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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

12 Comments

  1. BerserkRL
    October 3, 2013 @ 7:15 am

    What, no comments? Not even about Moore's Oz #18 cover?

    Reply

  2. Neo Tuxedo
    October 3, 2013 @ 7:20 am

    Arcade served as a rallying point for those cartoonists who were more concerned with their art than their bank balances,” although in the case of both Griffiths and Spiegelman (and for that matter Moore), it’s perhaps more accurate to say that they were concerned with the idea that the two might be interrelated.

    Or, to put it another way: "By necessity we must be self supporting. Popular media are bigger than fine art media. Aesthetic mediums must infiltrate popular mediums." (Gary Panter, item 10 of THE ROZZ TOX MANIFESTO)

    Reply

  3. Anton B
    October 3, 2013 @ 8:05 am

    I hope my lack of comment doesn't suggest lack of interest. I'm loving Last War in Albion and am blown away by the amount of research and detail Phil is including; for example his two or three paragraphs detailing the baroque history of the UK music weeklies suggested a man who, like me, in the 1970s ran to the newsagent every wednesday for his weekly fix of anarchic muso gossip, tour news and scandalous lies rather than the contemporary young American phd and Doctor Who nerd we know and love . By the way the 'comic strip section' of the 'inkies'* hardly took up an eighth of one page (usually under the letters column), it was hardly the Sunday funnies, so for Moore to get any kind of gig in that tiny space is impressive.

    *So called because of the cheap newsprint which left one's hands as black as a coal miner's after few minutes reading.

    Reply

  4. C.
    October 3, 2013 @ 8:32 am

    Bill Griffith doesn't get enough credit for introducing the underground to the "straight" world. I recall when the Hartford Courant started carrying "Zippy" around 1985: they would run days' worth of letters of complaint, about it being weird, unfunny, creepy, etc. and the strip really bothered me at first, too, but then something clicked and I began to love it—so I dug around to find out about Griffith and that led to Crumb and Spiegelman.

    Reply

  5. jane
    October 3, 2013 @ 10:18 am

    Yup, reading and learning at this point — don't have much to say.

    Reply

  6. Elizabeth Sandifer
    October 3, 2013 @ 10:19 am

    To be fair, I spent four days trying to figure out what the hell to say about that cover. (Next post I get to Crumb and race.)

    Reply

  7. Dave
    October 3, 2013 @ 11:28 am

    I remember reading Zippy as a kid when the Washington Post printed it. Definite anomalous, when Berke Breathed is about the most subversive person you've read. Which is a very interesting thing, looking at something as overtly weird as Ziggy as someone who's totally unaware of the cultural space it came from, when for me (generationally at least) the 70s counterculture is something typically experienced in a historical or archival frame.

    Hell, might be related to my political differences from what seems to be the most common position among commenters here (leftism via subversion, postmodern liberalism, etc.) The other day a professor and I had a discussion about how many people born between the mid-80s and now haven't really seen the possibility of reforming or transcending capitalism as we know it. Most of the achievements of the 60s and 70s were rolled back or torn down before we can remember (and even the basic stuff laid down in the New Deal etc. is tenuous). So where my professor stopped waiting for the revolution, I've stopped waiting for meaningful reform.

    Reply

  8. BerserkRL
    October 3, 2013 @ 4:39 pm

    Have your talents for redemptive readings finally hit a wall? 🙂

    Reply

  9. BerserkRL
    October 3, 2013 @ 4:39 pm

    Hey, my captcha was singeek!

    Reply

  10. Elizabeth Sandifer
    October 4, 2013 @ 1:51 pm

    Thank you. In truth those paragraphs were the product of me asking Andrew Hickey for a primer, and then adding a bit of Wikipedia research. So I'm heartened to know the illusion held. 🙂

    Reply

  11. Elizabeth Sandifer
    October 4, 2013 @ 1:52 pm

    No, actually – the redemptive reading is easy. Alan Moore makes it himself. I'm just not sold, and more to the point, am kind of flummoxed that Moore is, since it's so unlike him.

    Reply

  12. Lawrence Burton
    April 12, 2016 @ 7:34 pm

    Yeah, once again having actually lived and grown up within the culture under anthropological scrutiny, I don’t really recognise certain aspects of the stuff which is stated herein with such apparent confidence. Sounds was neither particularly rightist nor ‘leftist’ but was principally a metal/rock publication (and as such conservative with a small c) with a few oddballs who managed to keep it interesting, mainly Bushell (albeit for the wrong reasons, excuses made for the 4Skins at Southall etc.), Daves McCullough and Henderson who covered all the sort of left-field stuff that the shitty NME wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole, NWW, DIY tapes, Some Bizarre etc. Sorry – NME was always wank at the best of times, and the suggestion of Sounds as something which wasn’t quite as good may make for a nice pattern but doesn’t really reflect anything of the time under examination. See also Blue Peter in something else you wrote. Sorry – but it really was chess club shite. Most of us watched it because there wasn’t anything else on and so we could join in with the piss-taking at school next day.

    Reply

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