Mindless Ones

Four comics about empty places & the people who live there + extras, now available in print. 176 beautiful black and white pages, created by me and brought into the physical world by Comic Printing UK.

Includes: Looking Glass Heights, Labyrinths, the Alasdair Gray adaptations of Beyond Whiles and a brand new comic called Raptor, which brings the LGH sequence to a close.

You can buy the print edition here and the digital version here. Nae extras in the PDF version, and it can’t sit on your shelf making you look damn attractive like the book can, so weigh both options accordingly.

PRAISE FOR NOT BECAUSE OF THE PEOPLE

“The best haunted house comic you’ve never read” – Dan White, artist of Cindy and Biscuit and Sticky Ribs.

“Classic British indie small press pamphlet, and a sharp burst of mood and ideas. It’s very much comics as poem – it’s the sort of work that Douglas Noble has been known to do” – Kieron Gillen, writer of The Uncanny X-Men and The Wicked + The Divine

“A spooky zine… Liked this a lot. The writing is really strong and the art suggests just enough to make you uneasy” – Sarah Horrocks, artist and creator of Aorta and Goro

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If you enjoy Not Because of the People or have enjoyed any of the individual LGH comics in the past, please consider giving some time or money to Living Rent (Scotland’s Tenants Union) or another similar group closer to home –

thanks,

David

This is happening now. As I type.

The first draft is always the most immediate, isn’t it? That’s why serialised comics are a more interesting form than the graphic novel. You can’t go back and fix things. You can retcon, of course — like the politician’s denial, “what I meant to say when I said I wouldn’t raise taxes is that I wouldn’t raise taxes unless I need to” — but you can’t go back and edit what you’ve already written. (I just wrote “edit the past” and then changed it. You can still do that when you’re writing a first draft). You have to keep pushing forward. Embrace the mistakes. Embrace the errors.

So this is a real-time look at Multiversity. This is the take on it I am writing today, Monday 4th May 2015, 10:53 AM as I type this. From this perspective, here and now, Multiversity is the latest part of a story Grant Morrison, one of the most interesting writers to work in the comics medium, has been working on for decades. It’s fair to say that in many ways he’s been telling the same story over and over — a story of idealism turned to dirt, and of a multiverse that hints at a secret conspiracy behind reality, and of the dirty, bedraggled, idealism reasserting itself. Of betrayal and redemption. Of the difference between the physical and the spiritual. And of the multiplicity of viewpoints.

In Morrison’s work there’s often a struggle between two giant warring factions which are revealed to be aspects of the same thing, while real change comes from those opposed to both viewpoints. The significance of this, in election week, is left to the reader.

But the story has been told in a variety of different ways, and this version of the story is the one that Grant Morrison started in 1988 with Animal Man, and told in the 1990s with JLA, and in the 2000s with Seven Soldiers of Victory, JLA: Classified, 52, All-Star Superman, and Final Crisis. In many ways it’s a leftover from those years — it’s a story that was conceived as a follow-up to Final Crisis, and was originally meant to come out in 2010. It’s a profligate, luxurious, expansive story, of a kind that no-one, not even Morrison, is telling any longer in DC comics. After the economic crash in 2008 we’ve had a kind of austerity of the mind in DC’s work, with the “New 52” comics line that started in 2011 being fifty-two flavours of the same grim, gritty, dull, dim-witted hopelessness.

Multiversity has its darkness, of course, as all Morrison’s work does, but there’s hope in there still. It’s a very 2008 kind of comic, from before hope was revealed to be a bad joke.

But maybe that’s what we need right now. To be told it’ll all be all right. That things can get better.

As I write this, we’re in the middle of an election campaign in the UK. The Conservative Party are campaigning on a platform of austerity, cutting benefits, demonising immigrants, and increased authoritarianism. The Labour Party are, in order to provide people with a real choice, campaigning on a platform of austerity, cutting benefits, demonising immigrants, and increased authoritarianism. My own party, the Liberal Democrats, has had a campaign that has mostly ignored the pretty sensible policies its members have voted for in favour of messaging saying “you know how you can’t get a cigarette paper between those other two parties? We want to be that cigarette paper!”. Everyone wants change, but no-one believes it’s possible. The world has been taken over by the anti-life equation, and we need a way out.

As you may have guessed by now, this is not one of those books that annotates everything, saying “the Batman of Earth-793 first appeared in Batman #793, from 1954, in the story Batman’s Bat-Trousers!”. There’ll be some of that, but this is more a response to Multiversity, a reaction to it, and a guide through the thoughts behind it, rather than a catalogue. Those of you who’ve read my earlier books dealing with Morrison’s work, An Incomprehensible Condition and Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, know what I’m doing here. The rest of you can either jump off now or come along for the ride.

Do I have your complete attention yet?

Whose voice is this speaking in your head, anyway?

Yours?

[Over a ten-day period I will be posting my long piece on Multiversity. Those who want it in one piece can buy the whole thing as an epub from Smashwords right now for $1, it will be available for Kindle from tomorrow (the link will be in tomorrow’s piece), and my Patreons get it for free]

Like the text says, there’s more from me and Mister Attack at The Weegie Board dot wordpress dot com! If you’d rather read Scott’s comics without all my stupid words on top, he’s got exactly the thing for you at his own site.

If, on the other hand, you were hoping to find out about actual Weegie Boards (for contacting dead weegies), you might have to take your business elsewhere…

Merry Christmas?

That’s quite a line-up, isn’t it? Click here to find out more about what Kot and Jeske are doing in it!

A brand new Cindy & Biscuit strip for you:

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Synergy.

Nice word that. It means ‘The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects’.

Which pretty much perfectly sums up a good comics creative partnership.

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