Mindless Ones

Writer, The Wicked + The Divine (with Jamie McKelvie, 2014 – 2019), We Called Them Giants (with Stephanie Hans, 2024), The Power Fantasy (with Caspar Wijngaard, 2024 – present). Also writes a mean newsletter (not the kind that hurts your feelings), sometimes even talks about games.

Tell us about power.

Power is a fantasy.

Tell us about fantasy.

Fantasy is power.

I sometimes wonder what my career would look like if I just was happy to just release gnomic statements into the world and wasn’t addicted to trying to communicate with people. I suspect “I’d have more free time” instead of indulging my hypergraphic bullshit. Seriously, I was going to download a ridiculous amount of stuff in the microinterview before deciding that, no, Kieron, it’s Microinterview. Understand the brief. 

To actually answer the question, Power is the ability to make reality align with your preference. As such, all power is suspect. A lot of my work has circled back to the soft power of art, specifically to be suspicious about it – writing stories about stories fucking us up, writing the equivalent of the warnings on cigarette packets. I’ve concentrated on that aspect of power as it’s my neck of the woods – but also as it’s the one which is the first, necessary step to any other abuse of power. One needs to tell themselves a good story to be happy to kill someone. The power of art is to aim the gun of most other forms of power. 

OH MOTHER DEAR WE SADLY FEAR THAT WE HAVE SOILED OUR MITTENS

Another week, another blurb. People often ask, “Hey! How do you keep your blurbs so fresh and new, week in, week out? It’s amazing! You’re amazing! How can I be like you?”. Well, we here at SILENCE! Blurb Inc. are tired of this question. So tired in fact that we’re now offering our SILENCE! Blurb Writing Masterclass. Learn from the best to realise your potential in the lucrative field of Blubcraft. Packed with high profile contributions from Todd Carty on how to find inspiration, Danny Dyer on the impact of brevity and Neil Gaiman on the power of blurbs. Send your £500 to the usual address.

The tired dads return and Gary’s been selling off parts of his collection! Both Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die have been guesting on Shelf Dust Presents The War Effort.  The Beast has been enjoying Paul Morley’s biography of Tony Wilson and the surprisingly heavy inclusion of Kieron Gillen therein.  There’s a non-review of The Eternals and chitter-chatter regarding the SILENCE! Juniors’ emergent relationship with super heroes and Gary’s quest for space.

Sadmin.  The tragic loss of Steve Walsh and Garry Leach.

The chaps pick themselves up with the exciting birth of Dark and Golden and the peculiar pleasure of comics speculation.

Off, down and away into The Reviewniverse with Mek Memoirs, Kamen Rider, The X-Cellent, Orphan and the Five Beasts, Step By Bloody Step, a comic called Uncanny X-Men and The Sharkfighters of course.

Then with a yawn we learn that Fraser Geesin will be at the Brighton Illustration Fair on Sunday 1st May, The Beast went to the London Comic Mart and that finding your own comics for sale secondhand really makes you feel like you’ve made it.

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

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Hello there. This issue of SILENCE! has been put together from conversations between Gary Lactus and The Dear Listener. Normal SILENCE! service shall return soon.

CONTENTS!

Little Kieron Gillen is off school and talks The Ludocrats and Asterix with the recent passing of Albert Uderzo. He also bigs up Pulp by Brubaker and Phillips before getting on with his homework.

Spare 5 tells Gary about life at home right now where he’s found time to get round to reading Uzumaki and watching Galaxy Quest.

John Bishop tackles the topics of the sickness of collecting, his new dog, Ryan Brown and Blast Furnace.

Illogical Volume fulfills a diversity quota with his Scottishness. He tells Gary about The Drifting Classroom the newly colourised From Hell and Gary tells him about Billionaire Island and there’s speculation about our post-virus world.

Zom is our final caller even though he lives close enough to Gary’s spaceship in space to shout. He’s done a right good read of David Boring so the pals talk about Daniel Clowes and ponder what sort of Batman they are.

The end. Now wash your hands. Seriously, wash your hands.

