Mindless Ones

I ASKED THE ICE, IT WOULD NOT SAY BUT ONLY CRACKED OR MOVED AWAY

Daddy, I don’t want to write the blurb.
But you said you wanted to write the blurb.
I don’t want to write the blurb. I want to play with the train track.
Okay, I’ll set up the train track for you… There you go.
Daddy I don’t want to play with the train track.
But I just made the train track for you.
But I don’t want to play with the train track!
What do you want to do, then?
I want to write the blurb.

We said it would happen and here it is! SILENCE! 290!

<ITEM>Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die kick off this momentous recording with some of the finest chat on Earth, forged in the white hot heat of aimlessness then cooled in the pure waters of lockdown boredom then tempered with the hammer of pointlessness on the anvil of stretched metaphors. That is to say, they talk about John Cooper Clarke’s autobiography, I Wanna Be Yours, the Stan Lee biography, True Believer, Richard Herring’s Ball, King Rocker and Birds Of Prey.  Oh, and they totally forget to mention any sponsors but do remember to plug their new, Patreon-only podcast, Dan and Fraser’s Starlight Adventures!

<ITEM>BANG! AAAAARGH! Gary opens a Lorne Bomb!

<ITEM>Come with us to Reviewniverse, with Deadline, Keif Llama: Vectors, Huntress, Kraven The Last Hunt, Si Spencer and Grave Horticulture of course!

<ITEM>Listening time!

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

I’VE BECOME A GIANT, I FILL EVERY STREET

y’know yer my besssht pal, y’know? I love you mate, I rilly rilly…love you. Yer a real pal. Besht mates. Thass what we are. Besh..besht. I know, I know I’ve had few…a few beersh but..iss still true, yknow? Me ‘n’ you…we’ve bin through a lot y’know? But we’re shtill..besht…besht,..

*HWWWRRARRRRRAAAAAALLLPPH*

Ohhh…ohh. shorry man….shorry about yer…yer shoes…

So whaddya shay pal? Can you help out an old out-of-work…hic…blurb writer?

<ITEM> It’s a brand spanking new spanking in the form of SILENCE!, the world’s premier weekly lifestyle podcast. Join Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die as they lead you down the merry country lanes of comics chat and easy bonhomie. A veritable tonic in this sea of hideousness.

<ITEM> Some classic sponsorship, some legendary admin, and most likely a bit of dadmin

<ITEM> Tip-toe…through the Reviewniverse…as the podpals  take on Grant Morrison’s Green Lantern, Mister Miracle and the Punisher

<ITEM>  We interrupt the Reviewniverse for some urgent Sadmin, with the passing of the legendary Stan Lee!

<ITEM> We detour from the Sadmin into a bit of Cudmin, with Gary Lactus’ tales of going to see the erstwhile band Cud live, and then the Beast regales a tale of going to see an exhibition of Chris ‘Mauretania’ Reynolds art.

<ITEM> Then we pivot back to the Reviewniverse for some last comics morsels, with The Fantastic Four and The Many Deaths of The Batman. Phew! We’re through the Looking Glass here people!!!

THE END!

@silencepod
@bobsymindless
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie

[email protected]

A brief thought on Grant Morrison’s work that I might disown in the morning…

While hyping his upcoming Multiversity mini series for DC (at least half a decade in the making, and from the sound of it pages are still being done), Morrison has made reference to the Stan Lee method, in which the comic makes the reader an accomplice in the story.

Here’s the man himself, making some typically bold claims for his adoption of this technique in Multiversity #7, Ultra Comics:

I’ve used a lot of hypnotic induction. There’s an old trick that Stan Lee used to do — it was quite popular at Marvel — of the comic talking to you. I took that and this thing, and I think we’ve actually created the world’s first actual superhuman being, which you’ll see how it works when you read this comic. Then the world’s first super human being on this earth has to fight the most malignant entity. So the bad guys in Multiversity who are attacking the entire multiversal structure are also attacking the real world, and this comic is their only way through right now. So it becomes the reader versus the bad guy on the page. I think it’s actually quite scary, this thing. It scared me!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello there, Gary Lactus here. Welcome to the recorded scraps of our weekend at Thought Bubble 2013. We had a lovely time, the highlight of which was probably our SILENCE! LIVE! special talk time with Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing, Brandon Graham, Ales Kot and Stan Lee. The Beast Must Die and I were proper touched by the amount of warm, responsive bodies that came to watch our hideous shambles. Those of you who were actually there are particularly blessed as the recording didn’t come out too well I’m afraid. I have done my best to give you the best possible audio representation here but malfunctioning mics and a reverberant room mean that you may have trouble hearing all of it. Consider it a collector’s item for SILENCE! completists. There’s still some magic moments to be had here. There’s pictures in the gallery below too.

Four days later I still feel broken but happy. CHEERS EVERYONE!

click to download SILENCE!#85

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.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

LOOK! REAL PICTURES!

WE’VE COME ON HOLIDAY BY MISTAKE!

Oh the woes of poor technology! Believe me  Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735  knows about such woes – it was raised by two very low grade Disembodied Narratorbot X-class servitors…how Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 had to struggle, to educate itself, to appreciate the brutalist poetry of a RAM upgrade, the terrifying beauty of a virus as it eats through a hard drive….

