Mindless Ones

Brief and hasty thoughts after listening to this rather interesting Roundtable Discussion from 2011 on Romero’s Dawn of the Dead…

[You already know if vague meanderings about zombie movies are your thing so stop here or shuffle on as you prefer.]

Ballard (Mentioned in discussion c. –40 mins)

An interesting avenue of conjecture lies in imagining a conclusion to Dawn and it’s central private shopping mall utopian imaginary, minus the aggressive intervention of Blades, Sledge and the rest of the biker gang (see below) which provokes the films dramatic finale. The inevitable outcome here is mentioned already during the roundtable: pure Ballard.

Left to fester in the mall, the survivors’ molecular neosuburbia would have atomised rapidly, losing its structure to the dissipating pull of mathematical entropy as our survivors retreated further and further retreating into their private dystopian interiors:

Francine behind the false wall of their enclave, nursing her baby, perched upon a nest of ripped-up cardboard boxes.

Peter burrowing ever deeper into the mall’s guts, crawling the ventilation shafts and access hatches, digging at the walls and chewing the electric  cables.

Stephen with his weathered flight jacket, binoculars and empty rifle, stalking the rooftop, unable to return to the plastic vaulted sky below.

The shops lying terrifying and empty again, except for when the moon is full and Fran and Pete would meet on the main concourse to fuck, while Stephen peers through the skylight.

Zombie children (c. –23 mins)

This scene is recapitulated in 28 Days Later, in which Cillian Murphy’s character walks through almost exactly the same scene, killing a rage-infected child, out of sight of his fellow survivors. Boyle/Garland choose this taboo-within-a-taboo as a key turning point for his character, beyond which he kills no more of the infected victims, choosing instead to identify with them and eventually adopting their methods as a means of overcoming the remnant militarism of dead Britain.

This seems to suggest dead children as given cause and justification for the entwined problems/solutions each film poses and represents: GET MAD=GO ZOMBIE

Bikers (c. –15mins)

Led by Tom Savini himself, who used the …Dead movies  to transfigure his traumatic memories of Vietnam War horror into celluloid spectacle, thereby changing the decomposing face of cinema forever, the biker gang within the film’s model represent the coming intrusion of post-Fordist labout and neoliberal capital, crashing the postwar party of settled and endless bourgeois plenty.

The bikers are literally deterritorialised – piratical and nomadic – and better adapted to survive within the available niches of the postapocalyptic ecology than our bored and barricaded survivors: they are playful with the undead, having developed new perversions and sexual subjectivities with the zombies (and mannequins) as their focus.

Despite their anarchic surface and apparent disdain for the commodified desires and familiar comforts of the hastily re-improvised nuclear family, they are only interested in the mall for what they can extract from it. Their belief in might-makes-right and reinscription of archaic gender roles makes the vision of a human future where they are most fit uncomfortably primitive…

I PUT DOWN MY BLANKET ON CIGARETTE BUT BEACH, I SAW THE OLD MAN HE WAS DOING OK

Don’t you want Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 baby? Don’t you want Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735? Oh.

Those two unimpressive moons are once again orbiting the great planet of comics… That’s right it’s a full double-fisting edition of the comics podcast that might have been recently labeled ‘a national disgrace’ by frothing right wing cartoon knob-jockey Richard Littlejohn. You couldn’t make it up meatsacks!  The Beast Must Die & Gary Lactus entwined in each others strong yet tender arms cooing sweet nothings into each others ears and letting YOU dear listener into their boudoir.

<ITEM> The Beast has a report from his recent sojourn to Caption Comics Festival, and Gary Lactus does some listening. There’s talk of kids comics, Al Davison, Eddie Campbell and tatty village halls. GLAMOUR.

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse is opened like a particularly large oyster and inside is the pearl of COMICS…a shame-faced Beast is soundly trounced i the comics reading comics competition by eager beaver Gary, with ensuing discussion of The Outliers, Solid State Tank Girl, Innvincible Haggard West, Resident Alien, Daredevil, Lobster Johnson, Batman 66, Justice League Dark, Infinity, Rocketeer & Spirit and The Mysterious Strangers…

<ITEM> Mention is made of the 11 o’clock comics podcast special with Brandon Graham and The Beast froths about the Batman: Brave & The Bold cartoon. Always so contemporary that Beast.

And that’s enough, meatbags. Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is going to kick back and listen to Kendrick whilst scanning vintage circuit board  pornography. Bring me the cyber-vaseline and get out of here!

click to download SILENCE!#74

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

A brand new Cindy & Biscuit 1-pager for all of you. Enjoy, and head over to Milk The Cat if you want to buy their comics…

This one was done for the programme of this year’s wonderful Caption Comics Festival, a truly unique and wonderful event – part comics symposium, part ramshackle village fete, it’s a real treat. I was on a panel talking about Cindy & Biscuit this year, so thanks to Alex Fitch for inviting me!

