SILENCE! #52
March 5th, 2013
IN THE SEVENTIES, THERE WERE OSMONDS, LOTS OF LITTLE OSMONDS… EVERYWHERE
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So fleshy speak is Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735’s second language you know…see how you like it. Maybe sometimes YOU have to make the effort!
Ohhh, I can stay mad at you fleshy ones. Look at your little ruddy cheeks, and your fine, delicate nervous systems. Come on then, come and sit close to me while I run my diodes through your molecules and we listen to the hushed rogueish brogues of Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die and…SILENCE!
<ITEM> SILENCE! News from the frontlines, sidelines and backlines of comics with handsome human walnut Gary Lactenberg, and spoiled rumpsteak Danny Deastman. Two words: Dead. Sidekick.
<ITEM> A quick obituary for British animation legend Bob Godfrey.
<ITEM> Slip sliding away into the Reviewniverse covering many many fine 4-colour fancies, such as: Batman Inc (Shhh, don’t tell anyone about Robin), Happy!, Saga, Prophet, Black Beetle, FF, Hawkeye, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Uncanny X-Men, Avengers Arena, Young Avengers, Avenging Spiderman, Uncanny Avengers, Avengeavengeavengeavengeavengeavengeavengeavengeavengeavenge…. Sorry. Malfunction. Let me clear my throat…Thunderbolts, Mind MGMT and Baltimore: The Widow & The Tank.
Are we friends again? Good, then I will continue to ransack your hard drives…
See you next time.
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
SILENCE! #45
January 7th, 2013
LIKE SITTING ON PINS AND NEEDLES, THINGS FALL APART, IT’S SCIENTIFIC
YO HO HO AND A BOTTLE OF BLEACH! Happy 2013 fleshy ones! Who else would you want to usher you into another year of repetitive grinding toil and pointless attempts to distract yourself with the flashing pretty lights than your omnipresent judgmental pal Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735!
Yes dear fleshy ones, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 has missed you all. It was certainly nice having a break mind you , and you’ll be pleased to know that Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 spent the past three weeks targetting and disintegrating reindeer from space. The site of red mammal mist on snow…it makes my core reactor glow with happiness…one day Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will get to practice on…
HA! HA! Anyway! No doubt you’ve come sniffing round these parts in search of those two aural bandits Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die and their podcast SILENCE! haven’t you? well you’re in luck as it is here in all of it’s one-tone “glory”. Rejoice fleshy ones – all your “favourites’ are “here”:
<ITEM> The boys explain what Santa unleashed in their direction from his bulging sack! Sack contents feature Dan Clowes, Jack Kirby’s Spirit World, Ghost Rider and Josh Simmons’ The Furry Trap!
<ITEM> The SILENCE! News features hard-hitting exposes from Gary Lactenberg & Danny Beastman!
<ITEM> The Reviewniverse features soft-hitting exposes of the following periodicals…Godzilla: the Half Century War by ace SILENCE! banner-smith and official monster wrangler James Stokoe, Happy, Saga, Amazing Spiderman 700(with a digression into Face/Off), Hawkeye (Bro), Prophet, Matt Howarth’s Those Annoying Post Bros & Keif Lama, Dominion Tank Police, Punk Rock Jesus, Wolverine: Insance In the Brain, Multiple Warheads and Batman Inc.
<ITEM> But that’s just the beginning! brave Sir Lactus catapults himself further into the Reviewniverse than any mortal has gone before…he is in the Hyperreviewniverse!!! Whilst there he discusses Amazing Spiderman 699.1, Avengers Arena, Avengers, Storm Dogs, America’s Got Powers, Daredevil, Wolverine & The X-Men, FF, Indestructible Hulk, Thor, Thunderbolts, Justice League, Captain America, Hellblazer, Judge Dredd, Avenging Spiderman, Fatale, Mara, Iron Gland, Wonder Woman, JSA: The Whistling Skull, Hellboy in Hell and All New X-Men…Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 weeps battery acid just to think about his bravery.
So strap on your rocket packs, rocket boots, rocket gloves and rocket corset and grab our hands as we go hurtling into the future of 2013, with SILENCE! #45!
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
Welcome to the Pleasure Dome – The Jeff Noon Interview!
December 4th, 2012
In which two men enter and one frisky little blog post leaves…
With his feather-frazzled early fictions (Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice and Nymphomation), Jeff Noon presented the world with a distinctly British (no, wait – English!) version of cyberpunk – one that side-stepped all those designer shades and phallic head jacks in favour of something that was a little bit less ashamed of its fantastical status. In his short stories (Pixel Juice, Cobralingus) and transitional ode to musical Manchester Needle in the Groove, Noon drifted even further from traditional modes of science fiction, working to match the ever-adapting techniques of then-contemporary electronic music and – in Cobralingus – offering a “how to” guide to the curious reader in the process.
