Eruditorum Press

We’re not cancelled; these are just our Wilderness Years

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

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.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Last Christmas Review

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Instant reaction has it with 76.88% at an 8-10, with an 8 being the most popular rating, which is pretty standard issue. And to be fair, its faults announce themselves somewhat forcefully. There’s a bit of a pacing problem – the ten minutes or so after Santa wakes everybody up the first time and before the sleigh sequence are an entirely unnecessary bit of padding, and I found myself getting restless on first viewing. Second viewing was kinder, but also solidified my sense that there’s a problem there. Yes, it resolves a few levels of the Inception pastiche, but it’s not delivering any significant development, and mostly seems there to get a forty-five minute story to take an hour. Also, the “last Christmas” metaphor is a bit vapid, or, at least, seemingly missing a definite article. 
But the reason these problems seem so visible is because this story’s chief virtue is its sheer level of confidence in what it’s doing. Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus. The fact that Doctor Who is at a point where it can do that, for a mass Christmas audience with an unusually large number of non-fans, is genuinely impressive. And yet the episode just gets on with it, trusting that the individual components of this are all broad and high concept enough to work so long as you spend a little time establishing them. 
A corresponding part of this is also the confidence that they can do all of this. Here the virtue of casting Nick Frost really announces itself. He’s a fantastic choice for Santa, or, at least, for Steven Moffat’s Santa, which, as you’d expect, is mostly a series of jokes about how Santa is no harder to explain than anything else in Doctor Who. Frost’s instincts on how serious to pitch the performance are spot on. But there’s also a tremendous amount of confidence in the visuals. The sequence in which Santa arrives to save the day, with an army of toys marching into the polar base is flat out one of the maddest things Doctor Who has ever done, but there’s not a trace of the program seeming embarrassed by this or worrying whether or not it can get away with it.
As a result, it pretty much does get away with everything. Even the obvious accusation that Moffat is recycling things, and he unabashedly is, seems silly here. It’s difficult to imagine how the sentence “it’s business as usual: Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus” would even seem like a sensible and coherent thing to say about Doctor Who only two years ago. That this feels like a completely organic and sensible thing for the show to be speaks volumes about the degree to which the program has become flexible and varied even by the standards of Doctor Who.
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Comics Reviews (December 24th, 2014)

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From worst to best, with everything something I willingly paid money for, if not wisely.

Also, as I am now more aware of my Christmas schedule, my Last Christmas review should manage to go up sometime tomorrow, and not, as previously expected, on Boxing Day. You can still back that at Patreon, as well as my Doctor Who in 2014 wrap-up post and, starting in January, coverage of Sherlock Season Three, just to fill the gap between the last Eruditorum and the start of the Capaldi reviews.

But now, comics.

The Massive #30

Thirty issues of my life I’ll never get back.

All-New X-Men Annual #1

I’d hoped that this would cohere more in its second issue, but it didn’t really. There’s no sense in which this story needed two over-sized issues and $10 to tell, and it didn’t benefit from being held back for months after the actual event in the comics. On the whole, kind of a mess.

Daredevil #11

New storyline. I think I’ve definitely hit the point of being a bit bored with Mark Waid on Daredevil. This is a perfectly serviceable “the sort of thing Mark Waid does on Daredevil” story, but it’s increasingly clear he’s gone through his best ideas and is on to the second tier of them.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #3

Woo! Axis is over! This book can actually get on with doing interesting stories now! This isn’t bad, and has a good fight scene, to be fair.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #9

Loki wielding Thor’s hammer is beautiful, but I have to say, this entire arc gets overshadowed by its cliffhanger. Still, this is the only Axis-related comic that’s held my interest at all, and that deserves some credit. Was this the worst Marvel crossover in recent memory? I struggle to think of something quite this dire in a while. Given the one-two punch of Original Sin and this… well, at least I have hope for Secret Wars.

New Avengers #28

Hickman’s finally gotten his eight months later pieces on the board how he wants them, it seems, and is now getting around to making interesting things happen. And this issue, while not necessarily full of interesting things, at least has some interesting things that happen in the final couple of pages.

Uncanny X-Men #29

Surprisingly eventful, with an absolutely fascinating state of play at the end of the issue. I’m excited to see where this goes, not least because of the teases for Cyclops’s future offered by Hickman in Avengers.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #6

I worried that the Rob Williams issues of this were going to be weaker than the Ewing issues, but this is a fantastic formal experiment that makes strong use of the structure of a comic book, and has a Nimon in it to boot. THE NIMON BE PRAISED.…

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The Breaker of Rules (The Last War in Albion Part 76: This Vicious Cabaret)

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This is the fourth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: One of Moore’s earliest formally experimental strips was the sixth chapter of V for Vendetta, “Versions,” which consisted of two monologues, one by Adam Susan, the fascist leader of Great Britain, the other by V. This script was a replacement script after Moore and Lloyd decided that Moore’s first effort, to be called “Violence,” was not good enough.

