Eruditorum Press

Some sort of samizdat wind effect

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:

Comics Reviews (November 12th, 2014)

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I liked the “post this as soon as it’s ready” approach last week, so I think I shall make it a regular thing. As ever, ranked from worst to best of the week, with everything being something I voluntarily paid money for…

Captain America #1

If not necessarily deliberately paid money for. This was picked up in a miscommunication (Jill did the comics run today, and mistook my request for Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1 as a request for Captain America #1 and The Mighty Avengers #1, which I submit as an illustration of the sheer number of stupid bars to entry for people who aren’t obsessive about comics purchasing, because really, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to release two comics called Captain America #1 on the same fucking day). In any case, it’s an action sequence with captions that are some of the most cliched “white person writing about black people” ever. It’s heart’s in the right place – the joke about America’s prison system is wonderfully bleak. But it’s… not good, and is in fact that other thing.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1

I’m sure this will be a lovely series once it’s not tying into Axis, but right now it’s exactly nothing I want out of a book called Captain America and the Mighty Avengers. 

Captain Marvel #9

Wonderfully silly one-off space romp with gratuitous rhyming. Good fun. I still don’t feel like I enjoy this book as much as I should, though – it often, as with this issue, feels competent without having any spark. The big cleverness here is the gratuitous rhyming, which is… forced, to say the least. Fun, but inessential.

Thor #2

This really should have been Thor #1, as it’s charming. The use of thought bubbles to convey the new Thor’s uncertainty and self-doubt is delightful, and there’s some good characterization here. I’m still not sure about the “don’t tell us who the main character is” hook, as it makes characterization for her trickier, but this was at least a good, fun Thor comic.

Wytches #2

I love what the book is doing, particularly with its transitions among scenes, but I find the obliqueness challenging. No recap page, no captions telling us what or where a scene is, and Jock’s scratchy art makes it hard to know what’s going on – it took me a couple tries to get that Sailor’s father and uncle were different characters, which made the final scene a challenge. A cast page or a recap page or something would be nice – I completely forget what Lucy’s deal is. But this remains a promising horror comic.

Spider-Verse #1

A collection of shorts. In general, the shorter the better – the one-page Hostess Fruitcakes pastiche and the two-page newspaper comic one were both particularly brilliant. Quite liked Skottie Young’s as well. I continue to really be enjoying this Spider-Verse crossover, and I’m glad I snagged the silly tie-in anthology.

Batgirl #36

There’s some awkwardness at the start – the book’s post-Young Avengers social media aesthetic runs aground with some dodgy pseudo-computer stuff where finding a couple terabytes of storage to use is actually something that requires time and effort.…

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Giants With Leaking Boats For Feet (The Last War in Albion Part 70: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Third Death of Swamp Thing)

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This is the twentienth 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 fifth 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, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: As a coda to his extended arc about the apocalypse, Moore penned a tale in which Swamp Thing lays siege to Gotham City, causing vegetation to grow wild over the city. The final issue of this story, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” was named after a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
“[Anarchy has] become a kind of shorthand standing for the breakdown of society and order into screaming chaos; into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape populated by looters, berserkers, giants with leaking boats for feet and eggshells for a body.” -Alan Moore, “Fear of a Black Flag”

Figure 527: Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden
of Earthly Delights, closed.
This ambivalence is reflected in the title of this last issue, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is drawn from a triptych painted in the late 15th/early 16th century by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting consists of three distinct panels, following the general convention of the form in that era and moving from a depiction of the Garden of Eden in the leftmost panel and the Last Judgment in the right. The first panel depicts God presenting Eve to Adam, which flows smoothly into the largest panel, the center one, continuing the skyline across the gap so as to give a sense of this image emerging directly from the first one. This center panel depicts the titular garden as a scene of vast, libidinous excess. Nude figures embrace within a transparent globe that is itself the fruit of a plant, birds the size of people frolic in the stream, vast phallic and yonnic towers emerge out of the lake, there are men with heads of fruit, and men riding fantastic beasts, all spilling out across the panel in an overwhelming, breathtaking spectacle of man and nature in seeming harmony. Finally there is the rightmost panel, which breaks from the flow of the skyline, depicting a night scene in hell in which people are inventively and grotesquely tortured. The overall message, at least initially, appears to be an anti-materialist one that considers the earthly delights of the central garden but that ultimately concludes that these delights, which stem out of the original temptation of the flesh in the Garden of Eden, lead only to demonic ruin.
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A Little Bit of Nip in the Air (The Snowmen)

