Mindless Ones

PRELUDE

In times like these as in all other times, you are allowed to be relieved when someone else has done the heavy lifting for you.  As such, it’s comforting to find that Clark has put together not only a series of thoughtful posts on the immediate impacts of Covid-19 on the comics industry, but also a run of weekly link blogs to keep folk up-to-date on what’s going on in this little corner of the world.

Free from any delusions of being thorough, I figured I’d write a short post drawing attention to a few free comics / comics related videos closer to home, and maybe highlight a couple of ways you can help the artists involved along the way if you’ve got the cash to do so.

PART 1 – FREE COMICS!

Lockdown has seen a number of comics artists giving away their work for free, or at a discount.  Here are a few such works that we’ve reviewed before, if you’re stuck in the house and want a sense of what you might want to amuse and enervate yourself without splurging your last few iso-bucks!

Sarah Broadhurst, Jules Scheele and an army of sharp feminist voices – Identity: An Anthology (One Beat Zines, originally reviewed November 2015)

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE HERE

This is not only a truly beautiful object but a useful one too.  From Sabba Khan‘s elegant self-reflections to Alia Wilhelm‘s too-close photography by way of Sammy Boras‘ more traditional use of the comic book form to explore difficult questions of sexuality, Identity always makes intersectional feminism feel as natural as it really is, despite what some commentators might have you believe, arranging all of these disparate voices and means of expression together in one powerful volume.

This might sound like damning with faint praise but it’s meant sincerely.   Seemingly taking its cue from the punchy, “here’s my point and I dare you not to take it” expressiveness of Scheele’s cover design, this collection of comics and essays transforms lived experience into a rallying cry against complacency, against the possibility of mistaking your own experience for the only one worth listening to.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

K.Briggs – Story(Cycle); Magpie; Triskelion 

First things first: if you’ve not done so already, I’d highly recommend that you go back the Kickstarter for the complete edition of K.Briggs’ Triskelion, which has a week to go and could really do with your support.

As to why, well… there’s a specific challenge that comes with writing about art that is so obviously accomplished, so unashamed of its ambitions, so confident in the way it ranges across styles and subjects. The fear of showing your whole arse is strong, but the temptation to overcompensate by dressing yourself up in all your finery… that’s the one that’ll get you in the end.

“This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart…”

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It should come as no surprise that K. Briggs comes from a fine arts background. The most immediately appealing element of their work is its painterly aspect, which is equally well applied to the depiction of classically composed scenes…

…as it is to more intimate portraits:

This is a million miles away from overworked heavy metal style of a million sub-par Simon Bisleys, thought still recognisably in the tradition of comic book artists from Eddie Campbell to JH Williams III, artists who have brought a range of effects to the comics page that are more at home on canvas:

From The Fate of the Artist, by Eddie Campbell

We should be careful that in making such comparisons we aren’t just trying to box an artist in, especially when we’re comparing them with their older male peers. So for the avoidance of doubt: those references are broad brush strokes, while the real story in Briggs’ work is in the details, all of which are very much their own.

Briggs knows more about the visual arts than me.  If I try to pretend otherwise it will end badly for all of us.

All I can really talk about is the experience of actually reading the damn things!

Hey Kids – Stop snogging and listen to me!

Silence is back! And it’s smaller, longer and more claustrophobic than ever before! Welcome to The Temple of Lactus where the atoms of reality are comics and batman really is the god of my two fathers.

Cursing silver, Das Biest Muss Sterben drags his bloody pelt through the wilds of the black forest gateau and has NO TIME FOR PODCASTING, LOSERS. This means: homely, hirsute but dutiful farmer’s daughter Bobsy is kidnapped from his cosy homestead and forced into the servitude of the Spacelord and his menagerie of wives (x1) sons (x1) and cats (x2).

