Mindless Ones

IF YOU’VE GOT A PEN IN YOUR HAND YOU’VE JUST GOTTA DRAW THE MOST IMPORTANT GLANDS

On the 5th of November 2016 at 11.50AM at the Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds, something happened that would change the course of human civilization forever. An event that would give the free citizens of Earth to fight against the coming oppressors. This event was, of course, SILENCE! To Astonish!

The aptly named Cinema Of War played host to this titanic team-up between Gary Lactus, The Beast Must Die and Al Kennedy from House To Astonish. They were extremely lucky enough to enjoy the company of John Allison, Ryan North, Brenden Fletcher and Emi Lenox. Bless them all, they really had to put up with some nonsense!

LOOK AT THIS FABULOUS GALLERY OF VISUAL AIDS!

Got Your Nose, Douglas Noble, self published 2016

“Who is this bastard and why is he lying to me?!” – this was the first instruction given to me by my favourite English Lit lecturer, a guide for how to approach any given novel, no – check the expiration date, still seems good to go – any given text.  Shame that it falls apart only when you apply it back to the source, eh?

After all, who the fuck was this man and what did he have to gain from carving out space for that idea?  Only his whole fucking career.

Still, if I can’t pretend that this question will keep a roof over my head, I can still carry a jagged little fragment of it around in my back pocket, not so much an offensive weapon as a talisman to ward off the sly lies of authors, always so keen to have you see things their way.  So it goes with cartoonist Douglas Noble, whose New Lies in Every Line has had me bewitched and bewildered for a full year now.

I met Douglas at this year’s Thought Bubble festival, and spotting a sucker, he drew me in with his carnival barker’s knowledge of how to see into the heart of the audience, to know not just what they want to see but what they need to see.  He promised me that he was moving away from narrative and further into the realm of pure theme, and having glanced briefly at Got Your Nose, I believed him.

What can I say, I’ll always be a sucker for a Scottish accent in a distant land!

No Regular SILENCE! this week. We were all too stunned by the news that Rita Ora will be replacing Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model. Surely Rita can’t reach the preposterous heights of self importance that Tyra managed. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Instead we have the first SILENCE! Prestige Format, the special collector’s edition podcasts which was made available to C Unit Patreontologists back in January of this year. This is a nice chat between The Beast Must Die, Gary Lactus and Clark Burscough.

Named after the last son of Krypton, Clark is the assistant director of the Thought Bubble. We talk about many things including the broken reading experience,
The Amalgam Universe, his origins as a comics reader and Thought Bubble via the dad we all want, Invisibles, Grant Morrison, Marvel’s Doctor Who comics, 2000AD comics, comics comics, comics comics comics, the Thought Bubble party, his own writing for the Regular Show comic and Beef Ho Fun amongst many other things.

Do please enjoy.

Click to download SILENCE!Prestige Format #001

I might have come away from the Thought Bubble comics convention with a terrible hangover and an overwhelming desire to have a proper rummage through the back issue bins, but I can’t say that I came back short of good zines, great comics and better memories.

Here are five of the most exciting books I picked up last weekend…

1. Jonathan Chandler – Another Blue World (Breakdown Press, 2015)

At last Saturday’s SILENCE! x Breakdown Press interview panel, Jonathan Chandler was discussed as an artist who had staked out territory similar to that which Brian Chippendale had occupied but who had got there before it became a trendy holiday destination for art house cartoonists.

I’m not familiar enough with the man’s work to debate these claims, but reading Another Blue World what struck me was how important Chandler’s elusive sense of space is to communicating this particular set of hostile environments:

It’s not so much that Chandler is limiting what the reader can see to a few tufts of grass or a short stretch of water around his characters that makes his work stand out, more that he seemingly feels no pressure to fill up blank space on the page.

In a Brian Chippendale comic we might find ourselves feeling overwhelmed by the amount of detail, struggling to distinguish signal from noise whether we’re faced with the tiny cramped panels of Maggots or the wider canvases of If’n Oof or Ninja. In Prison Pit we are confronted blocky horror after blocky horror, but we know that this grim escalation will follow proceed through the sort of absurd escalations that are Johnny Ryan’s speciality.

Reading Chandler’s work, meanwhile, we are confronted with an eerie silence. All around us, we find unreadable white space, all of it primed with danger. Forms approach, assaults are perpetrated, sex is weaponised, but we can never be sure whether things are going to get worse or just sort of hang there:

I might crave for something beyond this harsh replication of animalistic imperatives, but there’s no denying that Another Blue World makes them painfully vivid.

Speaking of moving beyond, here’s Lando, back with another bleak, arid and yet undeniably stylish science fiction story!

Living legend David Wynne has commissioned me to write 500 words on this topic. Last night in the pub he teased me with the idea that I was going to be tasked to write 500 words on Frank Miller: Feminist Icon.

Having worked out my pitch for that one in the shower this morning (it’s actually really easy to read his work as an extended deconstruction of chauvinist tropes… so long as you just DON’T LOOK AT THE WOMEN IN HIS COMICS and only pay attention to the men – not an approach that’s conducive to feminist values, hence why this reading of Frank Miller is unlikely to catch on anytime soon) I now find myself face with a far more daunting task.

Five hundred words on “Hard Men with Big Truncheons: The Sexual Politics of Mega-City One”. I mean seriously: what can you say about this subject? What can’t you say?

Casting about for a place to start that wasn’t the bathroom, I asked Douglas Wolk…

Yes, it’s another THOUGHT BUBBLE SPECIAL POST!