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

MELON-RISING CALIFORNIA SUN, DRIFTING IN A DAY NOT YET BEGUN

SORRY! SO SORRY! We’ve neglected you dear listenoids, with our foolish ‘responsibilities’ to our families. Can you forgive us? Would you? Could you? Would you, could you, in a pod. Would you could you with a Furry Man and a Space God?

Well, we’re back in some fashion with the latest SILENCE! Your tired old pals Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die return to the heartland to bring you their frazzled recollections of Thought Bubble 2018, the Leeds-based comics hootenanny. In doing so we mention Hitsville, Alex Automatic, Triskelion, Tom Eglington, Cindy & Biscuit: Sundays, The Cleaner Issue 4 and a bit more.

There’s also some My Two Dads. WHO LOVES YA BABIES?

Part 2 is the epochal era-defining planet-shattering SILENCE! TO ASTONISH live event from the aforementioned T-Bubz18. It’s a shambolic thrillride with lovely Al To Astonish, special guests John Allison, Kieron Gillen, Alan Moore, Geoff Johns and Stan Lee.

Dig in, hunker down, bug out, kick back, suck it down, pucker up and sit tight. It’s going to be…a time.

@silencepod

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

Some more thoughts on the London Graphic Novel Network‘s second S.M.A.S.H. event, as previously discussed here.

You can watch the panel I contributed to below:

My speech at the start of this panel now exists like the death of Orion in/around Final Crisis, in a mini-kaleidoscope of different versions and recordings scattered across the internet – suits me, given the daft flourish about the Tower of Babel I threw in at the end of it!

The other panellists brought a range of expertise, and while there weren’t any heated arguments, I think our personalities and perspectives clashed in a way that was generally illustrative – Hannah was comfortable enough in her own skin to be flip and funny about taste, Katriona‘s contributions were considered and precise, and Mark‘s focus on technical skill neatly offset my own pseudo-academic tendencies.

As for the broader event, if you’d asked me I would have said that the crowd skewed young and “progressive” (not a term I’m over-fond of myself – I like specificity, a sense of what is being advanced – but having just used it like this I can see the appeal of its vagueness) but there was some pushback when Kelly Kanayama/Maid of Nails discussed the use of racist tropes in the first Warren Ellis/Bryan Hitch Authority story during the panel on MEANING.

Reconstructing intent was a running theme of all three panels (the other two were ART and DIVERSITY, remember), and in this instance it took the form of the Good Man defence

YOUR THIN PAPER WINGS, IN THE WIND, DANGLING

Roll the dice – move forward 4 steps. You find yourself at the clearing of a large empty podcast. To your right are some dense opinion shrubs. To the left a bubbling pool of judgments. Roll the dice – you decide to ignore both and move forward 8 paces towards the giant floating skull in the centre of the clearing. Roll the dice – you ask it a question: “Where am I?” The skull opens it’s mouth and with a terrifying ear-splitting screech it tells you…”SILENCE!”

Contact us:

[email protected]

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

You can support us using Patreon if you like.

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.

I WAS A TEENAGE STAMP COLLECTOR I’D LAY ON MY BACK AND YOU’D STAMP ON MY FACE

There we go, that’s the quote done. Now I have to do some sort of blurb. Gary Lactus here by the way. I was all excited about The Beast Must Die coming back from Croatia and Bobsy coming round to my space ship for a lovely 3 person podcast when illness and circumstance all struck at once! Let me tell you, I was all ready to give up on life when I thought, “Hey, there are more than three people who like comics and stuff” so I asked the internet. I Googled, “Pod Pals” and Kieron Gillen, James Baker, Steve Heller-Murphy and Matthew Craig fell out of my laptop almost instantly! Me and my new pals talked about things. Here is a list of them:

Witches, People Inside, Memetic, Six Gun Gorilla, X 23, X-Men, BendiXmen, Megaton Man, Aztec Ace, Reid Flemming World’s Toughest Milkman, 2000AD and a whole load of other divergences.

Come join me on my interractopodical adventure…

Click to download SILENCE!#116

Contact us:

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

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.