SMASHback #1: The Tower

April 3rd, 2016

Back in February, I appeared on a panel at the London Graphic Novel Network’s S.M.A.S.H. event. There were a lot of great speakers at those events (including our own Maid of Nails, friend of the website Kieron Gillen, America’s next top comics critic J.A. Micheline, Mazin off the Kraken podcast, and Jam Trap poet Chrissy Williams), staggered across three panels focusing on MEANING, ART and REPRESENTATION in comics.

The plan was to write series of posts inspired by these talks, but then this happened.

Trying to appear big and clever on the internet has never felt less important to me than it did in the aftermath. 

Anyway, I spoke on the art panel at S.M.A.S.H. and as a comics critic in the company of artists/editors, I figured I would be the least qualified person to talk about the subject so I did what I always do: I overcompensated. Only Mister Attack will ever see the first draft of my introductory talk, the charmingly titled “COMICS ARTISTS ARE WASTING THEIR LIVES”. In the end, I settled for a slightly less arsey approach that focused on different modes of reading, and how we might want to develop our understanding of our own biases so we can better make them fight to prove which opinions are best.

You can listen to what I actually said and the subsequent panel debate here (headphones recommended, audio’s a but quiet!), read the version of this pitch I submitted here, or if you fancy getting the right mix of depth and brevity you can now read the text I brought with me on the day below.

None of these versions are quite the same. None of them quite get across what I thought I was trying to say. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Taste the glory!

The Failure of The Filth

July 2nd, 2015

The five people who are eagerly awaiting my book on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s pestilent fantasy The Filth will note that the book has still not been released yet.

filth

That I have failed to finish this project in time for the release of the hardcover edition of The Filth will surprise no one who has retained interest in the project for this long. The fact that said hardcover contains just the bare minimum of fresh material  – a script for issue #6, some sketches that make the book even more difficult to read on the bus, the reheated contents of the charmingly crap Crack Comicks website – will also fail surprise anyone with a basic understanding of both comics and capitalism.

Good little enemy of the entertainment complex that I am, I paid to consume The Filth for the third time anyway. The hardback edition simulates the glossy colouring of the single issues rather than the battered bog roll of the trade paperback. It offers the reader a sense of solidity, of lasting luxury, that the previous editions lacked.

The Filth is a disgusting, slippery mess of a book. As Terrance Moreua said in the comments to one of my preview posts:

The visual grammar of The Filth is all over the place. The discontinuity being part of the point, of course. There are times when it seems to be Morrison’s script callouts (the tv cameras) and times when it seems to be Weston (background texture effects, etc) and times where it’s really fucking hard to tell (the goddamn photoshop transform tool effect to signify getting squeezed into the crack, or getting your personality fucked with in psychedelisex)…

Essentially, I find The Filth to be textually rich, garishly colored, expressively acted, disgustingly rendered and more. But comparatively poorly composed. I think there are too many components fighting for interplay. And while that’s part of the larger point, I think a little less noise and little more signal would have heightened the contrast between the two much better.

Another way to say all of that would be to say that The Filth is comics.

 

And we’re back… after a poorly coordinated Christmas break that was brought to you by the combined powers of sickness and having other stuff to do!

Our previous excerpt dealt with the methods of production of pornography and ended up questioning The Filth‘s efficiency as a way of dealing with the muck of modern techno-capitalism or some such shite.  This excerpt picks up right where that one left off, almost like this is what I’ve been building to all along – the question of whether the only way to discuss the muck we live in is to live with it

Palm and her five sisters

Were there alternatives?  When challenged by Greg/Ned on the horrors of the world and his role in it, Palm supervisors Man Green/Man Yellow seem to suggest that as products of this world we do not have an option about how much of it is in us:

Man Green: The crack runs through everything.  And everyone.

Man Yellow: Without it, we would be perfect, like angels, and as dull.

Convincing as this rhetoric might sound within the story, there were alternatives – different Filths were possible, and which might even turn out to still be possible if Hollywood ever gets desperate enough to commission a big budget adaptation.  Unless a work of art is created at gunpoint or under duress we should be ready to heap scorn on those who claim that they had to write the rape scene.  Nevertheless, the question remains: would The Filth be as effective as it is if it didn’t contain what it tries to critique?  The medicinal metaphor is invoked throughout the packaging of the collected edition (“The experts agree — nothing is more effective for shrinking painful existential eruptions”), but while this is yet another stimulating comparison, one should be careful not to mistake it for reality – a story is not an inoculation against other (similar/worse) stories, no matter how much we might wish it were so.

