Mindless Ones

Fresh from his appearance at the debate on comics criticism at S.M.A.S.H. in London this Saturday (pictured above), here are 21 statements on comics criticism from The Beast Must Die:

1. Comics as an art form has the critics it deserves.

2. Comics critics are not as good as critics in other art forms.

3. Comics critics enlighten people about an art form that they might not know about.

4. Comics criticism lacks notable or significant figures in its canon; there are no Pauline Kaels, Harold Blooms or Roland Barthes [‘Bartheses’, surely?].

5. Comics critics are the best critics of all, because comics is an art form free of decades of critical debate and point-scoring and endless spiralling discussion.

6. Comics criticism is a place for juvenile people to snipe at each other pointlessly whilst keeping out strangers from their precious domain.

7. Comic critics who can’t talk about the art in a comic are no good as comics critics.

8. Comics podcasts are a popular avenue for criticism. They are the most ill-informed, badly thought out most lazy form of criticism.

9. Comics podcasts are a popular avenue for criticism. Comics podcasts allow for free-flowing conversation which generates genuinely interesting critical ideas.

10. Most comic criticism is on the internet, and as such often has little or no editorial input, meaning it is littered with mistakes, weak ideas and groundless opinions.

11. A lack of editorial input means that comics critics are free to think in original and interesting ways.

Click here to read the rest of the list at Broken Frontier!

It might seem counterintuitive to name a post about transport, technology, and the different ways we imagine ourselves hurtling into the future after a Mogwai song, but remember: I’m a life-long pedestrian, so like Mogwai I plod along at the side of your automated adventures, only occasionally encountering the violence of twisted metal or getting caught up in the wakes of your passing.

Ahem.  Anyway, where was I going with all of this…?

1. Mad Max Fury Road

Oh yes. Here. Always here. If you were lucky, perhaps you woke up one morning this summer after your second or third showing of Fury Road to find Brother Bobsy perched on the edge of your bed whispering his Mad Max monologues straight into your dreams:

The Fury Storm sequence is key to the film’s intent, mapping a space  unexplored by the previous Mad Max trilogy. Although climate change, nuclear summer, associated water/petrol resource crunches, and militarised neo-feudalism were all too predictable (or depressingly inescapable) from the perspective of the late 1970s,  the history of cyberculture and networked existence went unforeseen. The Fury Storm rushes in to fill this chasm in Mad Max‘s rebooted version of tomorrow.

Imperator Furiosa nevertheless deliberately turns into the storm: eager not just for the camouflage, but the active tactical benefits it affords over  her ill-protected pursuers: naked War Boys mistaking annihilation for apotheosis. It doesn’t matter how much they enjoy their lovely day, how they shout and confuse the heat of digital immolation for the light of false afterlife – the War Boys are getting torn into bits in there, while Furiosa and the Five Brides (plus Max himself) are only truly empowered to taste water and freedom after traveling through the storm’s event-horizon and its violent, chaotic multiplicities.

There are several contradictions built into the sort of immersive enjoyment of Fury Road that I’ve experienced – loving a movie that frames women as exquisite things while explicitly rejecting this worldview is complicated – but perhaps none are more fundamental than the sense of hope captured in the above paragraphs, this rapture of collaboration between bodies in a scenario where flesh and blood are just yet more commodities to be scavenged.

If you want to understand how director George Miller, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron communicate such intense relationships through image and sound, Chris Ready’s your man.

If you need a more critical look at the film’s terminus point and treatment of the female passengers, the Kraken boys might make more suitable  tour guides.

2. New roots for public transport

If you’re interested in identifying Fury Storms in our present moment in the hope of mitigating or better preparing for the bigger storms yet to come, you could do worse than read this Novara media piece outlining six meaningful ways we can work together to fight climate change now.

For the sake of this travel themed 5 For Friday, it’s the fourth option that’s most attention worthy here, seeking as it does to re-imagine the urban environment as a zone connected by free transportation (“There’s little need to burn fossil fuels to get around cities – if the right transport and energy infrastructure is in place”) and suggesting new sites of mutual struggle, such as those between environmental activists and public transport employees:

Opening up mass struggles for public transport also offers opportunities for alliances with transport workers – such as fare strikes/free rides, as pulled off by a collaboration between Occupy Wall Street and rank-and-file transit workers in NYC in 2012.

Developing and sustaining these relationships will no doubt make the spectacular coordination of Fury Road look like child’s play, but while you’d be foolish not to take the difficulty of a journey into account before embarking on it, that doesn’t mean that you should treat all difficult journeys as though they are impossible.

