Mindless Ones

THE MASTER HEALED MY WOUNDS… AND SHOWERED ME WITH FOOD

DID YOU KNOW there’s a word in German for the weight gained whilst overeating because of emotional distress? Amazing!
DID YOU KNOW there’s a German word for the witty come backs you think of later? Yeah, it’s true!
DID YOU KNOW the Germans have a word to describe the a longing for far off places? Our German cousins, eh?
DID YOU KNOW that in Germany they have a word for the conversations English speakers have about how Germans have words that describe really specific things?
DID YOU KNOW sharks can smell London from space?

<ITEM> It’s SILENCE! #225 with Gary Lactus, The Beast Must Die and special robot guest Spare 5.

<ITEM> We pay tribute to artist Edmund Bagwell.

<ITEM> Lots of film and TV chat including Alien Colon Covenant, the Blair Witch remake, The Void, Iron Fist, and there’s some Highlander and Judge Dredd fantasy elevator pitches.

<ITEM> we are hanging out on the new SILENCE! Facebook group

<ITEM> We enter the Reviewniverse where we find Bug The Adventures of Forager, Doom Patrol, Rocket, World War Tank Girl, Shade The Changing Girl, and John Smith’s Tyranny Rex text piece from the 2000AD Annual 1991

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Edmund Bagwell
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Reviewniverse
Bug The Adventures of Forager, Doom Patrol, Rocket, World War Tank Girl, Shade The Changing Girl, John Smith’s Tyranny Rex piece from 2000AD annual 1991

‘Nothing of note was to be inherited by her loved ones, and nor was anything ever expected to be. She was put to rest with exactly the same title as the one with which she was born. She never ruined anyone’s life and never once considered a career in the deliberate, violent immiseration of her fellow citizens.’

‘One measures a circle, beginning anywhere’ – From Hell

‘Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores’

‘I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell’s Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline… and also I would say that if you’ve got the Avengers movie as one of the most eagerly attended recent movies, and if most of those attendees were adults, which I believe they were, then if you’ve got a huge number of contemporary adults going to watch a film containing characters and storylines that were meant for the entertainment of eleven year old boys fifty years ago, then…’

‘We shall attack, we continue to wait… This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision. … The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis.’

‘BOMB ENTANGLERS DISENGAGED’

Being: the third in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

I know one thing – they’re out there and I’m in here. Or rather, we are. Burrowed into precariously rented homes, needing increasingly mutilated services, awaiting mail that brings nothing but threats and bad news, painfully aware that social participation is as demanding of contacts, salesmanship and resources as much as livable employment, vaguely bewildered at a city that announces NOT FOR YOU from every corner: This is the Condition of the Working Class in Bizarro Town. Occasionally supermarkets, burger bars and pasty chains beckon for our devalued labour; if we can demonstrate the ‘right attitude’ (note: I can’t). Failing that, providers of job-seeking ‘services’ extract their own value promising to train us in the ‘right attitude’ and mandatory salesmanship. Otherwise we can shut the fuck up, get off the streets, and watch TV shows informing us that we’re scum. Or, as far as one’s amour propre can allow, talk to faceless strangers on machines that mine and collect details of every careless utterance. This is how neoliberalism ends: Not with a bang, but whimpering, numbing Dystopian cliche. A design against life.

(Pere Lebrun, A Hungry Gorge)

Click here for extra added haunting!

Being: the second in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

If you’re going to talk about Cradlegrave, you’ve pretty much got to face up to this image at some point:

Stripped of context it’s just a doll, just a tired horror-movie prop, a signifier of terror rather than something actually terrifying. In context however, this dull prop seems far more potent:

The sense of surprise, that feeling of “what the fuck is that face doing in the middle of this conversation?”, is enough to give the image some fresh charge here.  The last panel of the sequence hints at the answer, but for the duration of the two panels before it you could be forgiven for thinking you were in another, more Lynchian kind of horror story.

Still, even the most bewildering emanations in Cradlegrave trace back to fleshy, non-Lynchian sources, so it’s just as well that there’s more to the this sequence than  lifeless eyes and startling incongruity.

Look into these eyes, and tell me what you see…

Being: the first in a series of posts about John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s top British horror comic Cradlegrave.

ONE – If you didn’t look past this cover-cum-promotional piece for Cradlegrave, you might think that it was telling a very specific sort of story, the sort of story you might describe as being either “tabloid shit” or “a bit Jamie Delano” depending on which of those two targets was more worthy of disdain.

When I first discussed Cradlegrave back in December, regular comments thread contributor Thrills said he was looking now that he’d got past his concerns that it would “be like that Denise Mina Hellblazer where ‘hoodies’ are ‘demons’.”

Ah, so it’s tabloid shit that smells like Jamie Delano.  The worst of both worlds.  Fuck.

TWO – Despite the fact that the “Fear they Neighbour” text is missing, the cover of the collected edition still aims to make a similar impression:

To my eye, there’s something less real about the four hooded figures in this reformatted cover though.  The overly harsh, pixelated light that gleams off of their shoulders is even more unnatural when set against an all-black background, a background that now seems to expand outwards from the empty spaces where four young faces should be.

These are absent phantoms, not flesh and blood monsters, and while I wouldn’t want to pretend that they’re being deliberately undermined here I still find it hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously.

The only fear in this image is the fear you bring with you, be it fear of “savage” yoofs or of dehumanising right wing rhetoric…

Click here to drink the black milk… IF YOU DARE!

1. Endtroducing

Flashback to 2011 and the world is ending. Again. The signs are easy to interpret now, when they require any interpreting at all: a news anchor blathers away on TV,  building up so much expectation that the large hadron collider, suffering from a fit of performance anxiety, unravels and takes reality with it; meanwhile, under the sea in a parallel Earth, an archaic supervillain announces that he has “hung a deadly necklace of deadly meta-bombs around the world like precious pearls“; on the internet, or rather in a dated parody of cyberspace that resembles nothing so much as X-Box live for “edgy” business folk, a rapidly mutating program tries to take over everything.

Responses to this are equally typical: standing in a futile crowd beside a fatbalding awkwardman, a disinterested woman holds up a sign informing everyone that “THE END is NIGH!“; a bloodied hero crawls forward, trying to save the world again, knowing that all he has to do is push a button, but that even this might be to much for him now; elsewhere, tough men decide to make tough decisions with predictable results.

I’m talking about Batman Incorporated and Indigo Prime here, because they were the two garish fantasies that played best for my (semi-informed, heavily solipsistic) sense of panic throughout 2011, that end of season finale of a year.

After all, if you feel like everything’s falling apart, sometimes it helps to be able dress these feelings up in twisted words and garish costumes instead of focusing on the garbled socio-economic truth.

Spacetime becomes jelly.

The walls of reality buckle and fold.

Higher Dimensions intrude into the supersymmetry.

Dark Matter condenses as worlds collide.

Mmmmm, yeah, that’s the stuff.

Come down with me.

With our gift giving over but spirits still high, Zom pipes up about the problems with continuity using X-Men Regenesis # 1 as a starting point.  Conversation drifts to many areas including DC’s New 52, 2000AD and more, ending with a whole lot of talk about just how great Judge Dredd is.  Speaking of which, here’s a panel by Garth Ennis and Glen Fabry from the Dredd tale, Talkback.

Click to download
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