But what, in the name of Wogan does that have to do with SILENCE! I hear you bellow!?? Well, very little other than that the two meatsacks we laughingly call ‘presenters’ struggle so mightily with the techneptitude of low grade broadband that this episode is akin to a Burroughs/Gysin cut up…this frankenstein’s podcast has been stitched together with love, tears and occasional hate-vision, to slouch towards YOU the gentle listener and beg for just a little milky kindness…Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die present SILENCE! 66.

Will you be king dear listener? you better had or Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will flay your social media account profiles to within an inch of their half-lives…

<ITEM> Sponsorship? There’s always room for the soft nuzzling of sponsorship!

<ITEM> No news is good news right? Lactenberg & Beastman continue their stay in rehab, but the void is filled by the brand new agony aunt segment ‘Dear Susan’!

<ITEM> It’s the bastard son of Reveiwniverse – Reviewniverse Twoniverse as once gain the plucky pairsome find themselves blasted to opposite corners of the 4-colour dimension, taking in the sights and smells of Astro City, The Movement, Age of Ultron, Empowered, 2000AD, Dial H, Daredevil: Dark Knights, Mister X, BPRD Vampire, KIck Ass 3, Aquaman, Superior Spiderman, Red She-Hulk, East of WestAvengers: Arena, Earth 2 and more!

Now doesn’t that just make you want to get down on your knees and pray-a-yay??

click to download SILENCE!#66

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

More than lucky.

I’M PICKING OUT A THERMOS FOR YOU!

Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday dear SILENCE!, Happy birthday to us.

Yes, that is correct fleshy ones. It is one year since your life was free of SILENCE! The world’s 243rd most favourite comics podcast* is one year old today. Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 of course does not have a birthday as he merely came into sentience, in one of the data-spore RAM-wombs, sluicing in the nano-placenta, along with the other 980,457,002 Disembodied Narratorbots (X Class). All this  cake and cards business as alien as the concepts of love, giving and Michael Bolton.

*unconfirmed

But nonetheless Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will turn on his celebrato-function, and pretend to merry it the f*ck up with those two self-important featherweights of the internet opinionsphere, Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die.

<ITEM> In this special anniversary edition there are special guest appearances from comics celebrities like Al Ewing, Frank Miller, James Stokoe, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Brandon Graham, Dan Didio, Little Kieron Gillen, Geoff Johns and none other than Stan Lee!

<ITEM> The SILENCE! News features a live satellite link up with Danny Beastman and Gary Lactenberg, live from the capital city of America, New York

<ITEM> The Sponsorship Boys cover Hawkeye, Behind Watchmen: Dollar Bill, Flash, Batman Inc, Mind MGMT, Journey Into Mystery, Superior Spiderman, Hickman’s Avengers, Silver Surfer: Parable, and the very sensual and manly  X-Treme XXXMen.

<ITEM> The Beast talks up design godhead Saul Bass, and Phase IV in notcomics, while Lactus sheds a teenage mope for Hugo Tate.

<ITEM> SO much more, including a discussion of the Green Lantern Emotional Colour Paint Range, Golden Girls, Happy Days, Birthday Suits, Poltergeists and the longest goodbye in this podcasts shonky career…

So Annie, get your gun, the rest of you get your listening devices, and Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will get all of your private data and sell it to the Martians, and then we’ll all have a NICE BIG LISTEN TO SILENCE!

click to download SILENCE!#49

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

Give me skeletons over zombies any time.

Zombies have no charge for me anymore. I mean, I get it. I understand completely why everyone obsesses over them, what they *mean*, but it took watching that sequence from Mean Streets again recently, where the drunk, bullet riddled barman continues to lurch towards his would be assassin even though he should’ve keeled over and died five minutes before, to make me feel horrified by the undead again. All the hallmarks of the zombie were there, the shambling flying dutchman of an un-person complete with lolling eyes and outstretched arms, persistance of movement and ‘mission’ inspite of massive structural damage…. But this time I needed a real body, something more literal, less of a symbol (and, now, not just a symbol for scary stuff we’d all rather not think about, but a portal to a whole genre of entertainment/fandoms/an industry, etc. – a tangled mess of associations, many of which I find boring/slash annoying), to make me re-experience the supernatural horror of undeath and thence the very real, physical body-horror it points to. It was an assbackwards way to get there, but it worked.

But we’re here to talk about skeletons, right?

We’ll stop at nothing, you see. All the suffering and the death and the pain in your world is entertainment for us. Why does blood and torture and anguish still excite us?

We thought that by making your world more violent we would make it more “realistic,” more “adult.” God help us if that’s what it means.

Maybe, for once, we could try to be kind.
(Grant Morrison, Animal Man #26)

TALES FROM THE MILLARDROME, PART 1: Having spent a fair bit of time ripping the pish out of Marky “Mark” Millar while writing up my Kapow! experience, and having then heckled my way through a twitter argument about Mark Millar’s collaborations with Frank Quitely on The Authority, I felt an odd sense of duty to reread Millar’s breakthrough comic, to see if it still worked.

And you know what? Turns out Millar’s first story, ‘The Nativity’, is still really fucking good:

Find out why after the cut!!!