3. Autobanô

But maybe all of this talk of choosing your journey is just terribly outdated, what with automatically driven cars assembling in a secluded car parknear you right now. While the possibility of robots taking the jobs of professional drivers provided a new front for the debate about the relationship between automation and the world of work, it was this article on the ethics of programming cars to kill is the one that’s taken me captive.

The key line, for me:

People are in favor of cars that sacrifice the occupant to save other lives—as long they don’t have to drive one themselves.

In contrast to the toxic, dust-filled landscapes and radiation scoured pageantry of Fury Road, this suggests a very clean, carefully managed sort of dystopia. Think Cosmopolis as invigorated by J.G. Ballard – a future in which an elite class is driven around from one anodyne, too-easily diagrammed space to another, protected from the lower classes who populate the space in between by the clever programming and sturdy construction.

Action sequences in which driverless cars are programmed or hijacked have been part of our fiction for a while now, but for all my apocalyptic pulp rhetoric it’s the solidification of common human reactions that’s most unsettling here. We can perhaps understand people who make split-second decisions to put themselves first, but to specifically program a car to plow into a crowd of strangers in order to protect one passenger, to reproduce these survival instinct as code, to make them marketable… all of this is far harder to feel at ease with, for this pedestrian at least!

4. Rumble Strip

That diagram of different crash scenarios burned itself onto my eyes the first time I saw it, overlaying its emotionless reductions of life and death scenarios onto my everyday experience.  It took until my vision had cleared for me to realise that I’d been here before:

 

As Bobsy (yeah him again!) said back at the time of Rumble Strip’s release:

…the visual language of roads, the set of consensual signifiers that give punctuation and meaning to the otherwise meaningless grey expanses, the easy-to-read fluency of the roadsigns and road-markings, the minimalist and directly unambiguous design principles they adhere to – are an almost too-perfect subject for interrogation via the comicbook medium.

The three previous entries in this post have dealt with where we might be going, charting alternate destinations for our journeys. Woodrow Phoenix’s Rumble Strip is something else entirely – a lucid expression of the journey as we experience it  now.

5. No DeLorean

As Marnie Stern fan #1, I’m duty bound to say that she gets a pass on Back to the Future nostalgia for life, but everyone else could do worse than read this post on fake geek guys, hoverboards and how the obsession with technological commodities in the Back to the Future drowns out any consideration for how its fetishised future would have been built and by whom.

This might seem to be beside the point – the people who made those movies knew their way around a product, after all – but since we’re not exactly lacking in signs pointing us towards that sort of future, we should stay mindful of other possibilities.

After all, they may just end up taking us beyond our current limitations, to somewhere we’ve yet to imagine.

 

 

 

 

LOOK HERE! IT’S

SECRET CONVERGENCE OF INFINITE PODCASTS

That’s right!  In this third in the #SCOIP series of podcast crossovers, The Beyonder has gathered together Gary Lactus with Kieran Shiach from Journey Into Misery, Chico Leo from Fan Bros and Al Kennedy from
House To Astonish to ponder the impossibly specific question, ARE THINGS BETTER OR WORSE.

Unsurprisingly things turn pretty ramblesome pretty quickly as our cosmic castaways talk about Comic Book Movies, Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada and The Changing Face Of The Industry In General. There’s some laughs, some sagely nods and some lovely Moral messages at the end.

click to download SILENCE!#163

Contact us:

[email protected]

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

You can support us using Patreon if you like.

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

PREVIOUSLY: MAID OF NAILS and BOTSWANA BEAST opened a door and then walked through it.

BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT????

 

 

PAVEMENTS OF POETS WILL WRITE THAT I DIED IN NINE ANGELS ARMS

I am feeling boy howdy double plus positive you betcha. Ever since the operation, things have just been A-OK! I been as chipper as a bright sunny day. No more bad feelings for me, no sir! No more of the red thoughts, just nice bright blue thoughts. When I think back to how I usedta be…well gosh mister I just can’t even imagine being such an ol’ gloomy gus! All it took was a little snip snip and a bit of slice slice and POW! Clean thoughts! All-a-time! And the Men, they say that I have a POS-itive outlook now, one that makes me a WHOLE lot more acceptable for the big wide world. And what a world it is! Full of laughs and love, songs and dances. Birds and bees and butterflies and, oh just ALL SORTS! So whattya waiting for? Plug in those earphones and hop, skip and jump out the door into the comforting arms of the world. It’s a brand new day, and it’s a brand new SILENCE!

