Eruditorum Press

Stupid games *and* stupid prizes? In this economy?

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:

Saturday Waffling (December 6th, 2014)

7

So, next week you can all expect a review of The Game, a 70s-set spy series by Toby Whithouse, which is wrapping up a first run on BBC America despite being made by the BBC proper. That’s supported by the Patreon, which is undergoing a bit of a transformation. It’ll be funding that and the two Christmas posts (one on Last Christmas, one season wrap-up) this month. Next month, it’ll fund something as of yet determined (I’m tempted to have it be Sherlock Season Three). And come February and beyond, it’ll fund… whatever goes up on this site.

Ultimately, the nature of that is going to be up to a vote of the backers on Patreon, and the amount of it will be determined by how much the Patreon makes. If it makes a solid $400+ a week, thrice-weekly content of some sort remains very viable. If it makes less than that, we’ll see. Last War in Albion will of course run at least once a week until the end of time, but other than that, it’ll be the Patreon that determines what happens at this blog, and how often.

So, if you’re interested in having a voice over what sorts of things I cover, backing the Patreon as it funds December and January’s content and weighing in when I actually start framing those numbers and laying out options would be a good idea.

(Right now, the leading candidate in my mind is a Game of Thrones blog, relatively short run, going episode by episode. Other possibilities include the episode commentaries, should those prove popular. Or a book of some sort. Or video game writing. Or who knows.)

So, please consider backing the future of this blog on Patreon. More discussion there. And here, if you like.…

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A Savage and Warlike Race (Cold War)

49

“Sorry, sorry, I’ll sing ‘Rio’ instead.”
It’s April 13th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one, with Pink, Justin Timberlake, Nelly, Bruno Mars, and Bastille also charting. In news, things are mostly sleepy. There’s a beautiful entry on the Wikipedia list of historical events reading “Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley decides to tax the rain,” which apparently really just means that there’s a new tax on homes to help fund preservation efforts of the Chesapeake. The entire Paris Brown silliness happens, which probably speaks volumes about the tenor of UK culture right about then, though what it says is certainly open to interpretation. And Margaret Thatcher dies a few days before this, which had the sort of cultural impact you’d expect given what she came to represent in popular culture. 
On television, Doctor Who proves a bit too prescient, launching its 80s themed story in the wake of all of this. I’m sure there’s a reading that’s long on synchronicity to be made here, but I feel like 2014 isn’t the time to make it. Let’s instead focus on what this story is doing, because I do think that’s interesting in this case. On paper, the pairing of Gatiss and Mackinnon seems like it should be perfect in every regard except for quality. Both are people one describes with the backhanded compliment “workmanlike.” Gatiss’s scripts are, as we’ve by now thoroughly established, long on nostalgic recreations of things that worked in the past. Mackinnon, who we’ve not really talked about at great length, is a functional director with a weakness for colored lighting. Taken together, one expects a bog standard episode of Doctor Who, which is not strictly speaking an inaccurate way of describing Cold War.
Since a running theme so far in our coverage of Season 7B has been its early historicization, it’s perhaps worth looking at Mackinnon’s contributions to Season Eight, since he directed 25% of it, and it gives a better sense of what he’s capable of than The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and The Power of Three. His episodes are generally quite good – Listen is a very credible pick for season’s best. I was critical of the direction of Time Heist, and I stand by the claim that its attempt to mask its use of the same corridor through rapid changes of lighting color was a weakness in an episode without any major strengths. But even Listen is a functional job in which Mackinnon’s main job is to make the five settings feel distinct so that the episode is easy to follow. And Flatline is smart and efficient, much like its script. One can argue that this makes him as good as his material, but the other way of looking at that is that he can reliably get his teeth into the structure of a story and sell the big moments. 
Similarly, Gatiss has approached this particular bit of unabashed nostalgia with a sort of steely determinism. The production circumstances are, in this case, revealing.
…

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Comics Reviews (12/3/14)

, 9

From worst to best, with everything being something I like enough to pay for.

