Mindless Ones

To be, or not to be. That is the question. These comics I hold… Are they a record of what will be, or only of what may? For if the future is indeed immutably foretold in these short reviews… then my demise is but moments from that confirmation.

Worms: Book The First – Erika Price

Last time I talked about Erika’s work on here I just about got the sense of it over – “It’ll get under your skin. You’ll want it there.”

What this doesn’t quite capture is how her work feels once it’s worked its way past your psychic barriers. A line from this issue presents itself: “That night rippled through the whole city.” I knew this comic was the real stuff, the best stuff, by the third page, when the backdrop to a confession seemed to writhe and twist in front of my eyes across three rancid panels.

Erika’s comics have always been warped formal marvels, with carefully worried lines stacked on top of each other in patterns both intricate and suggestive of some sort of deeper unravelling, but there’s a mounting sense of dread to Worms that might just surpass anything she’s done before. Topical stuff, really – a conclave and its aftermath. Dark intimations about the new leader. Stuttering guilt, barked theories, recrimination. Writing to match the art, check the sequence where an internal monologue is put through the shredder while Eulogiuseley sits in front of knife and fork, lost in lost thoughts, feast not yet in front of him: “Have you ever woken up one morning to find your whole world, nay, your whole reality, is rotting away beneath your feet?”

Ripples within ripples within ripples. The whole city. The night. “Have you ever woken up one morning to find your whole world, nay, your whole reality, is rotting away beneath your feet?” There’s a mounting sense of dread to Worms that might just surpass anything Erika’s done before. Did I say that already, before the feast?

Detective Comics Annual 2025 – John McCrea (art), Stefano Raffaele (art), Fico Ossio (art), Al Ewing (script), Lee Loughridge (colours), Triona Farrell (colours), Ulises Arreola (colours), Tom Napolitano (letters)

We famously love a gonzo Bat-epic around here, but do you know what’s a wee bit undervalued in the post four dimensional Bat-squid era? A nice done-in-one mystery with Batman in it. “Detective Comics” they’re calling it, over on whatever cursed platform they’re using to propagate new sales pitches these days.

This annual is a perfect example of the form. Starts with a locked room murder and works its way to a big face-off with the perpetrator by way of a scenic trip to York. Vivid scene setting across its locales, from the hermetic rich man’s world where we begin to the very English churchyard where things get weird. Three artists for three sections so the “art jam” aspect of it doesn’t get too grating. John McCrae’s chapter is the clear stand-out, his work a welcome break from the impacted gothic house style. McCrae’s pages are full of bright pink light and well kent cop faces, all characters drawn with a bit of spring in their limbs, all backdrops rendered like unusually convincing film sets.

The panel above gives the trick away: even when writing a functional Bat-mystery, Al Ewing finds away to bring the uncanny into the story. The Bat’s solid but flexible, y’see – it can solve a crime, beat a magician at his own game, and incorporate Ewing’s current thematic occupation with unfathomable tech fuckery along the way. That’s why it’s the McCrae sequence that really sings. For a few pages in the middle there, the art is clearly every bit as adaptable as the guy with the big cape and the bulging toolkit.

As for computers, “Sophisticated idiots–they do only as they’re told.”

The Return & other short comics – K.Briggs

Already reviewed in a recent issue of the Mindless Ones newsletter – subscribe today if you haven’t already – and now available to order! To borrow some words that aren’t my own:

Briggs doesn’t really make comics like anyone else I know, I think there’s probably a “high Vertigo” ‘95ish influence but it’s not… they are never really narrative driven, I think they are ponderous if you can imagine that not being used pejoratively; a synonym of meditative but that has implications that I find sort of annoying, there’s a strong fine art sensibility that I only know enough about to vaguely recognise and can’t perform any disquisition on really, but I always find the work moving and connecting in ways that are… essentially I think what is done here with colour and collage drawing the eye across simple, diaristic blank verse – everything is everything remember & this is closer to ee cummings than it is to 95%(?) of comics – is what we have always been trying to write about, the art of life, these intercuts and disjunctions are essentially omnipresent in my own experience but to read a story – per my earlier post-Gaiman misgivings about “story” – or even biographical account, it’s incredibly rare to find something that matches the abstruse mind(/less) in action; M John Harrison’s writing about writing anti-biography Wish I Was Here is probably the closest to authentically being inside someone’s head I have chosen to be…

The comic in part is about having things in your head that other people have put there, I awoke with the dreamlike phrase “You have disconnected yourself from your real self” the other day – about my latest sexual frustration probably – it is a feeling or sensation I know and see mirrored here… all the stupid presets folk wanted to put on you, well they were wrong because how the fuck would they know better; the process of building the right life is long, hard, onerous and you will have to be so strong, and the haters and losers can waylay you… here is a pathfinder, though

I’m feeling too close to the page to add much to that right now. What I will say is that the fine art element is in full effect here, as it always has been with Briggs comics, but that The Return is their most immediate experiment in autobiography so far. The tactile aspect that’s always been there in their use of collage matched here by the immediacy of the line, the shape making more urgent than ever; reading all of these strips in one go, it’s possible to feel like the art is streaming directly into your brain.

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A book is a dream you can hold in your hands
Music is a dream that can be played by bands
Dinner is a dream that goes in your tummy
Drugs are a dream that makes you feel funny
Chickens are a dream that likes to lay eggs
Trousers are a dream that covers your legs
Drawers are a dream you can put things in
Norwich is a dream quite close to Kings Lynn

Here’s a bit of fun. The Beast Must Die has run off the the edge of the planet and is falling through space for all eternity (for charity) so Gary Lactus is joined by Douglas Noble and Tom Oldham, the two halves of Dark And Golden. It is not established which one of them is Dark and which is Golden. What ensues is fun and interesting until Tom’s audio stops recording for some reason so towards the end, dear listener, the podcast decays into judiciously edited scraps before rotting away entirely.

During the 1 hr 33 mins of this podcast we speak of Breakdown Press, Baby, It May Never Happen, Angouleme, Croix-Noire, 2000AD Extreme Editions, Peter Milligan’s The Dead, Meltdown Man, Rainbow Swelling, Billionaire Island: Cult Of Dogs, Catwoman: Lonely City, Power Comics, The Butterfly House, Clair Napier’s The Magic Necklace, Cowboy Picture Library 410 – Buck Jones The Hunter and more.

Some links for you:
https://darkandgolden.bigcartel.com/
https://www.breakdownpress.com/
http://strip-for-me.com/

Some sound for you:

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

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