They strip down to their essentials and get down to business. Their business is comic book reviews and business is in no particular order –

Magpie 1&2, Triskelion 5 – Kathryn Briggs
The Cleaner 4 – Fraser Geesin
Rok of the Reds 1-3 – Wagner, Grant and Cornwell
Reads 4 – Avery Hill Publishing
Berserker 1 – Breakdown Press
Battle Action Force – Major Black
Here come the beautiful people and Counting Stones – Douglas Noble
Prismatik Man 1 – Stathis Tsemberlidis
Stone Focus and Propagation of… – Lando
STEELBLADE 1 by Steven Steelblade
Into the Black by Benjy Goldsmith and Cicy Reay
Generation Gone 1-3 – Ales Kot and Andre Lima Araujo
What is Left – Rosmary V-O
Mr. Higgins Comes Home – Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell
Kid Lobotomy – Peter Milligan and Tess Fowler

@silencepod

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@kellykanayama


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

MELON-RISING CALIFORNIA SUN, DRIFTING IN A DAY NOT YET BEGUN

SORRY! SO SORRY! We’ve neglected you dear listenoids, with our foolish ‘responsibilities’ to our families. Can you forgive us? Would you? Could you? Would you, could you, in a pod. Would you could you with a Furry Man and a Space God?

Well, we’re back in some fashion with the latest SILENCE! Your tired old pals Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die return to the heartland to bring you their frazzled recollections of Thought Bubble 2018, the Leeds-based comics hootenanny. In doing so we mention Hitsville, Alex Automatic, Triskelion, Tom Eglington, Cindy & Biscuit: Sundays, The Cleaner Issue 4 and a bit more.

There’s also some My Two Dads. WHO LOVES YA BABIES?

Part 2 is the epochal era-defining planet-shattering SILENCE! TO ASTONISH live event from the aforementioned T-Bubz18. It’s a shambolic thrillride with lovely Al To Astonish, special guests John Allison, Kieron Gillen, Alan Moore, Geoff Johns and Stan Lee.

Dig in, hunker down, bug out, kick back, suck it down, pucker up and sit tight. It’s going to be…a time.

@silencepod

@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@kellykanayama


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

“THE BEAST MUST OCH AYE MAIR LIKE IT!”

With The Family Beast  busy pitching a Netflix series to cash in on the ecstatic reactions to Mini-Beast’s debut vocal track, and Illogical Volume hunched over an inter-dimensional toilet seat with time to kill, today is the day where we get to find out whether SILENCE! can survive a sudden influx of vile Northern nationalism!

It’s also the day where Illogical Volume gets himself banned from the nationalist dance party and from Dundee for mistakenly saying “Glaswegian” when he means “Scottish”, but no one ever said access to the Reviewniverse came cheap!

<ITEM!> Who is the nicest Mindless?  A hint: he’s not on this podcast!

<ITEM!> Since he’s mysteriously lacking in sponsorship deals from Dave’s Comics of Brighton, Illogical Volume takes a punt on his local library instead.  Somehow this devolves into Mssrs Lactus and Volume blethering on about how dead relatives can give you totally meaningless power – a “redeeming fart” is also mentioned but not heard.

<ITEM!> In a section that he didn’t remember to call SILENCE! at the Art Gallery, Mr Volume enthuses about the Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics exhibition currently running at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and recommends that SILENCE! listeners from all dimensions take the opportunity to really immerse themselves in all those footery wee lines and brilliant panel layouts.

A preparatory sketch for Batman and Robin, by Frank Quitely

<ITEM!> After that’s done with the boyce head over to the Reviewniverse for a nice wee trudge through the wheat fields of comics.  Shirtless Bearfighter, Shaolin Cowboy, Stray Bullets, Kathryn Briggs’ Magpie and Triskelion (which you should totally buy!), Al Ewing’s Ultimates 2 (which Illogical Volume should totally read!), Douglas Noble’s The Dreadful Work and After The Sessions (with Sean Azzopardi), Helena Crash, Justice League of Captain America and more.

From 'Pieces of Earth' by Kathryn Briggs

<ITEAM> In “I Recky-Mend” Mssrs Lactus and Volume somehow manage to spoil the plot of the new Bladerunner movie without even seeing it, and Mr Volume gibbers on about Darkcell’s Nightmare Document part 1, which he totally didn’t buy after seeing John Darnielle big it up the other day…

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@kellykanayama


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

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!