Gotham Academy #3

I admit, I’m thinking of dropping this. Three issues in, and each one I’ve wanted to enjoy more than I do. The characters aren’t standing out for me, the plots aren’t grabbing me, and this is settling in as a book I like the idea of rather more than I actually like paying for. One or two more, and I may sit down and reread them as a chunk to see if the characters get better defined for me before I do, but I’m finding disappointment growing here.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #5

It’s a very good week to put this second from bottom, let me say. Interesting, good character work here. Good stuff here, and a story that really did benefit from the extra issue to breathe. And I’m really curious about the rapidly inflating TARDIS crew, not least because the book remains so focused on Alice Obiefune as the secondary lead, making Arc and Jones odd sort of side characters. Is this the best Doctor Who comic ever? I think it might be.

Chew #45

This came in strong this week. After playing at a mass of ugly deaths last week, this one goes in a surprising direction, with a kind of beautifully shocking last page twist that feels, to me, exactly as mean as it should be. I’m really finding myself to be into this book at the moment, which is quite nice.

Uber #20

A bit of a slow issue for Uber. The rapidly spiralling sense of world in Uber occasionally makes for tough going, and this is, for me, an example. Much of this issue consists of events that were made basically inevitable by past issues, so that it feels slightly glacial. Gillen knows how to mash the “disturbing as fuck” button hard enough to cover the gaps, and the use of Mengele is very, very savvy. And then the end is smart and clever and interesting. I love this book, even on the off months.

Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #1

So, Kieron Gillen does an Asgardian take on Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons. I was a bit leery of this one, simply because it’s such an odd property to put Gillen on, and the co-author vaguely suggests that this could be one of those “have a major writer half-involved in the first arc and then wander off” books that Marvel pulls occasionally. The structure here is really sharp and interesting, though, with Gillen writing the present-day section, and Marguerite Bennett doing the flashback in the middle. Good first issue. Worth checking out.

Crossed +One Hundred #1

A deliciously slow, methodical start to this comic, of the sort that every writer wishes they could do, but really only Alan Moore working for Avatar could get away with. It does the thing that many annoying first issues do of simply introducing the book’s premise. But this is Alan Moore, and the book’s premise is a beautifully layered slab of theme.…

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Laissez Les Bontemps Rouler (The Last War in Albion Part 73: The Villain)

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This is the first 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 did some underground-style work for Sounds, a newspaper strip called Maxwell the Magic Cat, some work for Marvel UK on Doctor Who and Star Wars comics, numerous Future Shocks and Time Twisters for 2000 AD, the continuing serials Skizz and D.R. & Quinch for the same magazine, a run on Captain Britain for Marvel UK, and broke out in the United States working on Swamp Thing for DC Comics. Concurrently with all of that, he wrote a serial called V for Vendetta in the British quasi-monthly anthology Warrior…

“Please. For us. For all of us… Laissez les bontemps rouler.” -Alan Moore, Swamp Thing
Figure 551: The chillingly prescient
image of widespread CCTV cameras
in London. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain”
in Warrior #1, 1982)
From its first installment, back in 1982, amidst Moore’s earliest works, V for Vendetta crackles with mad gusto. The first page brazenly sets a scene with all the fascist gusto of 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd, only with none of the broad comedic satire that characterized that strip. Instead it is an all too familiar near-future world, recognizably just a few of history’s happenstances removed from the world of its readers. It is a few months shy of sixteen years in the future, with an unsettlingly phrased radio broadcast identified as the “Voice of Fate.” The language is plastic and stilted, quietly evoking Moore and Lloyd’s previous collaboration on a story for Doctor Who featuring the evil plastic alien Autons: it is “the fifth of the eleventh, nineteen-ninety-seven,” a declaration that is followed by a bizarrely precise weather forecast promising that “the weather will be fine until 12:07 A.M. when a shower will commence lasting until 1:30 A.M.” Note the care with which Moore sets up the unsettling nature of this – the first number is weirdly over-specific, whereas the second is a nice, round number like one would expect from a weather forecast. This broadcast is contrasted with David Lloyd’s starkly monochromatic art, which begins with a soaring skyline before cutting to a mass of people heading home in wide shot. A third panel focuses on a detail from the image, a CCTV camera pointed at the street, a sign proclaiming, “FOR YOUR PROTECTION.” 
Figure 552: The spartan squalor of Evey’s apartment.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The
Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982)
From this introduction, the art and voiceover both take a turn for the dark.
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Burnt Orange (The Rings of Akhaten)

