I wrote and published a Mindless Ones post about this book yesterday that’s also about my current job situation and how both Eddie Campbell and me are probably fictional characters. I think it might actually pretty good.
Not as good as the comic, obviously, but you know: Eddie Campbell!
A new Mindless Ones post, in which bobsy puts Shaky Kane’s work on Elephantman #33 under the knife.
Shaky Kane’s work with David Hine on the first issue of The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred is essential reading, by the way. It’s a timely warning about the dangers of using comic books as a wikipedia for life, and you really should check it out before it’s too late…
Sing it in the style of Girls Aloud or don’t sing it at …
One Song For You’s Top Five bits of Mindless Bloggery 2011:
5)Mssrs Amypoodle and Zom, with Masters Andrew Hickey, Bobsy, Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil
In which a creepy walk on a summers day got even creepier and more summery with the help of the Mindless Massive. Still the best annocoms in town, no question, and the classic classics features and Kevin O’Neil interview were pretty fucking great too.
4) The Direct Marxist on The Communist Bullpen and The Theatre of the Direct Market
Because it felt good to broaden the conversation about the shitty ethics of your (our?) favourite concept farms that was ongoing throughout 2011, because the ”ethical capitalism” is a tired joke to be filed alongside “military intelligence”, and because FULL COMMUNISM »» Glibertarianism, always.
3) Bobsy vs Mark Millar for the Month of Bastards
Sometimes you have to work hard to break a bastard’s reasonable facade and expose the prime fucknugget within, but sometimes…. sometimes the bastards do all the hard work for you.
2) Zom vs. The Joker, Three Fools parts 1, 2 and 3
Brother Zom might think these posts needed more work, but for me this essay series was just more proof that my fellow Mindless Ones “get” the potential of these lurid fictions way more than most of the fatbalding awkwardmen who are paid to maintain them.
Heath Ledger? Aye, that guy’s Joker was pretty good in a prawn cocktail sort of way, but we’re talking about DINNER here, awright?
1) Amypoodle Presents: A Very Hauntological Reading of The Invisibles, in three parts
It’s a little bit annoying that my favourite bit of Mindless bloggery from 2011 didn’t actually appear on the Mindless Ones site, but on the other hand these posts are easily the best things to have graced the “pages” of the relaunched Comics Journal website so it’s not all bad!
Before I read these articles I was pretty sure I was done with The Invisibles. No comic had ever fucked me up so much before, and I didn’t (and still don’t!) expect any comic to ever fuck me up quite so much again, but at the start of 2011 The Invisibles seemed exhausted and embarrassing, like so much of my own past. And maybe it still is every bit as irrelevant to NOW as I expected it to be, but while I was reading these articles the comic seemed alive and inhabitable once more and (it sounds stupid to say it but this is how it felt so fuck it!) so did the future.
Say it once more with feeling, try to believe it:
I finally managed to finish my post on the Left 4 Dead games for the Mindless Ones’ Notes From the Borderland series. It’s all about how the games can bring out all sorts of weird feelings of hostility and betrayal, even when you play them with your friends, and how that’s maybe part of their appeal.
It also contains a stilted erotic fantasy involving this guy:
It’s a little weird.
Dan White’s latest Cindy and Biscuit strip, Biscuit Beyond, is a straight classic - I’m amazed by how much he’s been able to do with the Cindy and Biscuit formula, and this is possibly his best strip yet.
Go read it now so you won’t feel like a dick later when everyone’s talking about it!
I just wrote a post looking back on A Month of Bastards and looking forward to our next series, Notes From the Borderland.
The Beast Must Die has created a noice new banner for us (above), so expect lots of spooky shit, starting at the end of the week.
A new Cindy and Biscuit page, in which aliens become kindling and so do all your other favourite comics. That Dan White kid is good - maybe you should go throw some money at him?
In case you missed it, I wrote a feverish essay about Darkseid, anti-life and capitalist realism for Mindless Ones’ Month of Bastards. I’m pretty happy with how it came out.
In case you missed it, the last (and possibly best!) part of our epic annocommentations for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969 went up on the Mindless Ones site last night.
Here’s a little taste, just to get you warmed up like:
O’Neill, it seems, has never taken a trip in his life, but you’d never know it – the quicksilver sheen Mina sees everywhere, like the first signs of coming up, the traces and the echo, is another classic psychedelic effect (and as for those cardboard cut-out eyes…. I’ve seen those things on every trip I’ve ever had). But, unlike many of the concert goers’, Mina’s first TAD experience has breached the tipping point and plunged headlong into cosmic horror. She’s not wrong about the atmosphere, however. The atmosphere around Tom Riddle probably *is* objectively evil. She’s definitely picking up on something. Afterall Tom, here, with his transformation into a forked tongued snakeman, is actually manifesting his true nature as not only a graduate of House Slytherin, but as a brother to snakes, a Parselmouth. Another devilish candidate then. As the song lyrics explain, ‘I’m Mephistopheles in my most up to date disguise’ – the old serpent is here, his human disguise sloughed at last.
And the crowd, the crowd are transforming from hippies to riot police……
I know I may be reading too much into this (me? Never!), but this feels to me like the first intimation of a grim future. The undirected hatred of punk, the rise of the far right, the three day week, ex flower children voting in a, quite possibly, literal Iron Lady in 1980…. Poll tax riots, May Day riots, Qurac, Afghanistan…… all of it spinning out into the deadly cultural malaise of the present, whose discontents are firebombing the streets of London as I write this.
Even before the riots, it was always there, for me, in this panel.
It’s possible, isn’t it, that Haddo, that red eyed devil, really does own/eat souls? Just check out all the blinking eyes inside his, err, mouth. I say ‘err mouth’ because it’s not really a mouth at all though, is it? I’m reminded of the Pretas (the Tibetan Hungry Ghosts), with their mouths the size of pinpricks, not fully alive or dead, desperate to incarnate and taste the pleasures and pains of living once more. It appears they have a correlate in the Judaeo Christian traditions too, the children of the demonic Grigori, who, again, with no mouths to eat but an insatiable lust, roam the earth searching for weak willed men and women whose bodies they can possess. While Haddo may justify his serial possession as a holy mission to bring about a new aeon, it’s possible that on one level at least he’s simply terrified of death, and with every new body claimed he becomes more addicted to mortal incarnation, more ‘hungry’, and more corrupt.
Reminds me of someone else, whose name I shall not speak.
That’s amypoodle there, doing what he does best - everyone’s done great work on these posts, but our amy’s done more than most!
Having been shamefully absent from the LOEG 1969 posts due to illness, I’m happy to say I’ll be posting the first of a three part series on Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder next week. Stay tuned, basically. I’m not dead yet!