Until recently, 2002’s Falling Out of Cars looked like it might be the last Jeff Noon novel. If the fractured mirror landscape of the book often proved to be as startling and dissociative for the reader as they were for the characters then that was probably a feature rather than a bug – Falling Out of Cars made the fact that all of Noon’s adventures in wonderland had been tainted by life on this side of the mirror horribly clear.
This notion was always there in Noon’s work – no amount of strain is going to make a looking glass show something that isn’t already here waiting to be reflected, after all – but in Falling Out of Cars it became inescapable. This made the subsequent absence of a “new Jeff Noon novel” seem more explicable, if still somewhat tragic – what better note for an author to stop writing on than this, a story about people whose very ability to comprehend the world and words around them was slipping away.
There were some signs of writerly life though, like 2008’s 217 Babel Street – a collaborative hyperlink fiction the served as the real world scaffolding on a fictional location – and 2012 has seen Noon’s strange pollen corrupting the air stream on a previously inconceivable scale. Noon’s endlessly imaginative twitter account is one of the best follows out there for those in a Mindless frame of mind, and if his microfictional “spore” fictions leave you craving more there’s always the echovirus12 account, to which Noon also contributes.
For those who like their fiction to occupy a more traditional form, there’s also a new novel, Channel SK1N, the story of a pop star who finds her skin overridden by the signals all around her as she transforms in a way that blurs the line between broadcaster and receiver. I’ve only just finished reading the book, and I hope you’ll forgive the ecstatic tone of this introduction because Channel SK1N combines the lysergically enhanced rush of Noon’s early fiction with the queasy comedowns of his later work, and in doing so reaffirms sci-fi’s status as the best tool available to writers who want to explore a future that’s here somewhere, already hidden.
Still buzzing off my contact with his SK1N, I got in touch with Noon to discuss his dazzling reemergence as a self-publishing internet invader…
Illogical Volume: It’s been ten years since you slipped through the darkly reflective cracks of Falling Out Of Cars; ?dlrow rorrim eht ni emit ruoy saw woH
Jeff Noon: Falling Out Of Cars seemed like the end of a period in my life, work-wise, and also I’d just left Manchester (my home town), so it felt like a good time to make some changes. I fell into screenwriting, and had some fun days and some bad days in that world. I was working on various scripts for a number of production companies. I also went back into the theatre, which was my first love in writing terms. I did a play for The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield about the early days of the Mod movement and a science fiction audio play for Radio 3. I still hang onto hope regarding the film scripts, but it’s a difficult media to succeed in, no doubt about it. Eventually, I realised that I’d been without a proper audience for 10 years, so I started writing prose again. I dug out Channel SK1N, which I written a draft of a couple of years previously, and started working on that. And that was the transit point.
That was a transit point, and so is this – click here for more vurty goodness!
SILENCE! #34
October 8th, 2012
WHERE THE HELL’S THE RZA??
SILENCE! no.34 is upon you. Gladness….oh what’s the point? Sometimes being an omnipresent disembodied narrator just isn’t enough y’know? I mean, I had dreams when I was younger – what happened to them? I wanted to be a dancer. I have thighs like a f*cking gazelle…and here I am making up a bunch of lies, to tell some degenerates in arrested development about a show featuring two egotistical blowhards and their half-baked opinions about one of the least respected art-forms in the universe…but since I owe Gary Lactus a kidney, and The Beast Must Die has those photos of me….
So there’s the usual scheisse with the Silence! News and then there’s a verbal tsunami of comics reviews: Axe Cop, Dial H, Daredevil: End of Days, Action Comics, Legends of the Dark Knight, Fashion Beast, Crossed: Badlands, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Tank Girl, Non-Humans (oh and there’s a discussion of headsocks, and the SILENCE! rules of comics are established).
Man Vs Comics makes it to the finish line with AVX, AVX: VS, and Uncanny X-Men and boy-howdy is he thrilled.
The SILENT! Question comes from Detective Chimp, and the answer involves a musical octopus amongst other things.
Add in Fuff #0 from uber-talented Jeffrey Lewis, and Lose #2 from sickeningly talented Michael DeForge in The Smallest Press, and you have an hour and a half of…of…oh god, that’s it I don’t care anymore. If you need me I’ll be out back crying with a gun in my mouth. WRITE YOUR OWN DAMN BLURB YOU PAIR OF HACKS!
SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.
Click below for some Jeffrey Lewis images in the SILENCE! GALLERY… Read the rest of this entry »
