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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SILENCE! Man’s oldest friend. Since time immemorial began throughout history it has been SILENCE! which has fed our children, built our houses, lit our fires and shoed our horses. Welcome to what is probably the single most essential issue of SILENCE! ever. Gary Lactus and Bobsy talk a load of balls, discuss SILENCE! LIVE #2 (to be held May 11th at the same place as last time, tell us in the comments if you’re up for it) and create some Slash Fiction///./../../..>>>>>##””’][=-`

‘;#.,/=-p][p’ITEM This has never happened before! Gary and Bobsy are both posting simultaneously and the streams are getting crossed!!! Gary had this chill- ironic narrator thing going, see above, but bobsy was going to do a bit about that show about the Mormon wives, and the guys with all the unhappy wives? Gary is the dumb guy who has to remember four wedding anniversaries per annum and TBMD, Maid of Nails, bobsy and co are all his babymakers who all loathe each other? It was gonna be a bit like that.

ITEM Bobsy didn’t really know where this was going to go however, so he started writing the end first and hoped a good bit for the start would come to him while he was going along. It to be honest, hadn’t…

ITEM And then the thing with the crossed streams happened which saved bobsy’s bacon quite a bit. Good old Gary: it’s his spaceship, we just float in it.

ITEM Then Gary and his third, or is it his seventh, fave wife have a great TV news section they didn’t have the presence of mind to call Silence! Because I’m trying to watch the telly and they say stuff about Legion and Samurai Jack.

ITEM Death is gripped as the celestially betrothed and cosmically neglected couple pair bond and enter the Reviewniverse! where they talk about the comics time of course: Inhumans Prime, Xmen Prime,  Lone Wolf and Cub, Galaxy of Brutality: Space Riders, Spider Woman, Black Widow, Rick and Morty, Cinema Purgatorio and Detective Comics.

ITEM that’s it G you can do the podcast embed now:

ITEM Right you are, Bobsy.

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

 

JUST GIVE ME SOME SECURITY, I’M A PARANOID SCHIZO PRODUCT OF THE 20th CENTURY

Well gawsh shucks and golly gee willickers! It’s the first new SILENCE! of 2017! Time to shake off the cobwebs, blow open the windows and let the singing bluebirds of the new year come twit-twitting right into your flaming gob holes. Got a resolution? Break it! The only resolution you need is to listen to SILENCE! and no other podcast. Oh, and be excellent to each other.

<ITEM> Join those lounge lizards Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die as they shed their old 2016 skins and reveal their shiny new 2017 bods, ready to rock the new year and shake the comics firmament.

<ITEM> Bit of post-festive admin including some spooky TV recommendations, Cat News and of course the boundless joys of unfettered sponsorship!

<ITEM> There’s a micro-edition of SILENCE! (Because the Film Has Started) as The Beast reviews Captain America: Civil War

<ITEM> Carrie Fisher RIP

<ITEM> New year, new Reviewniverse, and we ring in both the old and new, with discussions of Motro, Alan Moore’s Star Wars stories, Snyder and Lemire’s AD, Steve MacManus’ Mighty One: My Time In the Nerve Centre, She Hulk, Civil War II, Detective Comics, Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing, Keith Giffen on Spectacular Spider-Man and Hex and more, oh so much more.

So let’s go! Now! GO! NOW GO!!

 

RECORD  COMPANY MAN, I WON’T BE COMING TO DINNER

Imagine a blurb. A blurb like you’ve never seen. A golden, beautiful blurb that shines like the sun. A blurb that glistens like dew on morning grass. A blurb that sings like the strike of a tuning fork against an angel’s backside. Imagine a blurb like that. That blurb is here. Can you taste it?

<ITEM> It’s the return of The Beast Must Die, joining Gary Lactus for another ker-lassic episode of SILENCE! But wait! What’s this? It’s also a Bobsy episode! A Bobs-isode!

