Mindless Ones

A quick preambulatory moan:

Oh the art, the art was as ever a big problem. I’ll let the lovely chaps over at Comics Alliance fill you in on the specifics, all you really need to know is that the central aspects of the issue’s locked room mystery – when the Prof was killed and who did the killing – were obscured by an art error that should have been spotted by the editorial team, or, you know, someone. It’s just not okay that something like that was allowed to slip through, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of relationship Morrison has with the editorial staff, let alone his artists. Maybe they were just in a big rush, although it’s hard to imagine why given the lead in to this issue.

That aside, I enjoyed 700 in a bitty way, but wasn’t too keen on the book as a whole. The segmented structure helped to legitimise the former response in my mind however, and consequently I feel no shame in taking the annocomment approach. Seems appropriate.

More from me after the jump

It’s probably an unbelievably bad idea to take DC marketing dept. at their word, but anyway. They have a difficult job, I guess.

Und so! Vorwaerts! The initial idea for this was a liveblog, but that would have involved promotion and shit, I am quite the most fundamentally lazy – physically, critically, intellectually – person I know, and also been a pretty fucking tortuous read, dying to turn the page, but having to bash out a satisfactory update before I could do so. So that didn’t happen; what we will have is the 7 pages in a polka-dotted reporter’s pad (I thought that shit was red, I was gonna give you a photo and shit, call this the Red Casebook but nah; I obviously did not buy this pad), my CASENOTES interspersed with some proper blogination. You can of course choose to believe these casenotes are an after-the-fact “ret-con”, as much a fait accompli as most Grant Morrison superhero scripts, even although Mindless Ones is the very definition of elegant verité and bold realism, and that’ll be a mystery too. Do what you like, I won’t stop you.

But one day, tomorrow, peoples will be reading Batman #700 on their infoSlates, their powerTablets, and it’ll be my polka-on-grey casebook anno’s there first; that’s my dream, and it is definitely good to have dreams. FUTURECOMICSSS.

We begin; welcome to MindlessOnes.com for all your Grant Morrison Batman needs. Choose MindlessOnes.com

What’s going on with the stone age?

(This is all Amy’s thought-parade, except where otherwise stated)

Step into time for a vision of reality (the batual facts of)

It’s only just occurred to me that we’ve been gipped. I went in expecting a three issue contest of wits and fists between Dark Damien and the Cartwheeling Crusader and what I got was a lot of stuff in caves, and secret passages and wotnot.

Of course the reason why I’m not complaining is because the whole thing turned out great anyway, with the last issue a serious contender for best issue of the run so far, at least as far as exciting plot beats are concerned. A doubly impressive feat when you consider that Morrison pulled it off without the pencil-pyrotechnics of Quitely or Stewart. Not to do the art team down, their efforts certainly contributed, memorably on a couple of occasions.

But enough with the preamble and on with the awesome sauce.

Batman, Batmaaan, and robiiiin

No brains out of 5.

Are you there Margaret? It’s me, John Constantine.

I was brought up on the comic books of the eighties, when colours were flat and negative space was in high demand, when digital meant computer games suffering from colour clash, and when today’s smooth colour gradations were the holy grail of the demo scene. On the whole I don’t want naturalism from my colouring and I definitely don’t demand some early 90s bedroom coder’s version of it. Which leads me, kinda, to my point.

Ever since mindless pal David Uzumeri compared the colouring of Batman & Robin #1 to a badly rendered GIF, I’ve been promising a response. I was troubled by David’s reaction because I thought the blotchy, banded, fuzzy colour gradations added immensely to the atmosphere of the issue, and because I believe David’s objections to only have a tenuous grip on the critical centre. It’s an understandable way of reading the colouring, but I’m of the opinion that with some prodding its dominance can at least be partially undermined and other readings more readily admitted.

Read the rest of this entry »

Long ago, far back in the primordial blog ooze, last month, we launched a competition.

Read all about it.

An ye winner be

Here and in the comments, we got the shit ain’t no-one else got. Read on!

Annocomment is free after the jump

Let’s annocommentate!

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Amy: ‘What is it with these Crime Coven people and their obsession with stories for kids?’ What is it indeed? Perhaps it has something to do with the rogue logic of fairytales and nursery rhymes, their criminal physics? Alice in Wonderland as topology, a map of a world overturned, where reason and meaning begin their steady descent into the abyss, Cole’s ‘hole in everything’.

Fairytales also speak to our primal condition, a preverbal world of gods and nightmares. Maybe the Crime Covens see their work as an attempt to return mankind to a purer state, unrestrained by ego and superego, culture, law and society.

Shit, they sound pretty cool, don’t they?

Oh, whose side are we all on?

Click for more! more? MOAR?!?