Mindless Ones

Right then.  It’s that time of year again when things get a bit spooky.  In order to do our bit for the annual Genre Fiction Evening otherwise known as Halloween, we present to you YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE!  Yes, it’s a solo Gary Lactus issue of SILENCE! where he tries to fit in some comic reading and reviews around a trip to do some comedy in Newcastle.

COWER at the background noise!

SHIVER at the limited insight!

TREMBLE at the shorter than usual length!

SHUDDER at the barely thought out opinions on Clean Room #1, Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny Inhumans, Karnak and Ant-Man!

QUAKE at the excuses

JUMP at the news about Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts and Thought Bubble!

VACILLATE at the obvious use of a thesaurus!

WOBBLE to the song at the end, Crazy Zombi Party!

click to download SILENCE!#161

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: Botswana Beast and Maid of Nails discussed premature Batjaculation, ephemeral dogs and Grant Morrison’s Glasgow music hall touches.

Otherwise life is just a bunch of screaming meat

MoN: I think I have solved the mystery of the 15 moves in Multiversity #2, and I am so psyched about it

BB: Me too –

1. The cube is the missing weapon from Earth-15
2. 15 is 51 inverted, the last world

I kept meaning to say, what do you reckon it is?

MoN: Damn, I keep forgetting about the Earth-numbers…

Ok here goes: in Final Crisis (2008), Metron solves the Rubik’s Cube in 17 moves to save/restore Nix Uotan.

BB: Allllsssooooo, 15 can correspond to Alpha as in A and 5 looks like S, so All-Star, so the cube is Universe-Q from All-Star Superman (aka ASSMAN)??

This is this scalar trick he always pulls.

You are an inconsequential energy fluctuation born to the fractionally larger but no less inconsequential energy fluctuation we call humanity. You aren’t doomed to oblivion because you never were in the first place.

So you might as well click on some links!

1. These 31 spooky radio plays are one way, possibly the best way, of killing time until the apocalypse/Halloween. Mostly American, they cover a large chunk of the 20th Century, 1934-1979, and include adaptations of iconic horror works by the likes of Lovecraft, Poe and M.R. James.

2. An essential and concise overview of the English Eerie. Travel writer Robert Macfarlane dissects and opens up the books, music, film and poetry that have influenced our conception of England as in some sense haunted, be it literally or figuratively.

3. That weird confluence of hippies and horror that was the late 60s and early 70s’ age of Black Aquarius is given the documentary treatment by Dr Who fanboy and film historian Matthew Sweet in this episode of Radio 4’s Archive on 4. It’s a good’un.

4. Want your life – what’s left of it, anyway – to sound like a spaceship hurtling into the unfathomable blackness mortals call the universe? Here’s 12 hours of Star Trek/Alien/2001/Bladerunner atmospherics.

5. Hang on, you’ve never visited Scarfolk? I mean really? That needs to change right now. Because you are being watched, especially when you sleep, and if you don’t we’ll come for you and your children*.

For more information please re-read this message.

What I like best in art – and I like loads of stuff, I like jokes that I can’t help but laugh at, I like being able to just fucking marvel at someone doing something that seems impossible, I like that moment when something that didn’t seem like it could possibly come together does, and so on – is being put into difficulty.  Not in terms of being faced with something that’s hard to watch/read/look at/listen to necessarily, more in that I like it when I’m made to confront something that I can’t easily resolve or ignore or explain away.

The Millar/Hitch Ultimates doesn’t look like the most promising territory for this sort of experience, and for the most part that’s true. It’s probably the last Mark Millar comic I was able to enjoy without vomiting up qualifiers, and it definitely represents the last point where Bryan Hitch’s artwork looked good to my eyes, but if I like it at all then I like it in a fairly breezy way.  I laugh at the crude bits, I follow the fight scenes, I enjoy the brash, bratty character beats, and all of this is good.

