Mindless Ones

As you might have gathered if you’ve been looking at the site over the past couple of days, the Mindless Ones will be at Thought Bubble 2024 in Harrogate this weekend. We’ll be at tables B3-4 in DSTLRY Hall on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November, trading our handmade dreams for the purest product of the imagination we know of – your money.

Dan White won’t be with us at tables B3-4 this year. You see, the artist formerly known as The Beast Must Die is a real boy now. Oni press published Cindy and Biscuit last year, and since then he’s been a true fancy man, with his own fancy pants, and trousers too. If he takes a break from swigging Dom Pérignon at all this weekend, our good friend will be sitting… all the way over at table B2, DSTLRY Hall.

Despite the fact that he’s sitting one table away from us, and is therefore our mortal enemy, Dan is one of the best cartoonists around. Cindy and Biscuit: We Love Trouble showcases the range of skills Dan has built up over the years. As an action cartoonist, his compositions are genuinely propulsive. As a horror artist, his comics have reliably made me feel unexpectedly vulnerable in my own home. And as a storyteller, Dan can make you laugh just by the way he draws Biscuit’s cute dog face, or make you feel a world of unseen hurt with a couple of stray lines.

In addition to his Cindy and Biscuit wares, Dan will also be selling his new collection of Freaky Deakies, which showcases his lovingly coloured late night doodles, a real testament to both his raw visual imagination and his carefully honed craft.

Rounding out Dan’s offerings way up there in the giddy heights of table B2 is a collection of his single page Insomnia comics.

Like Terminus, Insomnia first ran on Mindless Ones dot com way back in the day. Like that comic, it’s a real masterclass in precision, but where Terminus was drawn in the playful, unsettling style that Dan would fully develop in Cindy and Biscuit, Insomnia made use of a series of painterly effects to get across is haunted absurdity. I can’t wait to see how this print edition looks, and if you’ve never read these strips before, I fully recommend that you give them a try.

In a heartwarming display of brotherhood, Dan will be putting his bucket of fizz down and putting his The Beast Must Die mask back on for the SILENCE! to Astonish panel at 2pm on Saturday 16th November in Panel Room 2.

The Beast will be joined in this endeavour by his trusty co-hosts, Gary Lactus and “Affronted” Al Kennedy, and by special guests Chrissy Williams, Ram V, David Brothers and Stephanie Phillips. Expect odd questions, inexplicable challenges, and totally unexpected and double plus special guests in this, the ninth occurrence of comicdom’s most pointless and shambolic panel show.

Our very own Dan White (aka The Beast Must Die) has been interviewed by Matt Colegate for The Comics Journal!  Colegate talks to The Most Handsome Mindless* about Terminus, Insomnia, Cindy and Biscuit, writing for this site, and the development of his art style, and it’s all well worth a read if you like what’s best in life.

A teasing excerpt:

When did you start noticing that your style was developing? Was it an incidental discovery or was it something you were working towards?

There’s a hodgepodge of influences that I can see in everything I do, but it’s nice that a style has formed. When I’m doing a brush stroke I’ll be thinking  “the way I’ve drawn those bushes is really Bill Watterson.” The style also came out of admitting that I didn’t have to do figurative art work. I could still tell stories that I liked by using cartoons. I should say that the biggest influence in my life is Chuck Jones. Seeing the Warner Bros. cartoons broke me forever.

So you were quite strict about wanting to be a cartoonist?

I just admitted, y’know, “You’re not going to be Simon Bisley and you’re not going to be able to draw Batman”. Nor would I want to. My uncle was an illustrator and I used to look at his work and the looseness of the brush work used to really appeal to me. When I realized I could tell the stories that I wanted by cartooning, and not being a slave to anatomy and photo-referencing, that was really liberating and I think the style developed there. It was quite organic.

A lot of your work – Terminus for example, which you did weekly for Mindless Ones – consists of single panel pieces. What is it that appeals about that format?

The one panel strip is traditionally used for political cartoons or simple visual gags, but I wanted to explore what you could do. They were like haiku experiments in paring down the text. Doing it on a weekly basis was great – doing anything on a weekly basis is great because it’s a way to refine your style – and I noticed that I was getting much better at paring the words down. I wanted to do something that wasn’t necessarily funny. What about if you had a one-panel comic that just disturbed you, or made you feel a bit sad? Somebody on the internet said “It’s like a fortune cookie that you open up and inside there’s an obituary.” That was the perfect description of what I was trying to do. He didn’t mean it as a compliment but I put it on the back of the first collection anyway. It was about trying to capture something and suggest a whole world in a panel. There was a nerdy element also, because I got to tell a science fiction or horror story simply. Horror is a thing that comes up again and again in my work and Terminus was a good way to flex some of those muscles.

If you’ll forgive me for sliding straight into huckster mode – this is the internet in 2016, after all – I’ll just right ahead and say that if the interview put you in the mood to read/buy Dan’s comics, we can help you out with that!

I mean just look at this sequence, from the most recent Cindy and Biscuit book:

SERIOUSLY – BUY DAN’S COMICS!**

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Footnotes:

*Aside from Gary Lactus, who is of course the face of bad backs, and also – in his ridiculous stage name of “Fraser Geesin” – Jack of All Polymaths.

**Unless you’re broke, obviously. We don’t actually want to bankrupt you or anything. Or at least, The Beast Must Die doesn’t…

Hi true believers! Sorry INSOMNIA has been away for so long but REAL LIFE and paying work have conspired to get in the way of my once tight weekly scheduling. But fear not, I’ll return soon with the latest PULSE-POUNDING installment!!!
In the meantime I thought I’d share with you a page from yhe SUN RA comic strip I worked on with the right honorable Lord Nuneaton Savage, for the SUN RA book published by the venerable HEADPRESS:

You can pick up a copy of the SUN RA book from the Headpress website, which features essays, interviews, diatribes and comics about the legendary skronk-master himself…well worth a look.

Until the next time, true beleivers, MAKE MINE FREE JAZZ!!!

The ever lovin’ Beast.

STARTS TODAY!

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin.

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.