Mindless Ones

Being an irregular series wherein I spotlight some particularly beautiful cover runs, from some comics you might have forgotten about, or never seen before. This time it’s the turn of Ted McKeever’s late 80’s NY art-house urban apocalypse Metropol:

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t worry, despite the title, this isn’t an attempt to take on the SILENCE! boys at their own game – if I was trying to do that I would have sabotaged Gary Lactus’ spaceship while he was up visiting me in Scorchland, then suggested myself as a replacement for the podcast while “comforting” The Beast Must Die. What’s the point in playing if you’re not playing to win, right?

Right.

Talking Comics is an attempt to reanimate that stinkiest of walking corpses, the comics review post. Now I could have called in Mister Attack aka The Eurythmic King of Nowhere aka The Boy Fae the Heed aka Flippant She-Creature like I have the last couple of times in the hopes of making these grizzly bones dance, but I decided to place my faith in technology.

So: rather than writing reviews of last week’s comics the old fashioned way, with fists, I decided to speak my brains into twitter via my smart phone and see what happened.  Unfortunately, since I’m a Scottish, and since the Scottish are natural enemies of voice recognition technology, the results are a little scrambled:

Daredevil #10, by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera, Javier Rodriguez and Joe Carmagna.

See, told ya!

More nonce-sense follows!

For those of you who don’t know – probably all of you – some of us Mindless like Mad Men a whole lot, and I think now that the new series is underway it might be time to get my thoughts down about it. The general format of these posts is presently undecided, so it’s difficult to give you an idea of what to expect. Whole screeds, mini essays, round robins with the other Mindless – all are possible. Whatever, these posts will be dense, but hopefully enjoyable if you’re familiar with the show, and, I’m sure, in some cases even if you’re not you can even enjoy it.

Today it’s Botswana, Ad and myself chewing the fat.

WE’RE GOING IN!!! IT’S THE RETURN OF THE BIG DOGS! WOOF WOOF!!!

Wait… sorry, where am I? Who are you people? WHERE AM I!?

Welcome then weary mortal to the 8th soul-scorching episode of the podcast that the internet is calling ‘a podcast about comics’. The Beast is back in continuity and living it up as super-powered *ahem* teenager in the 30th Century. Lactus, meanwhile, unveils his mighty Rock EPIC ‘Who He Is, And How He Came To Be’. Quake weaklings!

After the abortive SILENCE! news they hurl themselves face first into the morass of weekly comics, taking in Snyder and Capullo’s Owl Comics no.7, Dominique Laveau Voodoo Child no.1, the always swell Prophet (with a minor Jonathan Lethem digression) , Secret History of DB Cooper (again), Justice League Jeans and the Jeansification of Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman no.7, Amazing Spiderman something-or-other, The absolutely awesome sounding Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 (REALITY!). Lactus reaffirms his love of superhero dinners once again and the Beast compares Rocketeer Adventures to Band Aid. Then, in You Should Have Known Better, they tackle Mark Millar’s latest pitch Supercrooks. Following that The Beast froths about his bargain-filled week and talks up Chaykin & Garcia Lopez’s Twilight, Carol Swain and the simple beauty of Schulz’s Peanuts (always with his finger on the pulse this Beast!). Factor in a trawl through next week’s comics shizzle and you have a fat fist full of comics meat shoved right in your facehole. Suck it in you filthy rabble.

Also click below for the SILENCE! Gallery…

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/silence008.mp3]
Click to download

Read the rest of this entry »

NOT the best comic got this week – that was the Dahmer one, shit man – but five pages of McCarthy = min five extra pp worth reading, so ten in total twenty-three and a half pee a page, stiff but SOLD!

BUT the second best comic of the week, and it was more like fifteen cash-worthy pages as it turned out, maybe a smidge above that even. Well worth the getting.

Resurrecting this sometime feature then, like the apparently endless reincarnaions of one’s interest in “)))ad itself, to ask the timeless question – Any Cop?

Believe. Renaissance, new Golden Age, best in decades, all that.

Being: the first in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

ONE – If you didn’t look past this cover-cum-promotional piece for Cradlegrave, you might think that it was telling a very specific sort of story, the sort of story you might describe as being either “tabloid shit” or “a bit Jamie Delano” depending on which of those two targets was more worthy of disdain.

When I first discussed Cradlegrave back in December, regular comments thread contributor Thrills said he was looking now that he’d got past his concerns that it would “be like that Denise Mina Hellblazer where ‘hoodies’ are ‘demons’.”

Ah, so it’s tabloid shit that smells like Jamie Delano.  The worst of both worlds.  Fuck.

TWO – Despite the fact that the “Fear they Neighbour” text is missing, the cover of the collected edition still aims to make a similar impression:

To my eye, there’s something less real about the four hooded figures in this reformatted cover though.  The overly harsh, pixelated light that gleams off of their shoulders is even more unnatural when set against an all-black background, a background that now seems to expand outwards from the empty spaces where four young faces should be.

These are absent phantoms, not flesh and blood monsters, and while I wouldn’t want to pretend that they’re being deliberately undermined here I still find it hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously.

The only fear in this image is the fear you bring with you, be it fear of “savage” yoofs or of dehumanising right wing rhetoric…

Click here to drink the black milk… IF YOU DARE!

Sweet singing Jesus! This is it. THIS IS THE ONE! No hyperbole, no exaggeration, this is IT. This gonna be the one the kids bicker over! This is the one that’s gonna change the game, this…this…

Sorry I can’t remember what the hell I was talking about. Forgive me. Been hitting the bottle harder than my man Starks on payday.

So what is this? It’s the seventh episode of SILENCE! the ‘award winning’ new podcast that’s sweeping the netosphere. In this episode you get two, count them TWO superhero songs: Gary Lactus’ ‘Variable Hulk’ featuring guest vocals from the soft Glaswegian brogue of Illogical Volume, and The Beast’s ‘Saga of the Swamp Thing’ super-ballad. That would basically be enough for most podcasts, but not SILENCE! God no. After that you get ‘hot’ ‘comics’ ‘gossip’ in SILENCE! NEWS! before the two launch into a heady discussion of BKV’s Saga no.1, Avengers Bendicise no.1, Captain America (and the loveliness of Alan Davis in general), Wolverine and the X-Men (again!), The Incredible Hulk (why not?), Casey and not-Fox’s disco bloodbath Haunt, the derangement of Elektra Assassin, The Secret History of DB Cooper from Oni, Shade from Robinson and Pulido [during which The Beast turns into a f*cking robot AGAIN!], the increasingly less yellow Fantastic Four, Saucer County,and SPACE: Punisher (fucking yes). they soil their minds at the awfulness of the Gearheart: Steampunk Revue no.2 in the fan-favourite You Should Have Known Better. Then the beast rhapsodises (in blue) about the lost classic Batman: Jazz from Gerard Jones and Mark Badger in The Beasts Bargain Basement (and yes there’s a cocking jingle!). There’s a quick discussion of the surprisingly brilliant Rise of the Planet of the Apes in Notcomics. Add in some America’s Top Model and the scintillation of the Coming Attractions, and you have yourself an aural swingers party.

So stick on your headphones, pour yourself an extreme beverage and CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR!

PART 1
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/silence007a.mp3]
Click to download

PART 2
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/silence007b.mp3]
Click to download

You can’t change history, not one line…

But you can change the future.