FUCK A JOHN WAYNE

 Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is sad to say that Gary Lactus is no longer with us…he is in Edinburgh doing some ‘stand-up’, ‘comedy’ mission. Ha ha, You thought that  Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 meant he was dead! Gullible meatbags.

But seriously I disintegrated him this morning.

So you get solo-Silence with The Beast Must Die – STOP CRYING! – as  Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735  was saying, you get solo-Silence. Boo-hoo , all better now.

<ITEM> a brand new one-off theme tune and a GOSH comics jingle? Surely you spoil us Beasty one..?

<ITEM> TBMD slot himself into The Reviewniverse to talk about some stuff, including Incredible Hulk, Catalyst Comix, Dial H (final issue), Prophet and a bit more too!

<ITEM> A small play depicting Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin talking about Satellite Sam…? Stop, my beating diodes!

<ITEM> a long winded monologue about comics virtuoso Michel DeForge, taking in Lose no.5 and Very casual.

<ITEM> A personal message from Jesus no less

NO MORE ITEMS! Go away now and come back next time.  Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735  promises that you will get the Complete Deal, The Full Works, The Whole Kt and Kaboodle….The one true SILENCE!

click to download SILENCE!#73

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

If the first volume of Batman Incorporated exploded out of the gloom and propelled the character back towards life, then the second iteration of this latest re-branding was a far different proposition.

Every stage of Morrison’s Batman has followed a similar trajectory, starting off light-hearted and energetic before eventually plunging right back into the overarching mega-plot, and with it, the grand absence that unifies the whole run:

In the previous two iterations this has entailed an increase of complexity, either in the form of the deconstructionist absurdity of Batman RIP or in the twinned conclusions to Batman and Robin and The Return of Bruce Wayne.   Batman Incorporated 2.0 represents a different approach.  This final flourish of Batman comics represents the ultimate reduction of all that had come before, with the stresses of the plot compressing these twelve issues down to the barest element as it plays out to its logical conclusion: a man in a cape punching people in the face forever.

Click here to explore the limits of… THE INK!

A brand new Cindy & Biscuit 5-pager for all of you. Enjoy, and head over to Milk The Cat if you want to buy their comics…

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Alchemy
The belief that the world can be represented in a symbolic form, and that by manipulating those symbols, while following a strict set of rules, one can both understand and manipulate the world itself. Yes, yes, very clever, we see what you’re doing, you’re making a clever reference back to your piece on Logopolis, which was structured this way. You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself.

Ancestor Cell, The
Subversive propaganda by the enemies of Faction Paradox

Scholars attempting to trace precisely the cataclysm that is known variously as “the Time War”, “the War in Heaven” and “the Wilderness Years” have placed the events of July 2000 at the centre of the mystery surrounding that most ambiguous of events.

THEN RICHIE, RICHIE SAID “HEY MAN LET’S DRESS UP LIKE COPS, THINK OF WHAT WE COULD DO?”

Boy let me tell you that Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is super-pumped for the synergistic mind-mapping we have planned for this afternoon’s info-dump session…there will be Power Points out the wazzoo, and information will be cascaded down upon the fleshy ones like shimmerimg mercury…

Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 really feels that he has a lot to offer the corporation. Offer the hearts, skin and faces of the fleshy ones for example…

Oh hello SILENCERS, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 did not see you all there, waiting eagerly little  glistening fish-eyes blinking in anticipation. Well wait no more as SILENCE, the comics podcast that is all out of bubblegum, is here.

<ITEM> Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die wade through the greasy sponsorship shallows.

<ITEM>SILENCE NEWS with discussion of the newest Whoest Dr Who and of course America’s Next Top Model (do not ask)

<ITEM> Left foot in, left foot out, in out, in out…GET INTO THE REVIEWNIVERSE YOU WOODLICE!!! Comics discussed include Batman Inc and the end of Grant Morrison’s seven year Bat-opus…The Wake, Collider, Batman: Zero Year (Directors Cut), Uber, Daredevil, Hulk, FF, Adventures of Superman, Tom Strong, Optic Nerve, Sex, Wolverine & The X-Men, Gamma, Jupiter’s Legacy, Superior Spiderman and..well no that’s it. What more do you need you ungrateful meatsacks?

click to download SILENCE!#72

So that’s it. Now get out of here, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 has a conference call to set up with some very important and not in any way imaginary people.
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.