Mindless Ones

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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OVER MY SHOULDER, OLDER AND OLDER, THAT’S WHAT I TOLD YA, OVER AND OVER

Well, well, well if it isn’t Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die crawling back on their knees, begging forgiveness for missing a week of the world’s otherwise most reliable podcast.  Angry hoards of ex listeners have verbally and physically assaulted the punctual pair, blaming them for all manner of important, missed appointments because they set their watches to SILENCE!’s famous regularity.

Thankfully, that’s all over now and the two men are back to perform that most incredible feat, talking about stuff.  Stuff like Small Press Day at Gosh, and people like Sean Azzopardi, Molly Stocks, Mark Stafford, Douglas Noble and Fraser Geesin and Dan Cox’s comic, Jeff.

Gareth Hopkins‘ kickstarter, Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors gets a shout too.

Then it’s off to The Reviewniverse, with Counterfeit Girl, Geezer, John’s Worth and Marvel’s adaptation of Dune

Wrapping up, The Beast has watched The Boys and She Hulk and Gary has been listening to The Blindboy Podcast

There’s probably more that I’ve forgotten but you can find out what that is by listening… NOW!

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

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I’M GOING TO FAST! I GOT NO BREAKS ON MY ROLLER SKATES!

Hi, come this way, that’s right, just through here.  Now, our first exhibit is this collection of bricks.  As you can see there’s five in total.  Two of them are the same and one of them is made of latex.  That’s right! It’s a stunt brick!  Then over here we have a wooden duck painted like Superman, right next to this wide-necked plastic bottle with some piss in it.  Well that’s it.  I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour of the Museum of Gary Lactus.  Oh, I almost forgot, here we have a classic blurb written by the human disappointment himself.

Two men!  One pod!  Some saucy innuendo!  Some sentences ending in exclamation marks!  After a break, Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die reacquaint themselves with a bit of chat about Douglas Noble and pal’s A Pocket Chiller series, not doing comedy and an imaginary space battle between billionaires.

Then it’s off to a bumper Reviewniverse with Simon Hanselmann’s Crisis Zone, Jack Teagle’s Collected Madness, Fight! and Teagle Comics, Cinema Purgatorio, Nick Edwards’ It Had To Be You, Doctor Tom Brent – Young Intern, Battle, Walls’ Chill, Sean Azzopardi, Orphan and the Five Beasts, Mr. Men and Battle Action Force of course.

Then it’s away but not before you are urged to buy John McRea’s stuff to help him through a pretty devastating bout of long covid.

See you next week!

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

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Broken partings making strange goodbyes.  Hopeless cases with fake alibis

This is your blurb.  Deal with it, yeah?

<ITEM> Get excited because this SILENCE! is a The Beast Must Die Solo Special!  By that we mean The Beast is extremely busy and off on his own, working hard and, crucially, not appearing on this podcast.

<ITEM> Nevertheless, Gary Lactus loves to party (alone in his car like sad, middle aged man who is wondering where it all went wrong) so he’s invited some top guests to fool around with and have a really great time.

<ITEM> What’s that sound of creaking gears and whining servos?  Why, it’s Spare 5 who, although not a real boy, has real things to say about David Lapham’s Silverfish and the film, Psycho II whilst Gary moans about superheroes in general.

<ITEM>  Douglas Noble comes along to talk about Pocket Chillers and Tarzan.  Interesting to note that Douglas danced part of a 1980 Legs And Co routine continuously throughout recording.  Of course, this is an audio-only presentation and doesn’t come accross when listening.  Shame, he’s quite good.

<ITEM>  Maid Of Nails aka Kelly Kanayama sings some of her hits in between talk about Hellblazer: Royal Blood, Royalty, Amateur Demonology, Garth Ennis and A Walk Through Hell.  Oh, and a Korean Drama which might be called Worlds Apart or something like that.

<ITEM> Finally Tom Mortimer provides the weird, human cherry on top of this cocktail made from old, found booze which tastes surprisingly pleasant.  I mean, this is mostly bullshit but there’s some stuff about Blue And Green, Severed and Skrull Kill Crew in there.

<ITEM>LISTEN!

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

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Esther McManus – Windows (See You at the Potluck, 2018)

This one comes from what my partner calls the “They Saw You Coming” side of the comic/zine world.  Every time I visit a comics festival or zine fair I come back home with at least 2-3 books full of pictures of buildings, or parts of buildings, or spaces where buildings used to be.  I rarely regret it.

Esther McManus’ Windows is an excellent example of the form, a series of portals that have been removed from any supporting context in a way that serves as startling prompt to the imagination:

The work demanded by this zine doesn’t just come in the form of having to reconstruct the urban environment – that’s the most immediately striking element, of course, a natural by-product of the composition of the piece, but it’s the start of a process rather than its final conclusion.