“Nomax the Rebel! Nomax the Breaker of Rules!” – Grant Morrison, Annihilator

The more rigid structure, along with the title and declaration of each monologue as “first version” and “second version” puts considerably greater emphasis on the idea of V and Susan as representing contrasting visions of the world. But this gets at the more significant difference between “Versions” and “Violence,” which is that where “Violence” contrasted V and the fascists on the basis of their tactics, “Versions” contrasts them on a more fundamental philosophical level. And for all that the comic is clearly on V’s side, it goes out of its way to present Susan’s position, if not quite sympathetically, at least credibly. Moore has talked on several occasions about the effort he put into writing the fascist characters, and specifically about how this evolved over the course of working on the series, talking about how “I’d look at a character who I’d previously seen as a one-dimensional Nazi baddy and suddenly realize that he or she would have thoughts and opinions the same as everyone else,” and about how, for all that fascists were in practice his real-life political enemies, “in fact fascists are people who work in factories, probably are nice to their kids, it’s just that they’re fascists. They’re just ordinary.”
In this regard, perhaps the most significant thing about “Versions” is the way in which it depicts, in effect, three possible choices. The first is Adam Susan’s embrace of Fate, which is on one level a literal object in the form of a computer, but on another is clearly meant to include the abstract concept, the notion that outcomes are pre-determined by some outside and higher power being fundamentally in line with the ideology of fascism. The second is Justice, who both V and (in V’s telling at least) Susan aspire towards, but which is also, ultimately, suggested to be a tool of fascism. And the third is V’s new mistress, Anarchy, who, as he puts it, “is honest. She makes no promises and breaks none.”
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Some Mercury Left Over (Nightmare in Silver)

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Figure Who Even Knows: Matt Smith’s Doctor Who faces down
himself with a facial prosthesis in front of a menacing green screen
projection.
This is an excerpt from a future chapter of The Last War in Albion, the precise placement of which remains ambiguous. Think of it as our “The Yesterday Gambit.” 
 
Previously in The Last War in Albion: At the same time that Gaiman was working on The Ocean at the End of the Lane, he was also writing his second Doctor Who story, Nightmare in Silver, where he brought back the Cybermen, the very same monsters that featured in Black Legacy, Alan Moore’s first professional publication as a writer, and that Grant Morrison had employed in his early-career Doctor Who Magazine work…
 
“Dreams!! Visions!! We are Cybermen, Medic… we do not run from shadows!” – Alan Moore, “Black Legacy”
 
Gaiman had considerably more affection for Doctor Who than either Morrison or Moore (who was known to suggest that all of the actors to play the part after William Hartnell made Doctor Who seem like a pedophile). And so it is not, in this case, his mentor’s take that he turned to, but rather his own memories of the Cybermen from childhood. Indeed, they were the series’ iconic monsters for the period when The Ocean at the End of the Lane is set, due to some curiosities with the rights to the show’s usual iconic foe, the Daleks, which meant that Doctor Who couldn’t use them for several years. Gaiman’s seventh birthday fell on November 10th, 1967, two months into Patrick Troughton’s second season as Doctor Who, a season that both opened and closed with a Cyberman story, and the book’s main action takes place during the season’s penultimate story. 
 
Indeed, this is much of why Gaiman returned to the program to do a second episode, as there was little reason for him to otherwise. The BBC’s pay was, by his standards, meager, especially for the amount of time The Doctor’s Wife took. But that script had been one of the highlights of his career over the previous few years, winning him a Hugo Award and considerable acclaim. He’d had, for that story, a rare thing in one’s career – an editor who was as skilled a writer as he was, and the collaboration had sparked him to heights that his late career work had not consistently attained. But most of all, Moffat dared him to “make the Cybermen scary again,” and he couldn’t resist it.
 
Unfortunately, perhaps because Gaiman had time for fewer drafts, perhaps because Moffat was too occupied with other projects to edit as extensively, Nightmare in Silver harkens back to mediocrities like 1602 and Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader in which Gaiman offers a fairly hollow riff on pop culture nostalgia. Where The Doctor’s Wife had been progressively refined at Moffat’s urging to give more weight to its most interesting idea – Doctor Who being able to communicate verbally with his Tardis – Nightmare in Silver never settles down on one particularly interesting idea about the Cybermen.
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The Green One and the Not-Green One (The Crimson Horror)