Two parallel cases present themselves within The Filth, and though they occur in the world of the story rather than in our world and thus operate by the boundaries set by its creators, they nevertheless illustrate two extremes The Filth avoids and in doing so make a limited case for its methods.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another week, another Filthy pre-view. Last Friday I spent a bit of time thinking out loud about the different approaches I might take with the cover for the print edition of this book.  This week I mostly find myself thinking that I’m going to need to tweak this piece a little to account for the current debate about these (stupid) anti-porn laws.

I don’t have enough time to re-write the relevant parts of this post today, but rest assured that it’s on my mind and that it will be on the page come April.

filth-horns.gif

I should note at this stage, possibly far too late, that I do not write any of this in a state of horrified tabloid panic.  With regards to real world pornography, I am attempting to stay cognisant of Andrea Dworkin’s description of porn as “technologized prostitution” and I have written about pornography in the context of Michael Bay movies in an attempting to take onboard Dworkin’s comment that “The dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce”.  I do not propose here to make moral judgements about those who star in adult movies any more than I wish to tell any sex worker what their life and profession is all about – those who labour in both fields can give  undoubtedly give a better account of the varied and complex circumstances in and around their work than I could hope to.  Instead, I wish to focus on the conditions in which hardcore movies are created, and the effects of their reception.

I find myself entranced by an unfinished series of essays written  by UK politics blogger Tom Gann in which he proposed a left wing critique of pornography that re-framed the legal debate not in terms of the (laudable) liberal defence of whatever activities grown adults chose to take part in, but in terms of the means of production: 

Max Hardcore boasts of his innovations, “Positions like pile driver, where I would gape the girls asses wide open, and provide a clear view for the camera… I also created the technique of cumming in a girl’s ass, having her squeeze it out into a glass, and then chuck the load down…  A little later, I started pissing down their throats several times during a scene, often causing them to vomit uncontrollably while still reaming their throats.” It seems unclear whether the current legislation would necessarily cover any of this…

Against capitalism’s inversion, the point cannot made enough, all these things are being done to a real woman. Capital’s inversions and bashful concealments of production underpin the argument that the thing (the pornographic image, speech) must be protected even, or rather especially, against the existence destroyed to produce it…

These conditions did not exist as part of the production of The Filth, so their importance here is as a point of reference.  Tex Porneau does not exist as an unfathomable phantom that Morrison and Weston have dredged from the void.  His actions are an extrapolation of the processes by which entertainment is produced for our consumption, and the style in which it is processed for delivery.  If the ridiculousness of Porneau’s schemes strikes us as being over the top, perhaps we should reflect on the way that Michael Bay’s movies use real world violence and technology as a starting point for their own otherworldly fantasies.  

Read the rest of this entry »

As was noted in the comments to the previous entry in this series, the analysis of sex provided in that section of  The Function of The Filth wasn’t particularly attentive to the mechanics of The Filth as a comic.

I’m working to take some of those criticisms on-board while redrafting this chapter for print, and I’m confident that the finished result will go baws deep on the question of quite how narcissistic Greg’s fantasy sex scene is, and how little he and Boy/Miami/Nil enjoy it.  As I explained at the time, the second preview was the weakest standalone section because it was most obviously written with the hope of getting elsewhere – this doesn’t excuse the weaknesses of the section as it stands, but it does put the weight of expectation on this preview!

This is where it becomes obvious where the first chapter of The Function of The Filth is going, so hopefully this chapter will strike you as having a somewhat… meatier taste and consistency to it.  If not, please send your complaints to the usual address!

filth-frequency.gif
 

When we see Greg in his home, he tends to be either looking at porn (“Hear Caroline scream as Mike shoves his eleven inch dick… in her dad”), watching the news (“Thousands dead… mourning continues”), or pining after his cat (“You look after yourself and eat your special dinner up”).  In fact, in one scene in the first issue he combines these three activities into one page’s worth of fun, taking care of his needs on the couch before clearing up his cat’s shit, all to the soundtrack of distant tragedy.  This combination hints at the unkempt, exhausted, low level squalor in which Greg exists, but it also serves to carefully unite the crude, screaming brutality of modern news stories with that of hardcore pornography rather neatly.

This is crucially important to The Filth, because while – as we have seen – traditionally commercialised violence and sexual fantasy are surrealised and made unstable by Morrison and Weston throughout The Filth, their combination in the form of  hardcore pornography receives a different treatment altogether.  The theme of sexual brutalisation is present from that first image onwards, even in its Weston-diluted form, but it becomes increasingly inescapable for all the artist’s self-censorship.  The fleshy peak of this aspect of the series pokes up through the binding in the two-part storyline that fills the fifth and six issues of the comic, ‘pornomancer’ and ‘the world of anders klimakks’.  If The Filth is a desperate fantasy, then this is the point where the dream takes on a life of its own; if it’s all ‘real’, then this is where we get a glimpse of the bigger, grubbier picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

In last week’s instalment of THE FUNCTION OF THE FILTH, we skipped straight to the “violence” part of the equation.  This time round, we’re dealing with sex, because sex is always important in this sort of story.

