Mindless Ones

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GET OUT OF THE ROAD YOU LITTLE FOOLS!

IN TODAY’S EAR-SCALDING INSTALLMENT: The Beast finds his life has taken on lashings of fully painted Euro-sauce, while Lactus drags his cosmic chassis from the sofa to the table!!! The Beast debuts his paean to internet fuckwittery ‘Steve Dave is Online’. SILENCE! News comes and goes like a ship in the night, but not before the Greatest Jingle of All Time makes an appearance.

Finally the pusillanimous pairsome get onto the important business of comics. They discuss America’s Got Powers from top British TV man, and all round alpha-nerd Jonathan Ross, SAGA no.2 from BKV and Fiona Staples. Lactus talks about Avengers Assemble and Avenging Spiderman and Avenging Avenginators vs X-Avengers (one of those is a fake, eagle-eyes!). Mark Millar and Dave ‘The Rave’ Gibbons’ new spy tale the Secret Service is chewed and digested; Frankenstein Agent of SHADE is a thing, Casey & Fox’s Haunt is too. Saucer County and the Shade – these are the things that little boys are made of… Lactus has a less yellow experience with Fantastic Four and then the Beast tackles the baffling but kinda brilliant Glamourpuss from Dave Sim in You Should Have Known Better.

All this and the second coming of Tupac Shakur? Surely not (don’t call me Shirley) I didn’t I said ‘surely’ (Oh. my mistake) That’s okay Shirley.

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Don’t forget to click below for the SILENCE! gallery…
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Being: the second in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

If you’re going to talk about Cradlegrave, you’ve pretty much got to face up to this image at some point:

Stripped of context it’s just a doll, just a tired horror-movie prop, a signifier of terror rather than something actually terrifying. In context however, this dull prop seems far more potent:

The sense of surprise, that feeling of “what the fuck is that face doing in the middle of this conversation?”, is enough to give the image some fresh charge here.  The last panel of the sequence hints at the answer, but for the duration of the two panels before it you could be forgiven for thinking you were in another, more Lynchian kind of horror story.

Still, even the most bewildering emanations in Cradlegrave trace back to fleshy, non-Lynchian sources, so it’s just as well that there’s more to the this sequence than  lifeless eyes and startling incongruity.

Look into these eyes, and tell me what you see…

Amy: This episode wrapped its themes around itself so tightly the drama could have suffocated, but in the end it never got so arch that it failed to pack a punch even though as a construction it was pretty close to immaculate and, so, highly conspicuous.

Ad: Absolutely. It was testimony to the fact that Mad Men is only superficially realistic – realism is never so overtly self-conscious of its themes, or given to blurring the lines between dream and reality, for that matter.

Amy: It’s enjoyable to watch Weiner and co unpacking the theme of change in all these different ways, isn’t it? In Mystery Date it was all about the intrusion of an unknown element into the characters’ lives – a date with someone they didn’t know, a situation they couldn’t plan for. Basically they’re all Cinderella in Michael’s commercial, aren’t they, turning round to confront the stranger? We could break it down every which way, but that’s just a bit too anal for me. I think we should just play it by ear and discuss the threads we liked most.

Your date with mysterious mindlesses continues after this jump

SILENCE! #10 IS NOW BACK UP. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, LOYAL FANS!

We are 10 today! That’s right SILENCE! Has reached double figures…look at it! Ahhh! Look at it’s cute little face….ahhhh…

Okay, enough.

In this episode Lactus continues to monitor the South Coast from his swinging cosmo-lounge, while the Beast reveals the details of his new Prestige Life. Not only that but Lactus unearths an extremely rare Booster Gold promotional item! (with thanks to big bad Bob Ferrie for sourcing it) Following that the dyspeptic duo barrel straight into the SILENCE! News, covering such cultural hot potatoes as Shaky Kane’s pop art act of terrorism and the re-colouring of Flex Mentallo.

With nary a thought for their, or your, safety the turgid twosome somersault into the week’s reviews covering Daredevil 10.1 (gah!), Action Comics (featuring the debut of Shit-eating Superman), the final issue of OMAC (One Man Actually Cares), Freedom, Avengers Vs X-Men (omigodtotallypsyched) Animal Man and Sweet Tooth, and Alan Moore’s Supreme. Not in that order.