<ITEM>There’s some admin and a whole load of My Two Dads chat. Of course. And some self-promotion for the our sister and brother podcasts Diane and The Earth-Pig Diaries. And news of our various appearances at Small Press Day 2016

<ITEM>Three men in a Reviewniverse? It’s a king-size edition with more digressions than you can shake a fully painted graphic novel at. Transformers Vs GI Joe, 4 Kids Walk into a Bank, The Sweetness, Detective Comics, Providence, Beverley Hills Cop II, Bill Sienkiewicz, Midnight of the Soul, All New Avengers, Captain America, Captain Brexit, Sean Phillips, John Smith, Sexy Male Comics Creator Top Trumps, The Sound of Drowning and a whole lot more.

And we are done. Move along people.

Click to download SILENCE!#195

 

 

 

MY MINIATURE KINGDOM, MY KING-SIZE EGO

…and the thing is, you should have seen the size of the bleeder’s head! Like a bloomin’ bit of roast beef it was, with all these filthy mouths full of doll’s teeth…snapping they were, just all snapping! And the way it moved! Like a film running back it was, like some awful old film… and the smell! Like a flippin’ abbatoir that someone had sprayed with perfume…sickening it was, sickening!

I tell you. Last time I go internet dating.

<ITEM> HOO-HAH! It’s only a brand new SILENCE! up in your grill with a boatload of sass and a pocketful of attitude. So join The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus as they take you on a journey into: the internet’s ONLY comics podcast

<ITEM> Bit of preamble ramble, some uewd and rude Sponsorship, plus a bit of promotion for Gary Lactus’ London gig.

<ITEM> Behold! The Reviewniverse! In all it’s many angled glory. There’s some DC Rebirth fun, with The Flash, Detective Comics, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. There’s The Fix, All New All Sexy Avengers, The Vision and a whole mess more

<ITEM> But wait! It’s the Beast’s Bargain Basement with Alan Moore’s Majestic one-shot, Eddie Campbell’s Deadface and the 1991 Judge Dredd Mega Special.

<ITEM> Cheeky review of the ill-fated Fantastic Four movie? Don’t mind if I do.

More? More? Listen Oliver Twist, take your ‘more’ and shove it right up your

*BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

 

Click to download SILENCE!#192

 

 

Being an irregular series wherein I spotlight some particularly beautiful cover runs, from some comics you might have forgotten about, or never seen before. This time it’s a short run of covers for Detective Comics by Michael Golden:

Batman is a character who lends himself to bold artistic interpretations. Over the 70 odd years since his creation many of the brightest and best talents have put their stamp on the Dark Knight, and often to electrifying effect. There’s something bold and simple about the character’s design that lends itself to graphical innovation, and the neo-gothic ultra noir of Gotham provide the perfect artistic backdrop.

As such there’s an embarrassment of riches to choose from with regards to spectacular cover runs, and truth be told I feel a little guilty about selecting any Bat-comics for exposure in this series simply because of their sheer ubiquity – the aim of this feature is generally to expose work that may have been forgotten or overlooked. There is however one short run of Bat-covers that I have always adored, and that I just had to showcase for anyone who hasn’t seen them before. Simply put, these are some of my very favourite comic covers ever; strong stylish and vibrant they showcase the visceral power of the medium at it’s best.

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I’LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND! I’LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND! 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Ha ha! Hello SILENCERS! Under the brand spanking new SILENCE! banner from celebrity orc-peddlar James Stokoe, you will find the latest hot shot comics rot from notorious 4-colour sex pests The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus. Quake, then, frail ones at SILENCE! no.19…special early morning edition.

A slightly frazzled and sleepy pair take on the release of the recent Dredd trailer for SILENCE! news, then the coffee starts kicking in and they barrel into some full-blooded discussion of comics, including 2009 the third volume of Alan Moore and Kev O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century series. Also spoken of: Saga no. 4, Hellblazer (Biz + werewolves), Secret history of DB Cooper no. 4, Journey Into Mystery, AVX something or other, and Daredevil. The Beast brings back ‘You Should’ve Known Better’ with his take on Tony Daniels’ Detective Comics and then things peeter out as an over-excited Lactus realises he got up way too early.

It’s an hour and ten minutes of comics shpoonk, and it comes in a handy ear-pill sized format. So jump up, jump up and get down with the comics podcast that the world believes might change everything for everyone….SILENCE!

click to download

Comics bought and read on Saturday the 7th of June 2008

More after the jump