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I don’t know that I’d call it a crimson horror, really. Really, it’s
more a rosy horror. Incarnadine horror at best.
It’s May 4th, 2013. Daft Punk have gotten lucky and made it to number one. Calvin Harris, Nelly, Macklemore, and, in a stunning feat of horror, will.i.am and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, James McCormick is jailed for ten years for selling fake bomb detectors, Labour and UKIP do well in local elections, and three more people are arrested over the Boston Marathon bombings. 
On television, meanwhile, The Crimson Horror, which is very possibly the most self-evident pairing of writer and concept in the history of Doctor Who. More than hiring David Whitaker to handle introducing a new Doctor over a backdrop of Daleks, more than giving Paul Cornell the small and personal story in the debut series, more even than giving Malcolm Hulke the giant lizards story, tapping Mark Gatiss to write the Victorian penny dreadful is simply a case of hiring a man to do what he’s good at. 
And correspondingly, in many regards The Crimson Horror is exactly what you’d expect. A ranting villain, a classic Doctor Who plot, broad gags. But as with Cold War, the details on this are all spot on. Yes, you’ve got a standard issue raving lunatic Doctor Who villain, but she’s played by Diana Rigg, whose appetite for scenery is gloriously boundless. (Surely there’s not a single person on the planet who does not love the line “the wrong hands.”) Strax irrevocably hits the “one note joke” point here, yes, but he also has his best gag with “horse, you have failed in your mission,” and to be fair, the bit where Vastra sends him outside because he’s gotten overexcited is, in fact, a new trick for the character, even if it’s basically the last one he ever gets. Neve McIntosh relishes getting to be the Doctor for a large swath of the story. The period stuff all looks great. And there are some lovely directorial flourishes, most notably the grainy film look used for the Doctor’s flashback exposition of how he got captured. 
And, yes, Gatiss deserves some specific praise here. This is not necessarily a story that’s long on logic, but everything moves along gracefully by dint of the fact that all the elements just go well together. And that speaks to a slyly good sense of judgment on Gatiss’s part. There’s no obvious reason why bright red bodies, the eyes of the dead holding images, Diana Rigg ranting, and Victorian finery should magically click together so as to make a coherent story in the absence of any significant plot logic, but they absolutely do. The Crimson Horror was never a contender for season-best, but it was tremendous fun when it aired – much more fun than you’d expect given that it seems like it should be very standard issue.
Indeed, this is the first story of Season 7B to be almost completely unfazed by the passage of more than a year since it aired.
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Reviews (December 17th, 2014)

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So, just reviews this week, because I want to open with music, as Seeming has a new album out called Silent DiscoVery, so let’s start with that.

It’s a discipline worth maintaining, I increasingly feel, to remain aggressively plugged into the rhythms and promotional cycle of pop media. Television and comics both work well for this, but given that the entire rhetoric of “pop media” comes from music, one really ought to have at least one. For me, it’s Seeming, for a variety of reasons. Yes, Alex is a dear friend, and Aaron’s a lovely bloke as well. Yes, it really does help with the “stay plugged into the immense nowness of pop” thing when Alex sends you a new demo every couple of weeks. (I’ve been rocking out to the lead single off the next release for months now.)

Also, I love it. I just unabashedly fucking love the stuff Alex is doing right now, and I want everybody to listen to it. It’s at once well plugged in to current pop culture concerns (it’s a wonderful time for eschatology and utopian nihilism) and vibrantly idiosyncratic. So, new album, very exciting, let’s talk about what it says.

Silent DiscoVery is the outtakes album from his brilliant Madness and Extinction. If you’ve not bought or at least listened to that album, please do. It’s streaming free on Bandcamp here. It’s worth checking out. And if you’ve not listened to it… well, Silent DiscoVery isn’t necessarily the place to start, although it’s worth checking out some of the songs.

But that’s outtakes albums for you – their entire conceit, in the end, is that they’re the stuff that didn’t quite work on the album proper. That doesn’t mean not good enough, certainly. But every track on an outtakes album, by its very existence, opens up a fan debate on “was this rightly excluded from the album?” Tellingly, the answer, for all ten of these songs, is “because they were great ideas that belonged on a different album” and not “because they weren’t good enough.”

So, for instance, the first track, “Everything,” is a great song. Brilliant, sweeping, epic, all sorts of fun. Only problem is that it’s not quite as good as “Everything Could Change,” and the two songs not only have similar titles, they have musically similar endings, and you just can’t put both of them on the same album. So to the outtake pile this gem goes. (I’ve been loving the line “do you see your reflection when my glass is dark” for years, though actually, at the time of writing, it’s “did you know birds and metal outlive the likes of you” that’s stuck on a loop in my head.)