This sort of story?  Well, try not to stop me if you’ve heard this one before!

There’s this guy who wakes up from his mundane life to discover he’s really a disturbingly important human being – maybe the most disturbingly important human being – rather than just another boring arsehole with bad hair. Inevitably, he’s a little incredulous about the whole thing to begin with, but as one world crumbles away he soon starts to find himself more at home in his new reality – and it’s almost always his new reality, whatever complications may arise further down the line. 

This detail tends to narrow down the rest of the possibilities of the story so that at least one attractive woman will usually be involved – the idea of “normal” being what it is, can you think of a better way to ensure that the transition from the “real” world to another, more overdetermined world goes well?  Cosmic purpose on its own isn’t enough: if the switch over is to be successful then the deal must be sealed with flesh.  For this price, plus teleological extras, our hero finds it within himself to be all that he can be.

This story is called The Matrix, or maybe Star Wars, or maybe even Wanted. For all their differences, these stories are all equally at home in the pages of comics and on cinema screens, in visual media where they can best present the  dreams of their audience back to them as a dressing up kit, a series of moves or tools or attitudes that can be easily copped and used to remake the world. These stories represent the transformation of dreams into merchandising, and as such their tropes are as easy to critique as they are hard to resist .

But did I say we would be talking about sex instead of violence this time?  Yeah… let’s do that!

Read the rest of this entry »

Fresh from Thought Bubble 2014, it’s the one chapter preview of THE FUNCTION OF THE FILTH, my forever delayed book on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s best comic, The Filth, to be serialised in five posts corresponding to the five positions of The Hand!

CLICK HERE TO PEEL BACK THE MONITOR SCREEN AND PLAY WITH THE GOOPY MONSTER UNDERNEATH

SILENCE! #89

January 13th, 2014

 

JUST ONE MORE THING MA’AM…

Okay weaklings, time for a new year, and NEW. AWESOME. BODIES. Disembodied Resolutionbot X-15735 is here to get you started on Project: Rebuild 2014. Time to give up alcohol, give up food, and mostly give up goddamn comics, get off the sofa and get some exercise to other parts of your bodies than your Tweetin’ thumbs!! Now drop and give me 8,123 you maggots! Time to feel the burn. Feel it! Feel that burn!!! BUUUUUUUURN!

But first Disembodied Resolutionbot X-15735 will make you a delicious nutritious podshake to get you ready for the burn!

Silence Podshake

Ingredients:

– One part Gary Lactus and one part The Beast Must Die

– Two parts Sponsorship Admin

– a liberal dose of Read Along-A-Silence

– One large Silence! News story covering (what else) THAT Alan Moore interview

– A fresh bunch of comics, picked freshly from The Reviewniverse (containing The Saviours, Action comics, All New Marvel Now Wow 1111.0001, Black Widow,  Fatale, Detective 27, Shaolin Cowboy, Prancercise, Walking Dead, Sex Criminals, Origin 2, Wolverine, Doop Translator, Young Avengers, Batman B+W, Beware The Batman and Buck Rogers

– Add in some seasoning with Chris weston, At Home With The Kuberts, Editorials, Dr Who, Sherlock and Dogging

Now blend together with some technical ineptitude and a healthy dose of opinions, and force it down your birdlike gullets. We’ll have those bums, tums, tongues and gums skinny as a rake in no time!

BUUUUURN!!!!

click to download SILENCE!#89

Contact us:

[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

SILENCE! podcast #5

March 7th, 2012

NSFW

What? What do you want? You want to hear hot shit talked by two hot guyz? Well you came to the right URL true believers!

In this scalding 5th episode the Beast loses his job as a Transformer, but not before he drops his latest musical gem ‘O Transformer!’ Meanwhile Lactus stretches out on his cosmic sofa and relaxes into the hazy bliss of a heroin high!

But Not Just That! They talk about comics, including speculation on Morrison’s upcoming HAPPY!, Chaykin’s Black Kiss 2, Spaceman no.4., Fantastic Four: First Family, The Twelve no.10,  Orc Stain no. 7, Shade no, 5, Jason Aaron’s Incredible Hulk, Criminal, discuss Chris Weston’s meaty art, the annoyingness of comics covers that look the same each month, and Lactus takes one for the team and reads Robocop: Roadkill. Poor Lactus. Add in the Mindless News, the Coming Attractions and some shameless self-promotion for Cindy & Biscuit no.2 and you have a guaranteed sonic prolapse to brighten up your life.

GET SOME! GET SOME!!

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/silence005.mp3]
Click to download