Mindless Ones

Writer, Absolute Green Lantern (with Jahnoy Lindsay, 2025 – ), Metamorpho (with Steve Lieber, 2024 – 2025), The Immortal Thor (with Alex Ross & Co, 2023 – 2025). Ace podcast guest. Superstar DJ. All round sound human being.

Can you remember the first time you thought about alien intelligence?

Probably last week. I’m doing at least one book about alien thought processes and how an alien philosophy might differ from our own… while still cheating it all completely by having that different alien philosophy say things about very real and destructive human philosophies that we can’t get away from. That said, I always enjoy a nice New Wave of SF story about navigating alien systems of being, so there’s plenty of that in the DNA.

What are the chances of anything coming from Mars?

A million to one, they said! The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one – but still they come!

You once said it was important for Metamorpho to have a sincere relationship with the audience. Which element do you have the most sincere relationship with?

I’m incredibly sincere about the element oxygen. I think that’s the one you really can’t fake a relationship with. Eventually, of course, I’m going to have to break up with oxygen – but not by choice.

Can you say anything about the future of Absolute Green Lantern?

The further along I get with it, the more it reveals itself to me. Every issue from here will bring new and strange revelations until the tangled timeline of the book is entirely filled in… at which point, having untangled time, we tangle space and take a detour to the other end of the universe. I’m writing that one now.

In your dreams, are other worlds still possible?

I still dream, both literally and figuratively. If I were to believe that other worlds were no longer possible, I’d have to drop comics and become an op-ed columnist.

What’s next for you in this world?

Life’s a bit of a Red Queen’s Race at the moment – I’m running full tilt to stay where I am – but some future plans are starting to make themselves known in the present. Big things are manifesting in the world of Thor, for example. Meanwhile, in the personal realm, I’m DJing again – that might go somewhere exciting, or stay at the level where it’s a comfortable night out with friends.

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To be, or not to be. That is the question. These comics I hold… Are they a record of what will be, or only of what may? For if the future is indeed immutably foretold in these short reviews… then my demise is but moments from that confirmation.

Worms: Book The First – Erika Price

Last time I talked about Erika’s work on here I just about got the sense of it over – “It’ll get under your skin. You’ll want it there.”

What this doesn’t quite capture is how her work feels once it’s worked its way past your psychic barriers. A line from this issue presents itself: “That night rippled through the whole city.” I knew this comic was the real stuff, the best stuff, by the third page, when the backdrop to a confession seemed to writhe and twist in front of my eyes across three rancid panels.

Erika’s comics have always been warped formal marvels, with carefully worried lines stacked on top of each other in patterns both intricate and suggestive of some sort of deeper unravelling, but there’s a mounting sense of dread to Worms that might just surpass anything she’s done before. Topical stuff, really – a conclave and its aftermath. Dark intimations about the new leader. Stuttering guilt, barked theories, recrimination. Writing to match the art, check the sequence where an internal monologue is put through the shredder while Eulogiuseley sits in front of knife and fork, lost in lost thoughts, feast not yet in front of him: “Have you ever woken up one morning to find your whole world, nay, your whole reality, is rotting away beneath your feet?”

Ripples within ripples within ripples. The whole city. The night. “Have you ever woken up one morning to find your whole world, nay, your whole reality, is rotting away beneath your feet?” There’s a mounting sense of dread to Worms that might just surpass anything Erika’s done before. Did I say that already, before the feast?

Detective Comics Annual 2025 – John McCrea (art), Stefano Raffaele (art), Fico Ossio (art), Al Ewing (script), Lee Loughridge (colours), Triona Farrell (colours), Ulises Arreola (colours), Tom Napolitano (letters)

We famously love a gonzo Bat-epic around here, but do you know what’s a wee bit undervalued in the post four dimensional Bat-squid era? A nice done-in-one mystery with Batman in it. “Detective Comics” they’re calling it, over on whatever cursed platform they’re using to propagate new sales pitches these days.

This annual is a perfect example of the form. Starts with a locked room murder and works its way to a big face-off with the perpetrator by way of a scenic trip to York. Vivid scene setting across its locales, from the hermetic rich man’s world where we begin to the very English churchyard where things get weird. Three artists for three sections so the “art jam” aspect of it doesn’t get too grating. John McCrae’s chapter is the clear stand-out, his work a welcome break from the impacted gothic house style. McCrae’s pages are full of bright pink light and well kent cop faces, all characters drawn with a bit of spring in their limbs, all backdrops rendered like unusually convincing film sets.

The panel above gives the trick away: even when writing a functional Bat-mystery, Al Ewing finds away to bring the uncanny into the story. The Bat’s solid but flexible, y’see – it can solve a crime, beat a magician at his own game, and incorporate Ewing’s current thematic occupation with unfathomable tech fuckery along the way. That’s why it’s the McCrae sequence that really sings. For a few pages in the middle there, the art is clearly every bit as adaptable as the guy with the big cape and the bulging toolkit.

