Mindless Ones

Makes cool art/music, for example: We Are No Longer Strangers (2024). Official Daredevil enthusiast. Worth keeping an eye on his Instagram, always something going on there.   

Who are you and how did you become a man without fear? 

My name is Watters and I am what many describe as “cool music guy”. Basically I am an Artist who makes lots of cool things all of which are informed around my lived experience as a disabled person.

However what I feel sets me aside from a lot of what is out there when it comes to representing people like me is that what I make isn’t made to be anything in particular and what I mean by that is a lot of your typical mainstream disability programming tends to fall into two schools, the first being inspiration porn which often consists of infantilising disabled and neurodivergent people and presenting us almost like Zoo animals, a good example of this is Channel 4 producing a show called “The Undateables” and then touting it as inspirational programming and representation, it exists purely to make non-disabled people good about themselves. 

The second is the trope of tragedy, that life as a disabled person is miserable, “they can’t do anything” and are often in fiction window dressing/a storytelling object.

What I do and what I make is neither. It is one of the most honest and real representations of disabled life but more specifically my life. Because that’s all it is. It is me unabridged. 

Part 1 here

Daydreaming and trains. A topic I keep coming back to.

Britain has long been in the throes of a difficult and passionate relationship with it’s vast, antique rail network. Delays and overcrowding ride by side in the popular imagination with adventure and freedom, the feeling that the final terminus can still be the Britain of myth, the nation as idyll and possibility. Growing up without a car, a viable and not entirely uncommon experience this side of the Atlantic, I spent more than my fair share of time staring out of train windows watching countryside blur into city blur into countryside. Perhaps the most familiar spectacle, one which has remained a constant over many years, is the view over the rooftops of central London as the South East of England’s railway lines flow together before and beyond Charing Cross.

Daredevil will arrive any minute, I promise

Sometime in the nineties the cry rang out: Marvel was gonna put the “character back into comics”.

This was news to me.

As far as I was concerned the Marvelverse, with the possible exception of the X-Men, was still firmly rooted in a pre-Watchmen era. It was only the energizing touch of the man Miller that rescued the company from my utter contempt. DC on the other hand, was, in my rather woolly analysis, the natural home of adjectives like mature, and visionary, the only company where character was likely to flourish. My case rested upon little more than DC’s willingness to publish The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, and Arkham Asylum, and the serious moonlight cast over the DCU by Watchmen, and the Vertigo imprint.

While I’m now well versed in the legacy of Marvel’s legendary creators, if I’m honest I remain skeptical about Marvel’s claims to the concept of character. I grant that Lee and Ditko’s willingness to subordinate super to man was likely revolutionary back in the late sixties, and that they quite possibly changed the landscape of comics, but the reality is that while character is certainly the focus of many Marvel titles the characters in question have seldom been allowed much more than superficial depth – the MU as a place of histrionics rather than history. That, even as its best, seldom produces character studies with more going for them than I’d expect to see in a well realized soap opera. Don’t get me wrong, I think good soaps have their own virtues, and, and this is important, I’m not sure that I want to see rigorous character studies in (many) superhero comics, but I think it’s worth pointing out that by treating the term character as a monolith, and not admitting to its multiple meanings – the different ways in which the centrality of the concept can be approached, from Dynasty to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe – Marvel, and its die hard fans, are perhaps heaping undeserved glories on themselves. I mean, we’ve all read the Ultimates, right?

Guess what? I actually talk about Born Again after the jump