The point of difficulty, for me, the point where I find myself getting really tangled up in the book, involves a cameo by the man who was President of the United States of America at the time the story was published:

DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!

click to download SILENCE!#160

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.

Hideous reader, have you not noticed the leaf corpses strewn on the pavement? The stygian dark outside, even though it’s just past tea time?

Aye tis come again. Death season, when women with warty noses gather to mix their potions and slather their pungent unguents pon their flight rods and cats slink in and out of the shadows who art their kin…

Sorry, went a bit Gaiman there. Here’s five links gonna shit you up bruv. Halloween innit.

1. Saving the toughest for first: Current 93 doing Thomas Ligotti’s heat death of the universe poem I Have a Special Plan for This World.

This is really horrid, I’m sorry.

Be as strong as you can.

It won’t make any difference.

2. Perfect slaughtering season fare: Praeterlimina – a journal of daemonology, magic and the human condition.

Smart motherfuckers having hyperstitional fun, like MR James gone digital.

3.  And this? Well this is just a cosy cuddle by comparison isn’t it, a wonderful reunion with an old friend?

Well no, no it’s not really. Go to 28:26.

4. A Batman horror comic I did a while back . The only comic I’ve ever tried to make I think, weird for someone who likes comics so much…

The Mindless Lads were kind enough to pimp it for me a bit at the time, so apologies if you’ve seen it on here before. I would’ve been doing it around this time of year a couple of years ago, maybe that’s why I just remembered it. I think it’s actually not that bad – loads of mistakes obvs, but it does an alright job of providing a bat-channel for some of the black hole / speculative realist / super-nihilist stuff I was reading at the time. It’s definitely a bit grim, with the amateurishness hopefully contributing to rather than detracting from the  intended, alienated affect that earns it a spot here. That and I can’t think of anything else.

Chiroptopos.

5. Finally, an old favourite. Traditional at this time of year because that brilliant Madrid sunshine is quite the tonic.

The most Ballardian film ever, anticipating his Mediterranean/riviera period by a couple of decades, but with a lovely EC Comics kick in the finish.

This is more interesting that it would first appear. For a start it features FX guru John Gaeta, whose mode of delivery is mesmerisingly obtuse.

More seriously, this collaboration between ILM and xLab on virtual/augmented reality tech, while being part of the Disney hype machine, has some potentially fascinating and not a little chilling implications.

Read more

Botswana Beast: Hello readers, in my ongoing efforts to to trick other people into writing entire or the majority of my pieces for Mindless Ones, I have enlisted another vict… expert, silver Hawaiian Kelly Kanayama, who you may be familiar with from the excellent Women Write About Comics and More than Four Colours, amongst other things; she is also presently writing a Ph.D. on Judge Dredd, Preacher and transatlanticism, which is a thing you can do nowadays, even if you are a lady. I was surprised too, but she is totally brilliant, and yes of course has a Mindless name, see; this is her head:-

Maid of Nails: The Multiversity is one of those series that burrows into your brain — like the cordyceps fungus, not uncoincidentally. Sometimes you need a friend and collaborator to help you exorcise it. (It was this or make my girlfriends listen to me going mad about Grant Morrison, and quite frankly they’ve suffered enough.)

Isn’t that what academia is for?

Ha ha. There’s no room for YOUR MOM jokes in academia, nor for unbridled written enthusiasm. Besides, if this were academia, I’d have to include shitloads of footnotes and wouldn’t be allowed to say the word “shitloads”, and no one wants that.

Instead I subjected ya boy Botswana Beast to numerous Internet communications in an attempt to figure out what the hell was going on in this comic and, more importantly, why it had been lodged so firmly in my mind for so long.

As is often the case with GMo, we thought this was going Nix Uotan-ward at first but it ended up mostly focusing on Pax Americana: the black hole within the black hole pulling all thoughts and analysis inexorably towards its centre, and the infinite recursion of Algorithm 8 leaving us no clear point at which to get off.