As for computers, “Sophisticated idiots–they do only as they’re told.”

The Return & other short comics – K.Briggs

Already reviewed in a recent issue of the Mindless Ones newsletter – subscribe today if you haven’t already – and now available to order! To borrow some words that aren’t my own:

Briggs doesn’t really make comics like anyone else I know, I think there’s probably a “high Vertigo” ‘95ish influence but it’s not… they are never really narrative driven, I think they are ponderous if you can imagine that not being used pejoratively; a synonym of meditative but that has implications that I find sort of annoying, there’s a strong fine art sensibility that I only know enough about to vaguely recognise and can’t perform any disquisition on really, but I always find the work moving and connecting in ways that are… essentially I think what is done here with colour and collage drawing the eye across simple, diaristic blank verse – everything is everything remember & this is closer to ee cummings than it is to 95%(?) of comics – is what we have always been trying to write about, the art of life, these intercuts and disjunctions are essentially omnipresent in my own experience but to read a story – per my earlier post-Gaiman misgivings about “story” – or even biographical account, it’s incredibly rare to find something that matches the abstruse mind(/less) in action; M John Harrison’s writing about writing anti-biography Wish I Was Here is probably the closest to authentically being inside someone’s head I have chosen to be…

The comic in part is about having things in your head that other people have put there, I awoke with the dreamlike phrase “You have disconnected yourself from your real self” the other day – about my latest sexual frustration probably – it is a feeling or sensation I know and see mirrored here… all the stupid presets folk wanted to put on you, well they were wrong because how the fuck would they know better; the process of building the right life is long, hard, onerous and you will have to be so strong, and the haters and losers can waylay you… here is a pathfinder, though

I’m feeling too close to the page to add much to that right now. What I will say is that the fine art element is in full effect here, as it always has been with Briggs comics, but that The Return is their most immediate experiment in autobiography so far. The tactile aspect that’s always been there in their use of collage matched here by the immediacy of the line, the shape making more urgent than ever; reading all of these strips in one go, it’s possible to feel like the art is streaming directly into your brain.

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From secret staging grounds on two of Cybertron’s moons, the valiant MINDLESS ONES prepare to draft some short comics reviews…

Metamorpho: The Element Man #5 – Steve Lieber (art), Al Ewing (script), Lee Loughridge (colours), Ferran Delgago (letters)

Issue after issue, Ewing and Lieber find new ways to turn the language of groovy “educational” comics into an invitation to play. My favourite individual example of this so far is in issue #3, a two page spread drawn like a maze puzzle for kids/timefuct beatniks, with inserts showing our heroes blundering through a series of traditional perils.

Without this fundamental conceit, and its perfect extension of “a solid chromium foot… one of the hardest substances in the human body” into a bespoke absurdist aesthetic, some of this comic’s barbs against “A.I.” would have felt like mere prompts for applause. As it is, they’re of a piece with the Mad Mod’s monologues, or this issue’s grand duel between solar avatars – carefully arranged incongruities set in opposition to the banal ones our culture is producing en masse.

Resistance is all about finding the space in between the circuits, you see. Easier for Element Woman and Andor than you or me, but don’t let that stop you trying, Metamaniacs!

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Annual 2025 – Dan McDaid (art), Christopher Cantwell (script), Mark Waid (story), John Kalisz (colours), Steve Wands (letters), Dan Mora (cover)

Let me pay this comic one of the highest compliments I know: having read it, I don’t need to read any of the other issues in this series. This despite the issue in question being part 3 of a 6 part crossover between this comic and Justice League Unlimited. Writing an entertaining single issue under these conditions is a distinct formal challenge, and Cantwell and Waid have a lot of fun with it here, loading up a villainous plan with a twist that is both skilfully foreshadowed and compelling in its own right.

Artist and friend of the blog Dan McDaid has been doing some great work over at DC comics lately, finishing up extended runs on Kneel Before Zod (with Joe Casey) and Shazam! (with Josie Campbell). Zod provided plenty of opportunities for McDaid to flex his big boy drawing arm while depicting rugged action against a series of classic sci-fi landscapes. Shazam, meanwhile, showed that he could provide moments of formal play and true menace in an otherwise amiable fantasy.

This World’s Finest annual is all about the villains, though, and its chief appeal – beyond the old school comics writing craft mentioned above – is the amount of fun McDaid has drawing these goons. My favourite moment comes in this panel, where Bizarro, Cheetah, Lex and the Joker contemplate their own dark futures.

I don’t know which detail I’m most fond of here, Bizarro looking like he am no shat his pants, Lex and Cheetah’s duelling eyebrows, or the Joker’s stream of consciousness slowing to a trickle as he doubts his life choices and the company he keeps.

The annual is full of wee bits like this. Plastic Man swamping the villains and the page itself; a fun collision between Superman and Bizarro; some impeccable disdain from Lex. The art of providing familiar pleasures is easy to underrate until you realise how seldom it’s done well.

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