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I am a leaf on the wind.
It’s April 6th, 2013. PJ and Duncan are at number one with “Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble,” which, on the face of it, looks like one of those inexplicable things that happens to the UK charts occasionally. I’m sure Tom Ewing will have fun with it when the time comes. Also charting are Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Nelly, Pink, and Macklemore. In news, and recalling that we haven’t actually covered a lot of that recently given the approach taken for The Bells of Saint John, the world visibly failed to end in 2012, although there was an impressive meteor strike over Chelyabinsk in February. Benedict XVI resigned as pope, and was replaced by Francis. Chris Huhne resigned from the House of Commons after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice over a speeding ticket, same-sex marriage was legalized in England and Wales, and, apparently, Illinois banned the sale of shark fins. 
Television, meanwhile, brings the much-maligned The Rings of Akhaten. As with The Bells of Saint John before it, this is an episode where it is slightly surprising how, after less than two years, it already feels like a part of history. Certainly the bizarre ninth-from-bottom finish in the Doctor Who Magazine 50th anniversary poll feels like as much of a historical aberration as the first place finish for Day of the Doctor. Certainly one imagines this story will always have its detractors, as it belongs to the tradition of Doctor Who as children’s science fantasy that houses such “silly” stories as Kill the Moon and The Space Museum, which is, really, a better comparison than anyone gives this credit for being. Put another way, it’s unabashedly The Sensorites for a more sentimental age, and there are some people for whom that’s always going to be the same sort of challenge “children’s panto J.G. Ballard” is. 
More than any other Moffat-era story, more even than his puzzle boxes and narrative substitutions, more than the disjointed and at times dysfunctional River Song arc, this is the episode where the original experience of watching it cannot be recaptured. Everything about this episode is stuff that vanishes into the Impossible Girl arc. This is the one most obscured by it. In hindsight, we know its solution: everything prior to The Name of the Doctor is in fact the origin story of a companion who does something particularly impressive one day to save the Doctor. What we see is actually what we get. 
In that regard, it’s significant how much The Rings of Akhaten is Clara-centric. This isn’t a Doctor-lite story, but it might as well be. Almost all of the big moments go to Clara – the Doctor’s only real victory in the entire thing is his convincing Mary Gejelh, although he kind of steps on Clara’s victory in the end (in a way that serves as a metonym for the entire story, really). Instead the focus remains on Clara, who spends just as much of this “being the Doctor” as she does in Flatline.
…

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Saturday Waffling (November 29th, 2014)

36

Hello all. Finished the V for Vendetta chapter, and am mostly through the next round of Logopolis revisions, though I’ll probably typeset the bugger before I send it back to Jane so she can check pagination, and that feels like an impossibly large task right now, though that may be because it’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m cold and tired.

Still trying to figure out what on Earth I’m going to use this blog for once TARDIS Eruditorum wraps. I mean, Last War in Albion, obviously. And the episode commentaries I owe from the Kickstarter. And the commissioned essays, I suppose. The trouble is, I’m really not eager to take on another massive project, but I also do want to keep up regular blogging. And I’m not sure how best to reconcile those. Maybe some shorter blog series.

Right. Discussion for the week. Hm.

Well, December’s waiting for us on Monday. What are you looking forward to in the last month of 2014?…

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My Mind Will Be Like That Of A Child (The Bells of Saint John)