In its gradual blurring of the distinction between windows and the shapes that frame them, its removal of the human from the urban environment, and its finding of new ways to recombine familiar shapes, Windows is ultimately more Ballardian in its effects than it may initially appear.

Moving beyond brutalist cliches, this is a work that re-imagines the city as something that is no longer for us – a space that exists on the other side of the portal, where there is nothing to be reflected except windows looking on windows looking on windows all the way down.

It is March 2020.  I suspect that this scene is more familiar to many of us now than it would have been at any previous point in my lifetime.

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AND EVERYONE IS A CLEVER CLONE, A CHROME COVERED CLONE AM I

Q:  Didn’t we have a luvverly time the day we went to T-Bubz??

A: Short answer = yes. Long answer contained in the podcast below. It’s only the flippin’ annual SILENCE! Thought Bubble run-down!

<ITEM> Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die recount their TB 2019 experience and culinary escapades. They brag about fancy hotels and talk up their swag and encounters from the festival, including meeting John Wagner, Alan Martin, Atom Tan, Alex Automatic, House of Sweets, Trencher Xmas Special, Douglas Noble, Hitsville, Mindless Ones, breakfast, rain, the Poshness of Harrogate, Milligan & Dayglo’s Counterfeit Girl and more.

<ITEM> It’s the prestige-quality, extra-special SILENCE! TO ASTONISH LIVE spectacular spectacle, with consumate co-host Al to Astonish,  lovely guests Emma Viecelli, Gerry Duggan, Ram V and John Allison and the usual self-indlugence. Plus special magickal guestz…oooooohh!

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

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A song in mythic time/a poem stuck on some pictures of rocks – as always, Noble forces us to confront the relation between what we’re seeing and what we’re being told.

Trick works: we are now bound in the circle.

#Comics280

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Hey Kids – Stop snogging and listen to me!

Silence is back! And it’s smaller, longer and more claustrophobic than ever before! Welcome to The Temple of Lactus where the atoms of reality are comics and batman really is the god of my two fathers.

Cursing silver, Das Biest Muss Sterben drags his bloody pelt through the wilds of the black forest gateau and has NO TIME FOR PODCASTING, LOSERS. This means: homely, hirsute but dutiful farmer’s daughter Bobsy is kidnapped from his cosy homestead and forced into the servitude of the Spacelord and his menagerie of wives (x1) sons (x1) and cats (x2).

They strip down to their essentials and get down to business. Their business is comic book reviews and business is in no particular order –

Magpie 1&2, Triskelion 5 – Kathryn Briggs
The Cleaner 4 – Fraser Geesin
Rok of the Reds 1-3 – Wagner, Grant and Cornwell
Reads 4 – Avery Hill Publishing
Berserker 1 – Breakdown Press
Battle Action Force – Major Black
Here come the beautiful people and Counting Stones – Douglas Noble
Prismatik Man 1 – Stathis Tsemberlidis
Stone Focus and Propagation of… – Lando
STEELBLADE 1 by Steven Steelblade
Into the Black by Benjy Goldsmith and Cicy Reay
Generation Gone 1-3 – Ales Kot and Andre Lima Araujo
What is Left – Rosmary V-O
Mr. Higgins Comes Home – Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell
Kid Lobotomy – Peter Milligan and Tess Fowler

@silencepod

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

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NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT TO DO, NO NOT ME

Well, this was a lot of fun. On May 11th 2017, Gary Lactus, The Beast Must Die and Lord Nuneaton Savage sat atop the Bishop’s Finger with a the finest fellows a bunch of pod bods could ever hope for.

Small Press was the theme of the evening but first we started off with Tam Laniado leading a tribute to the recently rest-in-peaced Leo Baxendale.

Proceedings proceeded with some rambling chat which covered such small press obscurities as Bum Child by Tim Leopard, OHM by an odd chap that John Bishop met at a convention many years ago, Fast Fiction, Meow by Cyriak and L.I.F.E. Brigade by the delusional genius C. A. Stormon. There was also talk of Viz and the indestructible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

After a pleasant refill we decided it would be sensible to talk to the creators present. This meant John Riordan going on about Hitsville UK, Douglas Noble waffling on about Strip For Me and Gareth Hopkins guffing about Intercorstal. Luckily there’s some top top chat about daytime TV wine experts to liven things up.

After a lovely singalong we turned off the recording devices and indulged in social activities which shall go unrecorded and spoken of in hushed tones as the years passed thus turning all present for this wonderful evening into legends.

LEARN MORE!
John Riordan
Nick Bryan
Steve Lacey
Anton and Amy
Gareth Hopkins
Douglas Noble
Two Headed Thingies

CLICK HERE FOR A GALLERY OF STARS AND SUPPLEMENTARY IMAGES

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