Mindless Ones

PAGES 1, 2 & 3

One of the reasons Morrison loves working on Batman, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is because the character’s rapid response time, both intellectually and physically, suits his high velocity, compressed approach. Here, the guy, who I should probably add is experiencing catastrophic memory loss, has been booted thousands of years across time and half drowned, but does that slow him down? No, the fuck. He launches himself into the scrap with the uprooted sarlac pit (more on that guy later) without a second thought.

I’m fairly certain the idea that there’s a connection between Gaelic and Cthulhu-speak/fifth dimensionese isn’t an original one, and I wonder if Grant was thinking about the connection here. Annie is a first generation immigrant after all, and a pagan at that, so it would make sense that she’d speak some kind of aboriginal british tongue. Also, I’m choosing to believe she’s intoning a healing spell, which is interesting and a nice twist because lovecraftian magic is generally considered the blackest of the black. There’s the implicit suggestion that it was only later on, once the puritans were done with it, that the Cthulhu mythos gained the negative associations it has today.

The talismans represent the latest movement of Grant’s superheroes as gods theme, but because this is Batman there’s a hard(ish) sf explanation as opposed to the more fantastical noodlings of Flex Mentallo or ASS. They are pregnant with the idea, however, what with the DC pantheon zipping around the timestream like they’re popping down the shops or something, that should she clutch his sigil hard enough and whisper his name, even a slave in ancient Rome could summon Superman to her aid. Some future Superman I’m going to write in the future will definitely have this omni-hearing, that’s for sho’.

Amy beyond the end of time continues after the jump

Bob: This is not only the best issue of B&R yet, but the best single issue of Morrison’s batman run by some margin, and as dense and full a piece as he’s written since Seven Soldiers #1, with which it shares many links and referents, both deliberate, accidental and incidental.

Zom: Tan’s a nice chap, some of us around here were quite keen on his work, but if you ask me thank God for Cameron Stewart: Batman & Robin is back at long last. This isn’t my favourite issue and I’ll get into some of the reasons why later, but it’s a bloody good one.

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I used to have a friend who would perform his own peculiar brand of dance: DANCE FIGHTING

As adults we forget how strange things are. Take caves, for example.

On a recent holiday, my wife, son, and I found ourselves on a guided tour through a cave system. The group was large, and the cave as well lit as the intersection between health and safety and the management’s sense of theatricality would allow. The guide’s patter was honed and confident, glinting with comfortable jokes that didn’t require laughter, and just the right blend of folklore and history to keep us interested. The package offered no reason this side of phobia to feel unsafe, or uncertain. No-one was going to get lost, and no-one was going to get hurt, even boredom was unlikely to be much of a problem given that the tour was, quite sensibly, rather short.

But somewhere in the darkness beneath the spotlit consumer experience the real appeal rustled. Awe. It went unspoken of course only ever hinted at or skirted. The guide spoke of a gigantic network of which ours was but a fragment, of divers who had squeezed their way through small spaces in the deep and discovered gigantic caverns, one of which was thus far inexplicable to the geologists and engineers that had pored over the photographs, the mega-tonnage above the vast cave roof apparently unsupportable. The guide also spoke of deeper passages still, of underground lakes and streams, and of tunnels yawning forever into the earth. Even the history of the place hung like a heavy shadow. The caves had been sacred to the Celts, who offered up sacrifices to the dark. Later the Christians came and banished the old religion, a conflict hinted at in the local legend of a witch turned to stone by a priest. The guide showed us the rock where, if the light is right, the witch’s petrified profile can still be seen glaring into the blackness, and claimed, as a good tour guide should, that late at night her mordant laughter can be heard echoing in the depths.

Perhaps from sub-level 7, perhaps deeper

Down, down, down…

This is what last Friday afternoon looked like if you are a Mindless One (macrophageous Gary Lactus and the doughty, doughy Tymbus excepted, for some reason.) It was one of those doldrummy days, and this is how we killed the time: Email Style! I’ve caught a few of the bigger tyops, changed names, put a few links in, cut  mean or downright slanderous comments, and excised one-and-a-half shitloads of Ron Smith jokes for reasons of taste and such, and the following cascade of slurry is what remains.

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Holy shit Batman!

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The leading, upper-outer edge of the page’s porous membrane extends outwards into the reader’s domestic reality-space, super-imposed on an imaginary plane nearly a foot distant from the paper-thin physical boundary, roughly  on a level with the occipital lobe, back there at the back of the brain. Looking forwards, the page’s fluctuating inner boundary is theoretically infinite, a vanishing point occurring wherever the texture gradient of the eye-line happens to converge in that now-frozen, now-fluid moment, caught there in the net of the panel borders.

It downpours

You could listen to the similarly titled Motley Crüe song to accompany this post, but I’d advise against it. Bit rusty, hold on:

It’s all been done before, of course.

First!

Here we are in the vault.

Tymbus is saying “Respect my fandom!” and I’m saying “Keep it cosmic”.  It looks like I’m having a good time but I’m not because I’m with Tymbus.  Anyway, in this podcast we talk about  Batman:  Battle for the Cowl, written and drawn by Tony S. Daniel and inked by Sandu Florea.  We also talk about The Complete Peanuts (1971 to 1972) by Charles M. Schulz.

Click here to download Vault of Tymbus #4

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/vaultoftymbus4.mp3]
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