Then the prosaic pair have a lovely long chat about Urasawa’a masterful Pluto, and the Beast takes us synth-rockin’ all the way back to the 80’s with the sublimely ridiculous Slash Maraud in the Beast’s Bargain Basement. In addition they fizz and pop with enthusiasm about Community in Notcomics before the show slides into gibberish for the Coming Attractions. All this and perhaps just a little bit more in the comics podcast that stands gills and flippers above all others, SILENCE!
What a show. What a world. What.

Remember these colossally egotistical man-tards need love to keep going. Please submit feedback, questions, erotic fan-mail and abuse to [email protected].

 

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Or Flex Mentallo: A Moonrock Murder Mystery!!!!

Okay, as you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo is a very good comic by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, a four issue Dennis Potter style drama in which a young man who [may or may not] have taken an overdose of paracetamol looks back at this life through the lens of superhero comics.

As you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo hadn’t been reprinted until now because of various preposterous legal issues.

Now it’s finally been reprinted in a very handsome hardcover package, you [may or may not] be aware that it’s been the victim of a strange recolouring job, the sort of recolouring that transforms Flex Mentallo’s greatest foe The Mentallium Man from a Jolly Rancher nightmare…

…into the grayest daydream you never had:

Now, I’ll throw a couple of kind words in the direction new colourist Peter Doherty in a minute, but it has to be said that anyone who thinks that a character called the Mentallium Man, who is an exaggerated parody of an old-fashioned comic book villain, needs to look all clean and boring like that is just plain wrong.

Actually, thinking about it, I’d go so far as to say that anyone who prefers this new incarnation of the character needs blasted with all five types of Flex’s own Kryptonite-derivative “Mentallium” at once:

Sadly we never find out what the fifth type of Mentalium, “Lamb and Turkey”, does to The Hero of the Beach, but I think we can take a guess and that our guesses will all be equally delicious.

Tasty tasy dogshit, mmmm!

Steven Moffat once said of Doctor Who that it “was a great idea that happened to the wrong people”. Some might think that this says more about Moffat than about Who (in my experience writers who think of ideas as ‘happening’ to other writers, rather than being produced by those other writers, tend not to have very many ideas of their own) but in some cases one can see what he means. The Three Doctors, and in general all the work of writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, tends to be a case in point.

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This week we’re out in force. We’ve now got Illogical Volume added to the roster of mighty discussonaughts (‘Tremble before our discourse!’) So, yeah, they’re definitely a cast iron weekly thing now, these Mad Men posts.

Amypoodle: Although I haven’t checked, I think I can safely guarantee that over at Basket of Kisses there’s a debate genteely raging wrt whether or not this episode was fattist.

Illogical Volume: “Don’t you want to get back into that incredible closet of yours.” – American tv shows do love to fat up their pretty people, huh? It’s everywhere, from Monica’s fatsuit in Friends (“lol, remember when she was too fat to be in this TV show”) to Fat Lee Adama’s temporary command of Battlestar Galactica, in which fatness is a sign of weakness, something to be overcome on the road back to becoming a proper character.

Betty’s fat period is probably closer to the latter than the former, but we’ll see how it plays from here. Mad Men is a more nuanced sort of show, so – hopes, I still have them! To be honest, I found it hard to focus on that element of this episode because of the way it blurred into the “I found a lump” plot. It was almost too much drama for one episode (which is also very Betty somehow, plus it really amplified the sense that she’s frozen in her new life, that the skills she’s been told to value might not be much use to her if her body won’t oblige), you know?

Still, Betty’s… it’s hard not to empathise with her current situation. Plus while “I found a lump” stories are easy to overdo, they’re also scary stories to which we can all relate, sadly. And then you get to “your mother is obese” and “it’s good to be put through the ringer to find out I’m just fat” and it’s… ooft, the lady, she deals with horrible situations in some horrible ways. It was fashionable to slate January Jones’ performance in Sex-Men: First Class last year, but she was pretty great here, I thought. Her face conveyed just the right mix of blank terror and blank huffiness in pretty much every scene she was in.

Ad Mindless: Has everyone noticed that Betty actually lives in a castle now?

Click here to read the rest of this monster roundtable. There’s princesses, castles, and fairytale princes, so even bronys should dig it!

AND I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU MEDDLING KIDS!!!!

