Mindless Ones

Writer/artist/certified hunk. Collaborator with Iain Laurie on small press comics with unpleasant titles (Crawl Hole, Roachwell, acht, Metrodome’s not too grotty). Purveyor of occult wisdom (Billy Quest, The Ultimate Ross Geller Fanzine). Script droid on Ales of the Unexpected.

How did you and Mark Brady come to do a monthly strip for Ferment magazine?

Mark and I had finished our first bit of collaboration – tactile medieval battlefield workplace silliness in Medieval Times – and were considering a few things for our next project. I’d been getting Beer52 boxes for a few months and noticed the comic they had going in Ferment had dropped out the magazine. I thought we could have a lot of fun with it and I do like the challenge of a short gag strip, so we worked up some strips for a speculative pop at it. Unexpectedly enough, we were successful!

Do you guys get much feedback on the strip from readers?

Not a thing! It’s kind of crazy to think that given the membership of Beer52 and the number of people receiving Ferment magazine we must have somewhere between one and two hundred thousand people at least giving the strip a cursory glance once a month. Far, far more than has read any of our other small press work. But no, not a word either way. It’s cool though, we are stoic in the face of ambivalence.

Are there any particular strips that are favourites or felt like some sort of breakthrough?

I wouldn’t say breakthrough, as the groove and working pattern we found from the get go has served us really well and we haven’t had to modify it. But I have loads of favourite strips, and what’s fun is to link back to older strips and characters and expand the secret internal mythology of Ales that only Mark and I care about. To pick a favourite off the top of my head, maybe the Pilsner Pickelhuabe one as it’s a bit of classic Ales escalation and exactly the kind of thing Mark does an outstanding job on.

Any chance we’ll see a collected edition of these strips in the future? 

I’m pulling that together, albeit in a stop-start manner for what seems like forever!

Do you and Mark have any other projects on the go, together or separately?

If I get an Ales collection complete in some shape or form it would be lovely to go back to Trapped!, our dungeon crawling fantasy comic.

Finally, if you had to be any X-Men character who would it be and why is it Gambit?

Covid brought about significant changes to th’ way we live, and some of them have been difficult for ol’ Remy LeBeau. Jus’ one example is the ubiquity of de contactless payment. One day Gambit is taking an X-Jet through McDonalds drive through (de McRib is back). Garçon leans out wit’ the payment machine an’ the Cajun reaches for th’ Mastercard. But den de muscle memory kicks in – first we charge de card MWAAAAP – an’ den we flicks it through the window. Bang. Limbs an’ blood an’ broken glass… that boy is dead. Maybe others. Next ting we know, de Cajun is on th’ run an’ de Professor is screaming in his head “GAMBIT, RETURN TO DE MANSION! REMY, YOU HAV’ TO FACE DE JUSTICE!”. An’ no McRib. So what I’m sayin’ homme, is dat Gambit is tryin’ to be a better man in a complex an’ ever-changing world.