What follows is — I hesitate to say “the process”, because dwelling too much on the process by which critique occurs is the sign of a total wang. “The correspondence”? No, that sounds worse. Maybe just the parts of an extended analysis, in the sense of the parts that make up Allen Adam’s dog, nerves and organs and eyes laid bare; not quite a dog themselves, but at least showing a little of what makes the dog work.

BB: (we also deigned to suffer some latter interjections from yer man Illogical Volume)

Worlds on the balance of chance

0

recent photo of Pluto’s moon, Nix

BB: I’m just thinking of riffing on the 0-51 conceit, but like so ‘0’ is the Earth Nix is on, the main DCU one; I think he will probably be the major topic of discussion, issues 1 & 2 under that… rubric, is that the word.

MoN: Re: the possible future use of Multiversity’s developments, is there awareness of potential squandering/futility the whole way through? GMo did get burned after New X-Men (hence Seaguy), and what with having to tie Batman Inc into the New 52…if I had to choose, I’d say this is what the Empty Hand is about. You can try and achieve closure – in the sense of reaching the end of the story arc, etc – but since it can all be undone, the hand remains empty, if that makes sense.

4

BB: so, but not sequentially, and I guess the worlds is probably gonna be the thing…? But I think Pax/4, also the fourth issue in the series – I’m just interested in numbers, numerology, all this, I obsess over primes and prime products sometimes mechanically and so it’s interesting to me how two score and a dozen numbers have correspondant Justice Leagues now or whatever… but anyway, four is a unique number in that it is both the product and sum of its component prime, 2, (this fact seems to be a major agitating factor behind Iron Man 1 actor Terrence Howard’s rebel mathematical system Terryology) and the whole thing is about bifurcations and shit… four is an uncanny and discomfiting number

THE DOOR HAS ONE SIDE AND OPENS BOTH WAYS – LET ME SHOW YOU

1. What the fuck is money? Who makes it? It’s the government, yeah? Or maybe the banks. This episode of the Kraken podcast makes for a cheerful introduction to this topic, and if you’re left wishing that they got a bit more into the question of what they’d do for money, well, there’s a whole big world of people wanking for coins out there for you to concern yourself with.
2. If you’d plashing up to the deep end, the New Economics Foundation have put together a report on the prospects for an independent Scotland creating its own digital currency, the “ScoutPound”.  The NEF argue that if £250 worth of it were issued to every Scottish citizen, it would boost the spending power of the poorest and boost business.  Critics in the comments argue that the administration of this would be more difficult than presented and/or that it’s all just an New World Order plot, but then again these criticisms are generally applied to almost anything that’s “proposed” on the internet these days, so…
3. If you need to wash the taste of BitCoin out of your mouth after reading that, here’s a post on Basic Income (also known as giving people enough money to ensure that they won’t die of poverty) that takes issue with some of its technolibertarian supporters, and another that casts a sceptical eye on some of cryptocurrency driven Basic income proposals. I’m a big advocate of Basic Income as an idea, so it’s good to read critiques like this – shout outs to Charlie Stross for the links!
4. Bringing it back down to Earth for a minute, here’s a news article on the Govanhill pound, a local currency that has been created by a community artist at the Govanhill Baths, just round the corner from my old house.  The exchange rate for the Govanhill Pound is variable, with the suggestion being that it amounts to “a hundredth of a person’s weekly income”.  If you were going to make a joke about artists needing to print their own money don’t bother unless you’re going to wince when you say it.
5. Finally, in case you were wondering where all the comics chat went, here’s a link to my post on Eddie Campbell’s book about money, the title of which I stole earlier in the post. Every other comics critic I’ve discussed The Lovely Horrible Stuff with has told me that they think it’s good, but slight – I reckon they’ve just not realised that it’s a dapper bit of bunting that’s been hung around a gaping, cyclopean abyss…