Never is an awfully long time

ITEM
Mark’s headstone

Mark’s headstone was laid this week. The quotation is by Grant Morrison, from The Invisibles book one issue 21, the initiation atop Canary Wharf. You may feel free to consider the circular space however you wish. 

We think and talk about him a lot. He’s missed. This newsletter should not be interpreted as a weekly act of necromancy, yet in some very real way, everything we write is for- or to-him. He would have loved this shit.

Thank you to our dear brother in Mindlessness, and until then -

ITEM
A CUBE OF TRANSCENDENTAL GEOMETRY

I do love to go on about my hometown, which from age about 10-20 I could not wait to abandon and be literally anywhere else probably.

But now, here’s a quick wee psychogeography in honour of Alan Moore, of one area, a scheme near my work; Ardler: A Thriving Community as one chronicle calls it in pretty subdued ‘not as bad as it used to be’ mien - it illustrates the Mooreian notion that where you are is indeed the centre of the world but I think also demonstrates Dundee as a sort of convex microcosm city. I have a vague notion of dimensional spaces between 2 and 3D, what is root7D for example, where is fiction leaking in and out?

First of all, Ardler is the hardest area in Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto’s NYC synecdoche. 

Second of all, it has a crematorium and I am going to make up the legend Alan Grant wrote  living there and ingesting its fumes, he did live there at some point in the 1980s/90s, for proof I exhibit Detective Comics #610 which has an assist credit to the local shop owner.

Third/fourth, in terms of vicissitudes it had two of the most shocking murder cases (3 bodies, no link but at least one was a beheading) in the last 40 years and fifth was home to the vast majority of the workforce in this country’s last large scale industrial dispute - they lost, like the miners - in 1993 at Timex.

Lastly, it is home to a gym with a logo like the Multiversity hypercube, and apparently a portal to Earth-11, owned by my favourite superhero (beating out Bananaman by dint of being both from my city and real) where else would that be when you think about it… the rose that grows in winter… in conclusion, Ardler is a study in contrasts.

Bloody tesseracts.

Listening to new Doja Cat, the Knight Rider one is a beezer - she came back with a new blonde wig and everyone forgot whatever they were supposed to, that’s the business of show baby!

NEXT: Ancestor Homes & Fractals

ITEM
padsaid

ITEM
The Vile Dead 1

ITEM
A Brief History of British Comics
2: WHIZZER AND CHIPS

• Publisher: Fleetway and IPC
• Oct 1969 – Oct 1990
• 1,092 issues

Duality is a trope that resonates continually through British comics. Titles merge as sales decline, to create hybrid forms that wrestle for supremacy. Strips pitch competing forces against each other continually; rich / poor, big / small, Jock / Geordie. Pick a side. Join a club. Plant your flag.

Britain, a nation driven by division, pride and internal tribalism can’t get enough of this stuff. The foreigner-bashing tone of war comics, the economic and social pitched battles of its humour comics, the partisanship of football comics.

‘Whizzer and Chips’ took this to its logical conclusion. A title containing two separate comics at war. ‘Chips’ sat in the middle of ‘Whizzer’ claiming squatters’ rights. Blue-toned strips marking the territory against the red-tones of its host. Characters would undertake ‘raids’ into opponents’ strips, with retaliatory action taken the following week. Readers were urged to pick a side. To actively support one comic, and jeer the other, despite handing over their pennies to the newsagent to cop the lot.

Whizzer and Chips was also thrillingly scattershot and modern, in contrast to the stodgy sameness of the Beano. An unruly cousin packed full of weird, tossed off, energetic strips. A Roger Corman-style comics studio pumping out cheap and cheery gag strips: Odd Ball, Sweeny Toddler, Store Wars, Bobby’s Ghoul, Calculator Kid, Junior Rotter, Town Tarzan, Watford Gapp. A litany of gimmicky glories, riffing on modern technology, TV, celebrities and society.