Elsewhere you’ve got “Bayonet,” which is a great song for Alex’s previous band, ThouShaltNot, but that flounders ever so slightly as a Seeming song. And “Name Those Stars,” a peppy little number with a synth line that sounds uncannily like the bass hook from John Linnell’s “South Carolina,” and that, perhaps more importantly, is just a little too peppy and too upbeat for an album called Madness and Extinction.…

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An Unruly Torrent (The Last War in Albion Part 75: Violence and Versions)

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This is the third of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta included some of his earliest uses of one of his signature techniques, that of paralleling narration or dialogue from one scene with images from another to highlight the contrast.

“Institutions and authorities designed for the far simpler reality of just a hundred years ago have burst their banks; have found their timeworn principles inadequate to a flash influx of insight and revelation, an unruly torrent carrying us all struggling towards the edge of a Niagra future in amidst our driftwood debris of outmoded ideologies.” – Alan Moore, birthday greetings to Chelsea Manning

Figure 570: V’s quotations from Macbeth in
the first installment resonate with his actions
in rescuing Evey. (Written by Alan Moore, art
by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior
#1, 1982)
But “Virtue Victorious” does not use its contrast for comedy, or, at least, not for any straightforward comedy, and the point is not the contrast between the bishop’s words and the images, but the way in which the two intersect and resemble each other. The bishop is praying for divine forgiveness for the child molestation he’s about to commit, but when he speaks of “the evil one who is surely come amongst us in this, the hour of our greatest trial,” the images of V fighting his way through the guards give clear double meaning to these words. The sequence is of course not unprecedented – it is in many ways simply a refinement of the technique Moore was using back in the first installment, where he had V quoting Macbeth while slicing his way through the Fingermen threatening Evey. But the refinement is in this case significant, with the text and images in “Virtue Victorious” coming from two distinct scenes that are allowed, in effect, to play simultaneously. As the comic went on, Moore grew even more confident, eventually doing away with most of the dialogue and words entirely and giving Lloyd stretches of pages at a time in which the storytelling is entirely visual, or where, to use an example from Book Two, a chapter in which the only dialogue comes from television broadcasts playing out in the background. These are in some ways small potatoes compared to the expansive formal and stylistic experiments that Moore would later become known for, but nevertheless, the advancement within the course of the serial is significant, and it’s not surprising that Moore refers to the comic as “one of the first real major breakthroughs I made in terms of my own personal style.”
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Now Just a Moment: The Doctors Revisited (Tom Baker)

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That this should prove so difficult is in many ways revealing. First, we should start with what this isn’t, which is an account of Tom Baker as the definitive Doctor. Satisfyingly, this isn’t accomplished with some deconstruction. This is unabashed hagiography – just not to the exclusion of other eras. The result is on a basic level satisfying: the joy that is Tom Baker’s Doctor is celebrated, but without the distorting effect that the era sometimes has.

But it’s curious that there’s no real attention given to the sheer span of Baker’s tenure. Indeed, what really jumps out about this is that Baker’s tenure is reduced almost entirely to its first half. There’s some clips from City of Death, and K-9 makes the companion list, but for the most part there’s not a breath of acknowledgment of anything that wasn’t part of the Hinchcliffe era. Romana isn’t mentioned outside of the City of Death clips. Davros is talked about entirely in terms of Genesis of the Daleks. The other stories to get decent clips are Terror of the Zygons, Robot, Talons of Weng-Chiang, and The Ark in Space.

It’s not full-out erasure, and there’s certainly no overt misrepresentations, but it’s strange to see the Hinchcliffe-only take on Tom Baker, simply because it opens a weird gap in the chronology of this – there’s a chunk as long as the Hartnell or Troughton eras that’s all but cut from the official history.

Some of that is a product of the focus only on actors. The good old “gothic horror to comedy” transition that is part of the history of the program through this era is, fair enough, outside the remit of The Doctors Revisited. And the aspects of the Doctor’s character that are focused on are mainly the more comedic ones, so in a way, even if all the examples are Hinchcliffe-era, it’s the Williams-era version of the character that’s remembered. Which has kind of always been the case.

But another way of putting that is that this is account is almost completely uninterested in the stories. Tom Baker’s performance consumes everything around it, even today. The fact that this is the first installment of The Doctor’s Revisited to have the Doctor in question on hand to interview adds to that, although the actual use of Tom Baker tends to be as a slightly unreliable narrator of his own era. But the focus is very firmly on the character, which Tom Baker as good as says at the beginning, when he admits that the line between himself and his character got blurred.

None of this is helped by the choice of stories to show afterwards. The Pyramids of Mars is not a bad story, although its fourth episode is a bit of a mess. But it’s a tragically safe choice, and it’s telling that Moffat, in introducing it, finds himself mostly talking about Tom Baker’s performance once again before adding a few sentences about how the story’s pretty good.…

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