<ITEM> Nananananananananana-ADMIN! with S.M.A.S.H at the London Graphic Novel Network, Thought Bubble 2015, GOSH! Comics, Dave’s Comics, Secret Convergence On Infinite Podcasts, Fraser Geesin Jack of all Polymaths and sciatica

<ITEM> Reviewniverse come my selectah featuring hot new section COVER ME! I’m Going In!, Island no.4, Black Magic, Banacek, Magnum PI, Columbo, Alex Ross, Art Ops, Vertigo, New Avengers, Howling Commandos of S.H.I.E.L.D, Grayson, Justice League, and Garth Ennis’ The Boys

<ITEM> It’s the return of the excellent fan-favourite SILENCE! Because My Mouth Is Full Of Delicious Food! And then you can flipping’ do one treacle!

PLUS

SECRET CONVERGENCE OF INFINITE PODCASTS

AND ALSO

 

LONDON GRAPHIC NOVEL NETWORK EVENT

click to download SILENCE!#162

Contact us:

[email protected]

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

You can support us using Patreon if you like.

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

Far beyond its absence of green ladies and wormholes linking baddads of the past and gooddads yet to come, this is an overwhelmingly functional movie, but that’s not a criticism so much as it’s a sign that I was awake enough to notice the movie’s basic effects.

The transmission of practical genius is one its keys goals, but while this is most obviously signified in Rich Purnell(/Donald Glover)’s wild eyes and inattention to his own living conditions or the triangulations that blink up on Beth Johanssen(/Kate Mara)’s monitor, its most interesting expression comes in the scenes dealing with Mark Watney(/Matt Damon)’s attempts at life on Mars.

These scene aim for a “based on a true story” vibe through a mixture of heavily reduced scientific exposition and direct to fake-real camera addresses that remind me of computer game cut scenes in their overpoweringly “clean” flaws, the carefully composed cracks in their recording.

It’s down to Damon to sell all of this.

Halloween is close at hand gentle readers. Feel it’s cold, damp hand on the back of your neck. Feel as the grip tightens, and it turns your head towards this screen and these words. 5 for Friday. 5 ways to pass the time as the howling winds and…other sounds rattle at your windows. Don’t look under the bed. Don’t check the cupboards. Don’t look away.

1) Smoker of the future

Public service broadcasts have a long and brutal tradition of scaring the piss out of unsuspecting viewers. Often these informative warnings serve as micro-horror films of the highest order, utilising cutting edge film techniques and imaginative methods to get their hard truths across. Many a child was scarred by early exposure to these nightmarish visions of EC Comics like karmic justice, dealt by an uncaring universe.

The one that I could never, ever shake though was this one – ‘The Smoker of the Future’, a truly mindshredding antismoking advert that is like Hieronymous Bosch by way of Ridley Scott. It features one of the most terrifying monsters ever depicted on the small screen – that of an addict, mutated by their habit into something guaranteed to never, ever leave your memory. Brilliantly shot, bafflingly intense and truly horrific:

 

2) Moomin Groke

Tove Jansonn’s Moomin mythos is full of weird and wonderful creatures, that all hover right on the cute/scary borderline. Lovely, whimsical stories cut with an Scandinavian idiosyncrasy that gives them a unique and wonderful flavour. The Polish TV puppet adaptation from the early 1980s captured this flavour perfectly. But then. Then. The Groke. Oh god, the Groke. Those blank eyes, that shuffling, amorphous form. Moving ever closer, bringing frozen death with her every breath. Hide. Hide from the Groke.

 

3) Enigma of the Amigara Fault

I’ve talked about Junji Ito’s masterful short piece here before, but if you ever wanted to understand why he is one of the finest horror comics creators ever, this nasty little tale should convince you. As someone prone to claustrophobia there is something so profoundly disturbing about this story that I can barely bring myself to read it. It features a number of Ito’s favourite tropes – people behaving strangely, compelled by forces beyond their ken, bodies twisting into strange new forms, and a view of the natural world as alien and malign. Concise, uniquely weird and sublimely unsettling.

Check it out here

 

4) Tuck Me In

This brilliant one minute horror film did the rounds a while back but it sure packs a punch. Masterfully economic, it manages to be scarier than most mainstream full length horror films whilst also playing on parental fears expertly. Best not to say too much really. Just watch it.

 

5) The Grandmother
Seeing as Lynch is making a high-profile return to our screens soon (although not soon enough dammnit!) it only seems fair to dedicate some time to the master this Halloween. Thr Grandmother, his 1970 short film is a gruelling textural experience of alienating horror. Or is it a lovely story about a neglected boy and the special love that a grandparent can offer? It’s both, of course! Bringing his incredible sound design and visual imagination into play, before embarking on the opus of Eraserhead, this half hour film is pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel. Imagine stumbling across this on TV late one night, and then imagine never sleeping properly gain. No-one can make you feel as queasy or unsettled as Lynch. Pretenders have tried, but watch this and realise what watery gruel they offer when up against the original.