I got a stack of second-hand Whizzer and Chips off my cousin and spent a joyful sick day working my way through them. It became my favourite humour comic. These busy, scrappy, overstuffed things full of conceptual playfulness and daftness had my heart, just before the tsunami of toy tie-in comics, and 2000AD broke over me.

Whizz Kid till I die, by the way.

ITEM 
A Pride of Lions 

The first lion padded into the Mindless chat Wednesday. Aslan Moore, smooth of flank, disturbingly soft come-hither eyes. If not sexy why sexy shaped?

The second lion arrived Saturday morning, a prezzie from me mum. The Lion Annual 1975, a comic marking the year I was born. A sweet gesture. Mum became a Jehovah’s Witness when I was thirteen. Birthdays remain awkward. 

The third lion was that afternoon. The patriots gathered outside the hotel to let the refugees stuck there know that England was not for them. We gathered to sing songs to let them both know there is more than one England.

Sunday morning and Mindless Ones 24 arrived with the suggestion that I had unwittingly invoked the lions in my Dredd piece.

The fifth lion came Sunday night. My wife chose The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as the family film.

It’s disconcerting to be suddenly surrounded by symbols you don’t glom to.

The Lion is strength but all these signs are tinged with weakness and decay. 

The talk around Aslan Moore was the airlessness of his writing about magic. Didactic. Victorian. Lion ceased publishing in 1974. The annuals a nostalgia act limping on till 1983. Kennedy and Lowder the only creators I recognise as transitioning to the comics that are coming.

Lewis’s colonisation of fauns, centaurs and dryads, subordinating beings with different relationships to land and time to Christian eschatology has been usurped by Pullman’s middle-class revolt and Witchtok teens.

It’s always nerve wracking going to a demo. Their side has hard lads, severe in the ways of violence. Our side doesn’t. And down here you can’t guarantee your numbers. Saturday was alright. Dead proud of being English but they can’t stand a spot of rain.

In Tarot Strength is about facing the things you have found. Calmly and without fear. We need to transform this resurgence into their dying convulsions. 

ITEM
Never grow up

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you for reading.

ITEM
Alien: Earth (Walt Disney, 2025)

If a monster arrives in a genocide, how do you tell? The xenomorph finally made planetfall in August 2025, crashing into another summer episode of oversea ultraviolence, invasion hysteria and immigration terror. Screams are all you can hear.

Its journey had taken 47 years to Earth, plastic aetiology shifting all the while. Initially a Swiss clockwork mechanism syncing Freudian sexual horror with Jungian archeforms and teratoma, the cold vacuum of time dulled its carapace and exhausted its ability to reflect our obsessions. 

The friction of entry pared it further - intellectual property law, attention economics, cultural fracking. We realise that the nightmare incubator of post-industrial/pre-digital anxiety, a supposed break from the rural ghouls and wolves of the past, shares a classic weakness with the vampires: powerless in sunlight. 

Victory, we are told, endlessly, in season one’s crawling finale, belongs to the Lost Boys of Peter Pan. Terminally ill children (leukaemia, measles, poverty) whose minds are uploaded into synthetic adult bodies that can talk to machines, Earth’s other native alien. Technocapital’s bodily foreclosure as the best promise of eternal youth. 

But the liberation from time takes many forms.

It is the late 1890s between lunch and high tea and J.M. Barrie awaits the Llewelyn-Davies children in the undergrowth of Kensington Gardens, camouflaged. Barrie works through their nanny, their mother, their ailing father. Upon the father’s death he invades the family of boys and makes them his own, a reverse cuckoo. He takes them to his Black Lake Cottage, dresses them as pirates, watches them at play, makes stories of their adventures. They become immortal inside his fantasies.

George, the eldest, is sniped in Flanders, age 21.

Michael, 20, Barrie’s other favourite, drowns in a treacherous weir on the Thames, ‘clasped’ to his lover says the coroner’s report, suspected suicide pact.

Peter, the one with the name, reaches adulthood and drinks until 1960 before throwing himself under a tube at Sloane Square.