Mindless Ones

Back in February, I appeared on a panel at the London Graphic Novel Network’s S.M.A.S.H. event. There were a lot of great speakers at those events (including our own Maid of Nails, friend of the website Kieron Gillen, America’s next top comics critic J.A. Micheline, Mazin off the Kraken podcast, and Jam Trap poet Chrissy Williams), staggered across three panels focusing on MEANING, ART and REPRESENTATION in comics.

The plan was to write series of posts inspired by these talks, but then this happened.

Trying to appear big and clever on the internet has never felt less important to me than it did in the aftermath. 

Anyway, I spoke on the art panel at S.M.A.S.H. and as a comics critic in the company of artists/editors, I figured I would be the least qualified person to talk about the subject so I did what I always do: I overcompensated. Only Mister Attack will ever see the first draft of my introductory talk, the charmingly titled “COMICS ARTISTS ARE WASTING THEIR LIVES”. In the end, I settled for a slightly less arsey approach that focused on different modes of reading, and how we might want to develop our understanding of our own biases so we can better make them fight to prove which opinions are best.

You can listen to what I actually said and the subsequent panel debate here (headphones recommended, audio’s a but quiet!), read the version of this pitch I submitted here, or if you fancy getting the right mix of depth and brevity you can now read the text I brought with me on the day below.

None of these versions are quite the same. None of them quite get across what I thought I was trying to say. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Taste the glory!

IT’S A MUST THAT I TAKE THE STREETS BACK SO FAST, EVERYBODY THINKIN’ IT’S NOT GONNA LAST…

Okay big picture people, big picture only. Blue sky thinking, big picture stuff. Blue sky, big picture, out of the box stuff people. Big, blue, out-of-the-box thinking. Big picture, blue sky thinking, right out of the box, take the ball and run with it stuff people. Big runny blue balls, right out of the box. OK people? OK?

<ITEM> It’s the comics podcast that man, feels like a woman! It’s SILENCE! you lucky, lucky pea-pods.

<ITEM> Not just any episode, but one of our fabled Guesticodes featuring none other than Kelly Kanayama aka Maid of Nails. Scholar, Rob  Liefeld character, and Frank MIller gang member? Whatever, she’s here and she’s raising the bar. Limboing smoothly under it are old hams Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die.

<ITEM> Sponsorship as usual, but with some red hot Dundee recommendations! Also The Beast has some life admin to share, and is ready to introduce…the Phantasmacats! Also, Team Poppet and the Final Solution?? Oh and Dicks. Don’t forget the Dicks.

<ITEM> Let’s go go go into The Reviewniverse, and it’s a humdinger. We talk The Discipline, Shade The Changing Man, The Extremist, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan and bondage, Ted McKeever’s Pencil Head, Cerebus The Aardvark, problematic creators, Jiro Kawata’s Bat-Manga, Black Widow, Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and a slab more.

<ITEM> Gary has to duck out early so The Beast and Maid of Nails sing it out in style…

GERTCHA!

click to download SILENCE!#179

[email protected]

A WEE TREAT FOR YOU HERE TODAY, AS MAID OF NAILS/KELLY KANAYAMA WRESTLES WITH… WELL, WE’LL LET HER TELL YOU!

A confession: I am a Strong Female Reader, and I can’t get enough Dicks.

To clarify, I adore Garth Ennis’ and John McCrea’s (if he’s reading this: hi, John!) two-volume series Dicks beyond all reason. It’s obsessed with the combination of male genitalia and violence, and isn’t ashamed of that obsession. It’s ostensibly puerile to the point of featuring an alien antagonist called Lord Bluevein, leader of the Dong. One of its main goals seems to be answering the question: how many cartoonish dicks can we cram into each page?

That’s why I love it so much.

I mean, there’s a building on my university campus called Bonar Hall, and every single time I walk past it I do a mental snicker. The day I learned that All-Star Superman was referred to as ASSMAN in official DC correspondence is a day I will treasure forever. When I picked up a black-and-white print collection of Vol. 1 of Dicks at London Super Comic Con and got McCrea and Ennis to sign it, I made a point of telling them that since it was in a bag, I had an actual bag of Dicks in my hand.

It’s not exactly the most feminine behaviour. But why isn’t it?