31

The totally gibberish computer code that is occasionally superimposed
over things is by far my favorite part of this episode.
It’s March 30th, 2013. I’m in a hotel in Clarion Pennsylvania with my wife, at the halfway point of a drive from Chicago to Connecticut. This is the trip back from our honeymoon, which was a tour of top restaurants in Chicago. We’ve had some of the best food of our lives over the last week, which is making the shitty Applebee’s takeout nachos just that little bit more disappointing. It’s not helping Doctor Who much either, which we’re watching on a laptop having pirated it in a Panera’s. The honeymoon was about as impromptu as all of this: we wanted to check out a restaurant called Next in Chicago, which does three menus a year, each very tightly around a theme. Their theme that spring was The Hunt, and it was all game meats and preservation techniques and the coolest thing ever, and we were thinking about a winter wedding, and were basically going as inspiration. So we added a few other fine dining restaurants and made a nice vacation out of it. You may have noticed the hitch in the chronology already, so to speak – we quietly eloped to secure me health insurance, and then ended up deciding to save on the wedding and just declare it all done, the result of which was to, frankly, get a far better wedding dinner than any bulk caterer is going to give you for, ironically, not actually all that much more a head. 
So let’s see, that means I had the Pertwee book coming out, and yeah, I did the last few edits in the hotel. Exchanged e-mails with Mac Rogers and got set up to do the Slate review thing for Hide. No idea what was in the charts, because despite four days of 6-8 hour drives in a single week I mostly just listened to Paul McGann audios because those were what was coming up in Eruditorum. Last War in Albion wasn’t even started. It feels like ages ago. 
Strangely, so does this episode. I thought it was crap on transmission, although as I said, circumstances. I quite liked it on this pass, but I liked it very much as a thing that felt over. As the past of the series. I watched it last night after dinner with my wife, on the big TV in the bedroom, with one of the cats curled up on my chest, and it felt like a nice thing to watch before bed, and now she’s at work and I’m writing it up and I have a bunch of interesting things I want to say about it. I remember it both ways – in Clarion and last night. Like time’s been rewritten, which I suppose is what becoming history is. 
The Capaldi era starts here, in a sense, though we didn’t know it at the time. So does Clara, though we had no idea what that meant and wouldn’t really all season even though we’re told.
…

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Comics Reviews (November 26th, 2014)

, 4

From worst to best, but I paid for everything.

The Massive #29

One of those comics that leaves you going “really? That’s it?” Which is impressive for a comic featuring the apocalypse, and yet Brian Wood nevertheless makes it feel a bit underwhelming. I aspire, in the future, not to waste two and a half years of my life and $105 on comics this not good.

ODY-C #1

Not my thing, but if it is your thing, very good. Some lovely psychedelia and epic sci-fi, it’s all terribly pretty, and the opening octuple splash with two fold-out timelines and maps manage to out-Multiversity Multiversity and out-Hickman Hickman in one shot. Really, this is a fabulous comic that’s just not my cup of tea. If psychedelic sci-fi epics sound like yours, do check it out.

New Avengers #27

One of those Hickman comics that relies on the idea that the reader has remembered the mythology he’s been building up. I don’t, so, you know, oh well. The knowledge that the answer to all of these questions are in some fashion “Secret Wars” is a bit of a non-starter. But mostly… eh.

Stumptown #3

One that’s going to have to be reread when it’s finished for me, as I’ve definitely lost all sense of who most of the characters are. It looks very good, and has Rucka’s usual sense of characterization, at least in the bits that are self-contained enough to be understandable entirely from this issue, but this is definitely the comic I want to vote “most in need of a recap page and character guide” this week.

The Unwritten Apocalypse #11

I believe that this is the penultimate issue of this. In any case, it’s a lovely issue, building to a great cliffhanger and going through some nice paces to get there. Really, really looking forward to the “it’s all done” reread of this series.

Trees #7

Another series kicking into high gear, with a sense of things happening, if not of things converging. A bit puzzled by the decision to not bother with location captions, but if Ellis wants that level of attentiveness, he’s a writer who’s entitled to it, frankly. In any case, things happen. Is interesting.

Lazarus #13

Not only are things heating up, I feel like I understand them without having to reread a ton of past issues. There’s no recap page, but pertinent information is given through dialogue reminders, and there’s solid character work – I love the poker game amongst the Lazari, in particular. Not a jumping on point, but a solid reminder of why this is one of my favorite series going.…

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LaBostrie Feels His Skin Crawl (The Last War in Albion Part 72: Tygers, The Return of the Good Gumbo)