This is the first of two essays commissioned by James “patron of the arts” Baker, who has asked for five hundred words each from me and Bobsy. James wants me to talk about what Daleks mean to me.

It’s a difficult one, actually, because I grew up in the 1980s, when the Daleks were mostly being used for their recognisability, but being written by a writer, Eric Saward, who would much rather have been writing Cybermen stories. So while the standard iconography of the Daleks tends towards a combination of fascism and Frank Hampson space adventure, for me, the Daleks are all about body horror. The formative Dalek story for me was Remembrance of the Daleks, and so I think of humans being turned into Daleks, of Davros reduced just to a head, of dead bodies being processed for food.

So taking everything together, the Daleks for me, more than anything else, represent the dissociation from the body.

So once again the Mindless Ones will be at the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic Convention, Thought Bubble. You can find us at tables six and seven in New Dock (don’tmentiontheoldname) Hall on the fourteenth and fifteenth of November.

Bobsy, Andre Whickey, The Beast Must Die, Gary Lactus, and Illogical Volume will all be there (sadly Mister Attack, who has been with us for the past few years, will not be attending this year), and you will be able to buy Cindy & Biscuit and Terminus comics from The Beast Must Die, or the adventures of Andrew & Stephen or The Cleaner from Gary Lactus. And you will be able to see Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die doing a very special SILENCE!, and you won’t even have to give them any money for that (though you can, of course).

“But wait!”, I hear you cry, “there are FIVE Mindless Ones attending the convention, not two! What do Bobsy, Andre Whickey, and Illogical Volume have to offer me, other than their raw animal sexuality?”

This has, in previous years, posed a problem for those of us who are less obviously artistically gifted than the SILENCE! duo. We have previously attempted to sell my books, which don’t have any pictures in at all, with limited success, and to sell Illogical Volume, with even more limited success (he always comes back).

You will, of course, still be able to purchase some of my books, and we will still be entertaining offers for Illogical Volume, but this year, those of us who communicate only by means of text will be doing something different as well.

Have you ever wanted your own personal Mindless Ones blog post, written just for YOU? If so, now is your chance!

Throughout Thought Bubble weekend (depending on the vagaries of laptop battery life and the Royal Armories’ shonky wi-fi), we will be liveblogging on the subjects of your choosing. YOU, yes YOU! could have your own Mindless Ones blog post, custom-written by our blogging artisans.

For just a penny a word, we will write blog posts of any length. Have you a burning desire to be updated on the saga of Bobsy’s superhero underpants? Do you really want to read Illogical Volume writing five hundred words on why David Cameron is a great bunch of lads? Do you want to know who would win in a fight between the Thing and Darkseid? Do you want Andre Whickey to summarise his opinions on the pop music the modern young people listen to, with their Bay City Rollers and their hippity hoppiting, rather than that old stuff he writes about? Would you like a ten thousand word essay on the Clone Saga, in iambic pentameter?

Now you can have just that. Bobsy, Illogical Volume, and Andre Whickey will be tag-team blog-posting over the weekend. Short posts will be written by one of us solo, longer posts by some combination of the three. We will write words right in front of your astonished faces, and post them to the Internet for all to see.

We will be starting at a penny a word, but rates may go up (or down) depending on demand, so get there early. No refunds.

Right then.  It’s that time of year again when things get a bit spooky.  In order to do our bit for the annual Genre Fiction Evening otherwise known as Halloween, we present to you YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE!  Yes, it’s a solo Gary Lactus issue of SILENCE! where he tries to fit in some comic reading and reviews around a trip to do some comedy in Newcastle.

COWER at the background noise!

SHIVER at the limited insight!

TREMBLE at the shorter than usual length!

SHUDDER at the barely thought out opinions on Clean Room #1, Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny Inhumans, Karnak and Ant-Man!

QUAKE at the excuses

JUMP at the news about Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts and Thought Bubble!

VACILLATE at the obvious use of a thesaurus!

WOBBLE to the song at the end, Crazy Zombi Party!

click to download SILENCE!#161

Contact us:

[email protected]

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless

You can support us using Patreon if you like.

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.

There comes a point in every Mindless gathering where the correct amount of alcohol has finally been consumed for the conversation to turn to Final Crisis, with a special focus on the hastily squandered horror of the fifth issue.  Thankfully, we’ve started to bring friends along to help identify the reason for this boozy recurrence:

Yes, that’s right – the crushing banality of the morning aftermath is rank rotten enough to haunt its own bacchanalian origins, and when it does so it wears Darkseid’s face.  Honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The spirit of this wretched, queasy moment inevitably seeps into the comics I buy at Thought Bubble when I try to read them on the train home.  This petty, remorse-tinged meanness tried to curdle my appreciation of the Decadence comics I brought home with me last year, but it struggled to find shelter in their sparsely populated mindscapes. The darkness found a more suitable hiding place in Spandex, Martin Eden’s LGBT-friendly, Brighton based superhero strip.

Like his previous serial adventure The O-Men, Spandex mixes everyday drama and garish unreality with ease. Brother Bobsy mentioned Paul Grist as an obvious reference point when he discussed the collected Spandex on SILENCE! and there’s definitely something to that: like Jack Staff or Mud Man, Spandex is humorous without ever seeming parodic, and it manages to generate a sense of low-budget romance from its seaside drama.  The debt to the X-Men is also undeniable, both in Eden’s commitment to chronicling the adventures of a group of emotionally combustible super-friends, and in his clean, brightly coloured artwork:

I’ve done a pretty decent job of burying my teenage X-Men fandom underneath piles of Eddie Campbell comics…