SILENCE! #301

January 27th, 2022

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 ZoneJack 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



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This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

Neil Gaiman is one of the most charming and popular writers to ever escape from comics. Famed for his extended runs on The Eternals and Hellblazer, as well as for his transcendental novels Mirrormask and American Gods, Gaiman’s name has become a synonym for so many words that it’s threatening to replace our whole language: “dreamer”, “storyteller”, “vainglorious tout”… all of these words and phrases are contained within him now.

Soon, no thoughts will be safe!

But all of this is as obvious as breathing and twice as much fun.  What can we tell you about Neil Gaiman that you don’t already know?

1. While everyone knows about the Dreamsqueezer’s massive contributions to 2000AD, the fact that he cut his teeth for DC Thompson is less commonly discussed or understood. Working under a series of bewitching pseudonyms and accepting payment only through a convoluted array of shell companies, Gaiman honed his craft, taking the staid comedy routines that had trapped characters like Oor Wullie for decades and transforming them into something strange, something other:

Gaiman is often hesitant to discuss his early work, but in the deep, dark woods of his infamous 2008 radio interview with Jonathan Ross, the bewitching Duran Duran biographer compared these early strips of his to “the very best of Kafka”.

Rumours abound that Deep Space Transmissions archivist Ben Hansom will be debuting a new website this summer that is wholly dedicated to unpacking Gaiman’s contributions to the DC Thompson line. When approached for a comment, Mr Hansom maintained a knowing silence while letting a smile eat his whole face.  Gaiman into that what you will.

Click here for more red hot Gaiman!

Final FUCKING Crisis x 5!

December 13th, 2008

I feel like the Mindless Ones have been in on a secret. Since its inception, both beasts, Lord Nuneaton Savage, Bobsy and I have all been whispering amongst ourselves about how Final Crisis is actually good.

A few thoughts from Zom:

“I noticed that Brian Hibbs, amongst others, recently commented that Final Crisis lacks weight because of the way it seems divorced from continuity. That’s a criticism that I have some sympathy with – as a reader of ongoing comics how could I not? – but it is rooted in an understanding of the DCU that differs significantly from my own. Brian is positioning continuity as central to our relationship with the fictional space, whereas I tend to approach things from another angle. It seems to me that as fans we all have a much deeper connection with the DCU. I’m talking about our relationship with our private, idealized DCUs. We all know where Gotham and Metropolis are and what’s important about them, we’ve all been to Oa, we care about our favorite superheroes even when their continuities have taken a turn down shit alley. Especially then, perhaps.

Final Crisis is threatening those DCUs. Give a fuck about the one where “superpants punched bumhead so that couldn’t happen!”. Yeah, yeah none of it’s entirely separable- obviously! – but I tend to think that the world is best approached as an analogue rather than a binary experience. It’s not either/or, it’s just about turning down the continuity volume, and trust me it is possible – I do it all the time – and so do you, it’s just that you might not notice.

I’ll be giving you an example in my next post: FUCK YEAH!

Kick it out the door, Poodle!”

Back to me. Welcome.

Stop reading the interviews, ignore the hype, immerse yourself in some Kirby, trust the creative team, stick on some apocalyptic music and you’re ready to begin.

Just a little aside before we get into this. There’s plenty of sites out there featuring balanced reviews, there’s plenty of sites out there featuring scathing reviews, and there’s plenty of sites out there drooling like a muthafucker. This site, however, is all about celebrating what we like about the comic, with a healthy wodge of gushing, but hopefully in an intelligent, infectious way.

I could write the negative review. I could write the balanced review. I could go ‘I MARRY GRANT MORRISON LOVE WEDDING!!!!11123!YOU R BASE BELONG GRANT MORRISON!’

All this would bore the shit out of me. It’s like I’ve just heard a brilliant new tune and I want to enthuse about it, regardless if it’s a bit tatty round the edges and the breakdown’s a bit overlong.

So there!