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This is the twenty-second of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two 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 six volumes. This entry covers stories from the sixth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are left as an exercise for the reader.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s last Swamp Thing arc involved a series of sci-fi stories, including one featuring the Green Lantern Corps, a DC property Moore had played with in a trio of short stories as well.
“In the darkest part of the swamp, he pauses. A monstrous black bird flaps overhead, momentarily eclipsing the sun. LaBostrie feels his skin crall and moves on. Below, in the green tank of swamp water, something stirs. And rises.” – Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, Swamp Thing

Figure 542: The concepts Alan Moore and
Kevin O’Neill created for “Tygers” would
eventually become a central part of the DC
Universe in the form of the Red Lantern Corps.
But it is in most regards the second of his three Green Lantern stories that is most interesting. One of two collaborations he did with Kevin O’Neill while at DC, the story, entitled “Tygers,” tells of the death of Abin Sur, the predecessor to Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern for Earth’s sector of space. The story is notable for several reasons. For one, it is the story that Moore was referring to in later interviews where he accused DC of “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of night.” The story responsible for provoking that comment was a 2009 Green Lantern-based crossover written by Geoff Johns, which actually owes relatively little to “Tygers” save for featuring further characters from the alien planet on which it is set, although it is true that an extended prophecy given within “Tygers” has been extensively mined by both Johns and other writers for story concepts. 
Figure 543: The horrific Qull of the
Five Inversions. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Kevin O’Neill, from
“Tygers,” in Tales of the Green Lantern
Corps Annual #2, 1986)
For another, as its title suggests, the story owes a considerable debt to William Blake. The bulk of this debt is subtle – no actual Blakean concepts or images appear within the story, and although Kevin O’Neill draws a number of memorably grotesque and bizarre horrors in the story, his style in “Tygers” is far from a straightforward imitation of Blake, nor even an homage. O’Neill’s art is nevertheless striking, and in many ways he comes closer to Blake by doing his own strange and visionary style instead of an imitation.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea Final (Game of Thrones)

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Well, something had to knock Doctor Who off its Hugo perch. And after competing in long form for its first season, Game of Thrones seems to have cemented itself as the Hugo frontrunner with back-to-back victories over Doctor Who in 2012 and 2013. 2012 was perhaps understandable: It wasn’t an extraordinary year for Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones did have “Blackwater,” which was a stunningly good Peter Dinklage vehicle of an episode. Even in 2013, you can possibly criticize the strategy of having Doctor Who go in with Day of the Doctor, Name of the Doctor, An Adventure in Time and Space, and The Five-ish Doctors as possibly weaker than the strategy of just chucking “The Rains of Castamere” up.


But “The Rains of Castamere” is also an episode worth looking at because it gets at the way in which much of the talk about what makes Game of Thrones good is desperately silly. Because essentially all “The Rains of Castamere” has to recommend it is that it has a lot of really shocking character deaths in it. This is, to be fair, part of the show’s brand. Its first big, iconic cultural moment was the killing of Ned Stark, Sean Bean’s character, late in the first season after having previously presented him as the show’s main character (which, to be fair, he was up until his decapitation). And this is, if we’re being honest, one of the great deaths in television history.


But the reason that it worked wasn’t that it was a shock death. Shock deaths are, frankly, overused on television. What worked so well about killing Ned Stark was that it, in one shot, altered the status quo for every other character in the show. It was a plot twist that actually changed things. Which you can’t really say about the famed Red Wedding of “The Rains of Castamere,” which butchers a significant chunk of the cast, but which mostly has the effect of either preventing things that would be been interesting from happening (destroying any possibility of Tyrion and Sansa coming to understand each other, keeping Arya wandering around) or terminating plotlines that weren’t really working that well anyway (Robb and Catelyn). It was, frankly, a cheap move, and for my money, one of the weaker episodes of the third season.


So if not its body count, what is so good about Game of Thrones? It’s tempting to say a word I’m usually quite down on: worldbuilding. But instead I’ll go with “structure.” Game of Thrones is the most lusciously structured show on television. Under the hood, it is almost ostentatious in its simplicity: it’s epic fantasy structured as a soap opera, using the same basic trick of Doctor Who whereby you sell the sense of the epic with one or two tremendously expensive effects shots per episode, thus covering the fact that every other scene is just two British actors sitting in a room talking.


But where the show really sparkles is in its use of editing and structure within an episode.
…

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