in my life is Chuck Jones. Seeing the Warner Bros. cartoons broke me forever.

So you were quite strict about wanting to be a cartoonist?

I just admitted, y’know, “You’re not going to be Simon Bisley and you’re not going to be able to draw Batman”. Nor would I want to. My uncle was an illustrator and I used to look at his work and the looseness of the brush work used to really appeal to me. When I realized I could tell the stories that I wanted by cartooning, and not being a slave to anatomy and photo-referencing, that was really liberating and I think the style developed there. It was quite organic.

A lot of your work – Terminus for example, which you did weekly for Mindless Ones – consists of single panel pieces. What is it that appeals about that format?

The one panel strip is traditionally used for political cartoons or simple visual gags, but I wanted to explore what you could do. They were like haiku experiments in paring down the text. Doing it on a weekly basis was great – doing anything on a weekly basis is great because it’s a way to refine your style – and I noticed that I was getting much better at paring the words down. I wanted to do something that wasn’t necessarily funny. What about if you had a one-panel comic that just disturbed you, or made you feel a bit sad? Somebody on the internet said “It’s like a fortune cookie that you open up and inside there’s an obituary.” That was the perfect description of what I was trying to do. He didn’t mean it as a compliment but I put it on the back of the first collection anyway. It was about trying to capture something and suggest a whole world in a panel. There was a nerdy element also, because I got to tell a science fiction or horror story simply. Horror is a thing that comes up again and again in my work and Terminus was a good way to flex some of those muscles.

If you’ll forgive me for sliding straight into huckster mode – this is the internet in 2016, after all – I’ll just right ahead and say that if the interview put you in the mood to read/buy Dan’s comics, we can help you out with that!

I mean just look at this sequence, from the most recent Cindy and Biscuit book:

SERIOUSLY – BUY DAN’S COMICS!**

***

Footnotes:

*Aside from Gary Lactus, who is of course the face of bad backs, and also – in his ridiculous stage name of “Fraser Geesin” – Jack of All Polymaths.

**Unless you’re broke, obviously. We don’t actually want to bankrupt you or anything. Or at least, The Beast Must Die doesn’t…

AN EVENING OF FUN IN THE METROPOLIS OF YOUR DREAM

Ninjas, ninjas, who wants ninjas? I got ninjas mate, ninjas coming out the wazzoo. Ninjas here, ninjas there, farkin’ ninjas everywhere mate. Sick o’ bleedin’ ninjas I am, tryin’ to offload the LOT of ’em…tell ya what mate, you take this lot off my ‘ands and I’ll chuck in this lovely watch. Solid adamantium that is mate, worth a flippin’ bomb. Tough as you like that is…

GETCHER NINJAS ‘ERE!

<ITEM> Welcome Dear Listeners, to the internet’s most cherished comics podcast, SILENCE! with that couple of nation’s sweethearts The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus.

<ITEM> It’s some record level admin, with sponsorship, Arrested Development as Watchmen, Daredevil Season 2, The Phantasmacats and the Galacticats, The SILENCE! News covering Civil War 2, Donald Trump and the Mark Millar-isation of modern culture, The Edinburgh Festival, Misery, SILENCE!…Because the Film Has Started with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and unbelievably a whole lot more…while somehow there being so much less…

<ITEM> Finally the Reviewniverse coughs, splutters and belches into life, with Spiderwoman, Huck, The Vision and Turn Coat.

<ITEM> One Vision…that’s all I can say really.

Hello?  Yes, speaking. Why thank you, I quite agree.  And you rang just to tell me that?  Uhuh, go on… Right… Okay… Okay, can I just stop you there.  There’s no way I’d sell them.  They might be absolute dolts but I love them.  No!  The Galcticats are not for sale, GOOD DAY!

Damp mishaps, cheek and sponsorship occupy the admin section of the edition of SILENCE! Once in the Reviewniverse we cover Monstress, Head Lopper, Doctor Strange, Hellcat!, The Infinity Entity, Ian Finity, Jim Starlian, Alian Davis and Batman Vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Once we’re out there’s a bit of talk about Cerebus and the enduring cultural tyranny of Queen.

LET’S GO!

click to download SILENCE!#180

[email protected]

IT’S A MUST THAT I TAKE THE STREETS BACK SO FAST, EVERYBODY THINKIN’ IT’S NOT GONNA LAST…

Okay big picture people, big picture only. Blue sky thinking, big picture stuff. Blue sky, big picture, out of the box stuff people. Big, blue, out-of-the-box thinking. Big picture, blue sky thinking, right out of the box, take the ball and run with it stuff people. Big runny blue balls, right out of the box. OK people? OK?

<ITEM> It’s the comics podcast that man, feels like a woman! It’s SILENCE! you lucky, lucky pea-pods.

<ITEM> Not just any episode, but one of our fabled Guesticodes featuring none other than Kelly Kanayama aka Maid of Nails. Scholar, Rob  Liefeld character, and Frank MIller gang member? Whatever, she’s here and she’s raising the bar. Limboing smoothly under it are old hams Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die.

<ITEM> Sponsorship as usual, but with some red hot Dundee recommendations! Also The Beast has some life admin to share, and is ready to introduce…the Phantasmacats! Also, Team Poppet and the Final Solution?? Oh and Dicks. Don’t forget the Dicks.

<ITEM> Let’s go go go into The Reviewniverse, and it’s a humdinger. We talk The Discipline, Shade The Changing Man, The Extremist, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan and bondage, Ted McKeever’s Pencil Head, Cerebus The Aardvark, problematic creators, Jiro Kawata’s Bat-Manga, Black Widow, Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and a slab more.

<ITEM> Gary has to duck out early so The Beast and Maid of Nails sing it out in style…

GERTCHA!

click to download SILENCE!#179

[email protected]