Previously: Botswana Beast and Maid of Nails discussed premature Batjaculation, ephemeral dogs and Grant Morrison’s Glasgow music hall touches.

Otherwise life is just a bunch of screaming meat

MoN: I think I have solved the mystery of the 15 moves in Multiversity #2, and I am so psyched about it

BB: Me too –

1. The cube is the missing weapon from Earth-15
2. 15 is 51 inverted, the last world

I kept meaning to say, what do you reckon it is?

MoN: Damn, I keep forgetting about the Earth-numbers…

Ok here goes: in Final Crisis (2008), Metron solves the Rubik’s Cube in 17 moves to save/restore Nix Uotan.

BB: Allllsssooooo, 15 can correspond to Alpha as in A and 5 looks like S, so All-Star, so the cube is Universe-Q from All-Star Superman (aka ASSMAN)??

This is this scalar trick he always pulls.

Botswana Beast: Hello readers, in my ongoing efforts to to trick other people into writing entire or the majority of my pieces for Mindless Ones, I have enlisted another vict… expert, silver Hawaiian Kelly Kanayama, who you may be familiar with from the excellent Women Write About Comics and More than Four Colours, amongst other things; she is also presently writing a Ph.D. on Judge Dredd, Preacher and transatlanticism, which is a thing you can do nowadays, even if you are a lady. I was surprised too, but she is totally brilliant, and yes of course has a Mindless name, see; this is her head:-

Maid of Nails: The Multiversity is one of those series that burrows into your brain — like the cordyceps fungus, not uncoincidentally. Sometimes you need a friend and collaborator to help you exorcise it. (It was this or make my girlfriends listen to me going mad about Grant Morrison, and quite frankly they’ve suffered enough.)

Isn’t that what academia is for?

Ha ha. There’s no room for YOUR MOM jokes in academia, nor for unbridled written enthusiasm. Besides, if this were academia, I’d have to include shitloads of footnotes and wouldn’t be allowed to say the word “shitloads”, and no one wants that.

Instead I subjected ya boy Botswana Beast to numerous Internet communications in an attempt to figure out what the hell was going on in this comic and, more importantly, why it had been lodged so firmly in my mind for so long.

As is often the case with GMo, we thought this was going Nix Uotan-ward at first but it ended up mostly focusing on Pax Americana: the black hole within the black hole pulling all thoughts and analysis inexorably towards its centre, and the infinite recursion of Algorithm 8 leaving us no clear point at which to get off.

What follows is — I hesitate to say “the process”, because dwelling too much on the process by which critique occurs is the sign of a total wang. “The correspondence”? No, that sounds worse. Maybe just the parts of an extended analysis, in the sense of the parts that make up Allen Adam’s dog, nerves and organs and eyes laid bare; not quite a dog themselves, but at least showing a little of what makes the dog work.

BB: (we also deigned to suffer some latter interjections from yer man Illogical Volume)

Worlds on the balance of chance

0

recent photo of Pluto’s moon, Nix

BB: I’m just thinking of riffing on the 0-51 conceit, but like so ‘0’ is the Earth Nix is on, the main DCU one; I think he will probably be the major topic of discussion, issues 1 & 2 under that… rubric, is that the word.

MoN: Re: the possible future use of Multiversity’s developments, is there awareness of potential squandering/futility the whole way through? GMo did get burned after New X-Men (hence Seaguy), and what with having to tie Batman Inc into the New 52…if I had to choose, I’d say this is what the Empty Hand is about. You can try and achieve closure – in the sense of reaching the end of the story arc, etc – but since it can all be undone, the hand remains empty, if that makes sense.

4

BB: so, but not sequentially, and I guess the worlds is probably gonna be the thing…? But I think Pax/4, also the fourth issue in the series – I’m just interested in numbers, numerology, all this, I obsess over primes and prime products sometimes mechanically and so it’s interesting to me how two score and a dozen numbers have correspondant Justice Leagues now or whatever… but anyway, four is a unique number in that it is both the product and sum of its component prime, 2, (this fact seems to be a major agitating factor behind Iron Man 1 actor Terrence Howard’s rebel mathematical system Terryology) and the whole thing is about bifurcations and shit… four is an uncanny and discomfiting number

THE DOOR HAS ONE SIDE AND OPENS BOTH WAYS – LET ME SHOW YOU