Mindless Ones

For the first time since the last time, the Mindless Ones will be at Thought Bubble 2024 in Harrogate this weekend. We’ll be at tables B3-4 in DSTLRY Hall on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November, trading comics for cash and WNDRNG WHT YRTS.

Some handsome bastard called David Allison will be there flogging zines and comics in the hope of attracting the right crowd. His first big new release of the weekend is An Intervention, his second Pocket Chiller.

An Intervention is a tale of random encounters, submerged responsibility, and concrete angels. Like a chimp attempting to make fire by hooting at some twigs, David has made a crude trailer for the comic, which you can watch below.

David’s other new release is The Grave and The Good, a Choose Your Own Adventure zine.

Here’s how David is trying to entice the unsuspecting this time out: “You wake up with the taste of earth in your mouth. Everything else about you is cold and damp, but you sense that you were on the verge of learning something horrible and true about the world. The only question is, can you dig deep into this feeling and survive?”

David will have copies of his previous Pocket Chiller, The Candidate, for sale at the weekend. If he gets his act together, he will also have a range of zines and mini-comics with him, including: Uncle Frank, Cut-Out Witch, and Mini-Witch (all illustrated by Shaky Ghost); Beyond Whiles (adapted from the work of Alasdair Gray); BARRY, or “The Robot”; and Grave Tidings, an eight page comic made of reprocessed art from The Grave and The Good.

In a startling turn of events, the Mindless Ones will be at Thought Bubble 2024 in Harrogate this weekend. We’ll be at tables B3-4 in DSTLRY Hall on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November, trading comics for hard cash and pre-chewed vowels.

It wouldn’t be a Mindless meet-up without big massive genius Gary Lactus aka Fraser Geesin in the mix, so we’re all delighted to know that we’ll be able to look upon the face of bad backs this weekend. This time out Fraser will be debuting the latest issue of Pricks, his ongoing collaboration with Laurie Rowan.

Here’s a Mindless micro-review of the latest issue, just to get yr receptors tingling:

Ever feel everything closing in as you flop about in next door’s bins trying to find a new accessory? Ever wonder what’s happened to your brand, and how you were convinced to have it burned into your flesh in the first place? Ever find yourself not mad but laughing, actually? If so, congratulations, Pricks #4 is the comic for you! If not, amazing, Pricks #4 has experienced all those things so you don’t have to! 

The previous three issues of Fraser Geesin and Laurie Rowan’s Pricks established a tone and a set of characters, none of them particularly stable. Just when you think you’ve got a grip on what’s going on with Darren – hunched in a slum property, dressed in only a rubber glove for warmth – Pricks finds a new shape to squeeze him into. This is high, horrible absurdity that will appeal to fans of Michael Kupperman and Steve Aylett, made all the more potent by the way Geesin’s art grounds even the book’s wildest gags in the everyday.

Pricks looks and smells every bit as routinely abhorrent as the modern world. What a miracle, then, that it’s also the funniest comic of the year.

Alongside all four issues of Pricks, Fraser will be selling the following hand crafted wonders this weekend: his ace autobio comic The Cleaner; Ikea-themed anthology Komisk; prints depicting Ikea Products From Hell; his collaboration with big pimpin’ Andre Whickey, Tales From 500 Songs; the Pocket Chillers Speckle and Ash and Jeff (the latter with Dan Cox); and Journey To The Surface of the Earth issues #1-2.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Fraser will be stripping off his civilian identity and going full Gary Lactus at the SILENCE! to Astonish panel at 2pm on Saturday 16th November in Panel Room 2.

Goodie Lactus will be joined in this endeavour by his trusty co-hosts, The Beast Must Die and “Affable” Al Kennedy, and by special guests Chrissy Williams, Ram V, David Brothers and Stephanie Phillips. Expect odd questions, inexplicable challenges, and totally unexpected and double plus special guests in this, the ninth occurrence of comicdom’s most pointless and shambolic panel show.

Dan gets another chance at binning off Nigel. Good. But will it pay off? OF COURSE IT WILL! Bloody Nigel!

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Birdland (Gilbert Hernandez, 1991)

(Originally published in a slightly different form on the now-decommissioned Vibrational Match blog back in January 2009.)

Ladies, gentlemen, those beyond the binary – I’d like to start out by informing you that this post is most definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK, not even if you work from home!

I’ve edited some of the following images down so that they’re a little more abstract, but it’s still not the sort of material you want anyone else to catch you looking at, you know?  Your cat would be unimpressed, and your father would only fall back into the arms of his priest to spite you.

Sensible souls that you are, I know you’ve probably closed this browser down already, or at least flicked back to a less grubby web page. So, having scared off those who still have their wits about them, let’s get on with it shall we?

Dan and Fraser – sorry – Caroline and God drop back in to a devastatingly dramatic accentgasm of a scene. We won’t spoil what is to come here but let’s just say that risks are taken. BIG risks. Enjoy.

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IT’S A PLASTIC BAG WITH PLASTIC HANDLES AND PLASTIC SIDES

We spill our guts all over your ears, and Daisy the Galacticat does something similar.

We talk about:

Dan McDaid, Pricks, Summer Holidays, Sequent’Ull, Alex Potts, Gareth Hopkins’ Rainlight Cope Aesthetic, Lily Williams’ Digging, Freaky Deakies, Insomnia and the 1989 Batman film.

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Things are getting dramatic!  Things are getting Romantic!  Things are getting everything!  Holy shit, Island of Secrets is shaping up to be the richest adventure yet as God gives Caroline some genuinely tricky choices and Dan and Fraser imagine the writer of the book in ever more detail.  I think it’s fair to say that neither of these middle aged men want the summer of 1985 to end.

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Welcome, Fellow Traveler, to the second installment of Island Of Secrets.  In this episode we’re going to meet men galore, begin to sniff mystery and complain about how lazy all these bloody foreigners are on this Greek island.  There’s also some fantastic music. 

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We start the third book in the Starlight Adventures series, Island Of Secrets. Fraser is God, Dan

is… probably Caroline.

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