Mindless Ones

Running this oldie again in the wake the Morrison making reference to it at SDC

Right, offline in the real world, I occasionally enjoy a pint with Bulk Meat. The Meat, incidentally, hates his name and to be honest we never call him it to his face anymore – the man’s a father, a successful careerist (tho’ no-one understands exactly what it is that he does, except for Zac Goldsmith), fiercely intelligent and handsome, etc., etc., blah – and to continue to do so would be churlish at best. But in my heart of hearts, I still understand him as one of those massive slabs of pig bashed around by sound effects artists in the 70’s and Scott Walker in the recording studio. For he is, amongst my scrawnier-than-a-Face-model-in-the-nineties but slightly pot-bellied friends, absurdly stacked.

More after the jump

Because what the world needs now, is another end of year list…

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Shit me

‘Wearing this wig reminds me that if Kane is Batwoman, she must wear one too.’

Oh right, that’s interesting Bruce, because seeing you in that perm-wig (and accompanying IT salesman goat-beard), that absurdist eurobaddie nightmare of a disguise, has made me remember – love you, missed you, glad you’re back alive and all that – remember just what a massively weird bloke you are.

‘Syrup of Fig’

Zom: From a cave in Nanda Parbat to an old haunted house on the road out of town, and onwards to a better Batmobile. Let’s go!

Amy: Some quick preamble before we get into this. I admit to being as worried as anyone about the release dates, but that was before when the DC site made them looked really fucked up, when Batman: The Return looked like it was coming out the same week as Batman and Robin 16 or whatever it was not, and certainly never because Return of Bruce Wayne 6 was scheduled to arrive after Bruce had returned in that book. It was always obvious to me that ROBW 6 would cap Grant’s mega-story, if only because it was in that book that the real meat of the thing would have to be cleared up, dealing as the series does with Batman the myth, the eternal Batman outside of time and the linear flow of the batrob books. It was there that the spell would reach completion.

Moments before I tucked into the final issue, I discovered an old Grant Morrison JLA story in a Secret Files comic that as far as I’m aware no one I know has ever read before – the comic had been in my possession for years, but this was the first time I’d cracked it open. These kinds of weird coincidences always kick in when the deep magic is flowing.

Click to read the rest of the bat-magic!

• The phantasmal Bat-Signal of Nolan’s films with it’s spooky overtones works, somewhat counter-intuitively, with a drive towards a more realistic Batman, both in the aesthetic sense in that it marries with new colouring techniques in the comics, capable of rendering more precisely the qualities of light, and in the conceptual sense: it’s more plausible than the erstwhile cone of light, and gestures in the direction of a Batman more constrained by a realistic set of rules. The symbol’s ambiguous presence can also work to stake out an ultra-noir view of the character, less superhero more urban myth. The citizens of Gotham don’t know who or what this Batman stands for, or what he is or even whether he’s actually real, in much the same way as they don’t know whether that light does in fact constitute a signal or whether it’s, in line with the official explanation given in Nolan’s films, just the product of faulty equipment. This Batman is inherently mysterious, a creature of the shadows, someone (something?) to be unsure of. This isn’t a Batman who has much use for the golden chest emblem.

More chat about Bob Kane’s golden phallus after the jump

M is the British comic creator’s surname initial par excellence.

You are nine months into the nineties revival! Do not let these pamphlets decieve you!

So it goes right back to Morrison’s very first issue, does it?

It’s probably an unbelievably bad idea to take DC marketing dept. at their word, but anyway. They have a difficult job, I guess.

Und so! Vorwaerts! The initial idea for this was a liveblog, but that would have involved promotion and shit, I am quite the most fundamentally lazy – physically, critically, intellectually – person I know, and also been a pretty fucking tortuous read, dying to turn the page, but having to bash out a satisfactory update before I could do so. So that didn’t happen; what we will have is the 7 pages in a polka-dotted reporter’s pad (I thought that shit was red, I was gonna give you a photo and shit, call this the Red Casebook but nah; I obviously did not buy this pad), my CASENOTES interspersed with some proper blogination. You can of course choose to believe these casenotes are an after-the-fact “ret-con”, as much a fait accompli as most Grant Morrison superhero scripts, even although Mindless Ones is the very definition of elegant verité and bold realism, and that’ll be a mystery too. Do what you like, I won’t stop you.

But one day, tomorrow, peoples will be reading Batman #700 on their infoSlates, their powerTablets, and it’ll be my polka-on-grey casebook anno’s there first; that’s my dream, and it is definitely good to have dreams. FUTURECOMICSSS.

We begin; welcome to MindlessOnes.com for all your Grant Morrison Batman needs. Choose MindlessOnes.com

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