Happy watching Mindless Ones.

So once again the Mindless Ones will be at the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic Convention, Thought Bubble. You can find us at tables six and seven in New Dock (don’tmentiontheoldname) Hall on the fourteenth and fifteenth of November.

Bobsy, Andre Whickey, The Beast Must Die, Gary Lactus, and Illogical Volume will all be there (sadly Mister Attack, who has been with us for the past few years, will not be attending this year), and you will be able to buy Cindy & Biscuit and Terminus comics from The Beast Must Die, or the adventures of Andrew & Stephen or The Cleaner from Gary Lactus. And you will be able to see Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die doing a very special SILENCE!, and you won’t even have to give them any money for that (though you can, of course).

“But wait!”, I hear you cry, “there are FIVE Mindless Ones attending the convention, not two! What do Bobsy, Andre Whickey, and Illogical Volume have to offer me, other than their raw animal sexuality?”

This has, in previous years, posed a problem for those of us who are less obviously artistically gifted than the SILENCE! duo. We have previously attempted to sell my books, which don’t have any pictures in at all, with limited success, and to sell Illogical Volume, with even more limited success (he always comes back).

You will, of course, still be able to purchase some of my books, and we will still be entertaining offers for Illogical Volume, but this year, those of us who communicate only by means of text will be doing something different as well.

Have you ever wanted your own personal Mindless Ones blog post, written just for YOU? If so, now is your chance!

Throughout Thought Bubble weekend (depending on the vagaries of laptop battery life and the Royal Armories’ shonky wi-fi), we will be liveblogging on the subjects of your choosing. YOU, yes YOU! could have your own Mindless Ones blog post, custom-written by our blogging artisans.

For just a penny a word, we will write blog posts of any length. Have you a burning desire to be updated on the saga of Bobsy’s superhero underpants? Do you really want to read Illogical Volume writing five hundred words on why David Cameron is a great bunch of lads? Do you want to know who would win in a fight between the Thing and Darkseid? Do you want Andre Whickey to summarise his opinions on the pop music the modern young people listen to, with their Bay City Rollers and their hippity hoppiting, rather than that old stuff he writes about? Would you like a ten thousand word essay on the Clone Saga, in iambic pentameter?

Now you can have just that. Bobsy, Illogical Volume, and Andre Whickey will be tag-team blog-posting over the weekend. Short posts will be written by one of us solo, longer posts by some combination of the three. We will write words right in front of your astonished faces, and post them to the Internet for all to see.

We will be starting at a penny a word, but rates may go up (or down) depending on demand, so get there early. No refunds.

A few thoughts on Material, a prematurely cancelled comic by Will Tempest, Tom Muller, Ales Kot and Clayton Cowles that feels like it’s worth not just reading but talking about – and maybe even continuing?

!) IT’S ABOUT TIME

Like so much contemporary mass media, Material  seemed aware of its readers’ ability to act as biocapitalist broadcasting stations, trusting that they would work harder and smarter than Image comics’ marketing department – that its readers would talk about it on podcasts, write essays, send enthusiastic tweets, anything to try and share the experience of it. Its methods of going about this was somewhat obvious but effective: the comic lectured you, provided prompts for further reading, tried to link scenes in the comic to other texts, be they topical text pieces in the back of the comic or the names and references scattered in the margins.

Even while it was still being published, then, Material seemed to revel in its status as an incomplete text. The art echoed this approach, with with Will Tempest’s none-more-loose linework held together almost entirely by the carefully coded block colouring.  It looked and felt like work-in-progress, and with the action currently suspended, its characters’ lives have that feeling too.

Everything in this book is material for the reader; the question is, how much work do you want to put in?  How much do you want to let Material work with you?

As I’ve already said, by publicly engaging with the comic we become part of the marketing scheme, “self-facilitating media nodes” or some such Barley-bollocks.  Is that all there is to it though?  Value is fundamental to the idea of currency of course, and when you’re offering up cash on the promise of receiving a worthwhile experience it’s doubly hard to disentangle financial motives from your response, but that doesn’t mean that we should give in to the tautological worldview that says since everything can be sold it is best judged by its commercial worth.

Material‘s current status gives us pause to consider this question, temporarily free from questions of cash money and how to spend it.  It brings the other questions of trust – is this going anywhere?  is it just wearing the raw tragedy of the moment like a shiny new suit? – into the foreground.

All you need to spend right now is a little bit of time.