Lo, it was so. SILENCE! no.9 descended upon the earth like a particularly weighty turd from an overfed poodle’s arse!  The Beast brings the noise in a very real sense, with his hip hop meisterwork ‘COMIX (NOT 4 KIDZ). They then jaunt in a spritely fashion into the SILENCE! News wherein Lactus reveals what might be the BIGGEST news story of 2012 (let’s just say the word ‘Avengers’ is part of it – SPOILERZZZ!).

After that they proceed to lustily tango into last week’s releases, discussing Daredevil no.10 (and the practical ways to exit a monster), the eternal sunshine that is Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred no.3 (by Dave Hine serial comic abuser Shaky Kane) and briefly touch upon Spaceman no.5. Lactus is TOTALLY PSYCHED over the devastating psychological complexitiveness of Bloodstrike, and talks up Atomic Robo Presents: Real Science Stories (including a devastating critique of Tesla’s working methods, no less!). Next up is The New Deadwardians (sweet Lord…) Secret Avengers (Shhhh…secretly Avenging) and a Bowfinger reference. Then there’s a double dose of You Should Have Known Better with the twin-horrors of AVX no.0 (buh?) and Comic Book Men (hurry Mayan prophecy, HURRY!) The Beasts Bargain Basement concerns Paul Duncan and Phil Elliot’s Second City (props to Michel Fiffe) and the brief glory that was Harrier Comics, and the pair froth merrily over Booster Gold and how fucking rad his origin is. Not to mention the adrenalin-soaked thrill ride that is The Coming Attractions. Put it all together and you have Another. Comics. Podcast!

All this and perhaps a little bit more, from the lovable odd couple that the internet is calling “the Tango & Cash of internet-based comics criticism”. Grab your earpipes and snuggle down you hobbits!

(And click below for the SILENCE! gallery…)

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The following piece appeared in the very fine Architects’ Journal, written by AJ’s Deputy Editor Rory Olcayto *. We’re proud to represent it here on Mindless Ones for your pleasure).

*aka Proto-Mindless One Brother Yawn

The vertiginous cityscape Moebius conjured for The Long Tomorrow is one of the most influential works of architectural art created in the past 50 years. It first appeared in cult magazine Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal in the UK) in 1976, but its impact beyond comics, his medium of choice, is huge. Sadly the Frenchman, master of spatial representation in comic-book art, died of cancer a couple of weeks ago, aged 73. If you don’t know his work, here’s a short introduction.

In The Long Tomorrow, written by Alien scriptwriter Dan O’Bannon, a hard-boiled detective thriller unfolds on a planet-covering conurbation – an ecumenopolis (a term representing the idea of a worldwide city). Sky bridges and anti-gravity updrafts, now standard fare in Hollywood sci-fi, are set among towering monoliths defined by a stylised Brutalist and Art Nouveau mix.

It has been massively influential – particularly among filmmakers. George Lucas was ‘impressed and affected’ by Moebius, and Ridley Scott claimed The Long Tomorrow inspired his Blade Runner. The artist himself implemented his comic-book vision while production designer on Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, the most literal transfer of his work to celluloid. The literary world was also in thrall, as William Gibson notes: ‘It’s entirely fair to say that the way Neuromancer-the-novel “looks” was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. Those French guys, they got their end in early.’ Even Federico Fellini couldn’t resist Moebius’ art: ‘I have nothing but this to tell you, continue to draw fabulous for our joy, all of us.’

Moebius however was more than a science-fiction artist. He was first noticed for his Lieutenant Blueberry strips, a standard cowboy comic. And some of his most famous artwork depicts Venice, ‘a magical city out of time and space’. There is a typical Moebius twist – gondolas don’t float but fly, and canals have been replaced by deep ravines. Another image shows a floating Mont Saint-Michel, as if the citadel has uprooted itself from the shore below. This sense of breaking free from gravity is a recurring theme. Curiously given his mastery of the subject, Moebius confessed to having no special interest in architecture until he discovered Winsor McCay, the early 20th-century cartoonist who remains a key influence in comic-book art. ‘At first I was scared of architectural designs, because of their difficulty in terms of perspective, etc. When you draw as much science fiction as I do, it is hard not to dabble in architecture. But I remain an amateur. Winsor McCay was a master professional.’ Moebius. Modest. Magnificent. And very dearly missed.