Mindless Ones

Hello there. In this episode we mostly pay tribute to the longtime manager of Dave’s Comics, Stephen Bamford in the wake of his passing.

We also talk about Comics and Beer, The Sheild G-Man Club Fanzine, The Watchmen RPG and Bob Burden’s Robot Comics.

Oh, and both your hosts will be exhibiting at All About The Ink this month.

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

si************@gm***.com

OVER MY SHOULDER, OLDER AND OLDER, THAT’S WHAT I TOLD YA, OVER AND OVER

Well, well, well if it isn’t Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die crawling back on their knees, begging forgiveness for missing a week of the world’s otherwise most reliable podcast.  Angry hoards of ex listeners have verbally and physically assaulted the punctual pair, blaming them for all manner of important, missed appointments because they set their watches to SILENCE!’s famous regularity.

Thankfully, that’s all over now and the two men are back to perform that most incredible feat, talking about stuff.  Stuff like Small Press Day at Gosh, and people like Sean Azzopardi, Molly Stocks, Mark Stafford, Douglas Noble and Fraser Geesin and Dan Cox’s comic, Jeff.

Gareth Hopkins‘ kickstarter, Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors gets a shout too.

Then it’s off to The Reviewniverse, with Counterfeit Girl, Geezer, John’s Worth and Marvel’s adaptation of Dune

Wrapping up, The Beast has watched The Boys and She Hulk and Gary has been listening to The Blindboy Podcast

There’s probably more that I’ve forgotten but you can find out what that is by listening… NOW!

@frasergeesin

@thebeastmustdie

si************@gm***.com

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

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!