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Abominable special effects.
It’s December 25th, 2012. Justice Collective are at number one with “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” blocking the X-Factor winner from its traditional Christmas coronation by being a supergroup charity recording for Hillsborough charities, which is basically the sort of thing it’s impossible not to have go to number one. Rihanna, Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, and Psy also chart. 
In the three months since the Angels took Manhattan, Barack Obama took a second term, Hurricane Sandy took out a large swath of the New York/New Jersey coast, and Disney took over the rights to Star Wars. Much more bleakly, the fact that Jimmy Saville was a horrific and serial pedophile who sexually abused hundreds of people came out. Also, Nadine Dorries is suspended from the Conservative Party because she decides to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! She was beaten by, among others, Colin Baker. 
While on television, after our five-week dalliance with the Ponds, the future promised back in Asylum of the Daleks finally fails to arrive again. We’ll tackle the problems and brilliances of the Impossible Girl story over the next season, so there’s not really a rush, but it is worth noting that some of its weaknesses start to appear here. This is by design a false start – the new companion is seemingly introduced and then killed. Unlike in Asylum of the Daleks, this one was billed as the debut of Jenna Coleman. If you paid a lot of attention you could tell there was a ruse, but for the most part, it was a solid bait and switch. Certainly this was necessary for the Impossible Girl arc, not least because without it the headline was “the new companion is a Dalek” and not “the new companion keeps dying.” 
The trouble is, the moment when Clara gets killed is the moment when a tremendously promising and interesting episode goes off the rails. Part of this is unrelated to the plot twist as such – the fact that “a family crying on Christmas Eve” as the only thing powerful enough to stop the snow is grotesquely unearned, for instance, has little to do with killing Clara as such. The real problem is simply that Clara’s death transforms The Snowmen from a relatively self-contained bit of Christmas fairy tale into a teaser for the next season. Which is, of course, always the problem (and brilliance) of the Impossible Girl arc – it constantly erases what’s actually there, replacing it with a mystery about what isn’t. 
So let’s, in effect, simply clip off more or less everything between Clara’s fatal fall and the cemetery scene, allowing this episode to be a tremendously charming Christmas fairy tale with one of the best images in the history of the series in the form of that impossibly tall staircase ascending to the TARDIS on a cloud that closes with a quick teaser to get everyone back in March. The future will come along eventually anyway, so no need to talk about it now.
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Death in Heaven Review

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Thank you so much to the 171 people on Patreon who made these reviews possible. It’s not been the easiest past two months, and this has been an absolutely huge help. Come Christmas, I’ll be back with one more review, and a season wrap-up, and then a bit after that I’ll have something or other about future uses of Patreon, as it’s been rather lovely, frankly. So thank you very much. This has been a wonderful bit of fun. 

Well here we are, for one last round before, you know, the next round. Twitter is a somewhat mixed reaction. GallifreyBase has 71.65% on 8-10, with 34.62% of those tens. Me? I loved it. 
It’s ostentatious as hell. It builds on Moffat’s previous tricks in so many interesting ways. You can accurately describe it as “the Doctor Who version of His Last Vow” or as “Eric Saward done right,” it’s got the first companion departure to top Doomsday (Donna is disqualified for the horrific consent violation involved), and it manages an entirely different take on the phrase “tomb of the Cybermen” than the one we had last week. It frames that perfectly, with Clara and the Doctor having the exact inverse of the conversation Clara was trying to have with Danny at the beginning. It’s the Master as an evil River Song, while Clara plays out Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with Danny in River’s role. It’s as perfectly timed for Remembrance Sunday as Deep Breath was for the sunset. Clara applies the moral legitimacy she earned in Kill the Moon to the question of granting her boyfriend’s request for assisted suicide. The opening credits recycle the trick from the sixth episode of Jekyll. Clara’s an adult Linda. The fucking Brigadier. Moffat, a writer whose work is defined by narrative substitutions, plays it completely straight while doing weird inversions of everything else around him while telling a more or less straightforward point A to point B story over ninety minutes. 
It works. There are plot holes. I identified several in the immediate aftermath. On a second pass, all of them have, at the very least, a line of dialogue. Yes, Missy’s entire reason for bringing the Doctor and Clara together and intervening in their timestreams to keep them together was that Clara would eventually lead the Doctor to try to rescue a loved one out of heaven. It’s a scheme by the Master, what did you expect, sanity? The Doctor probably could have commanded the army to self-destruct, but he recognized that Danny was the right person to do it. They’re not always satisfying payoffs, though for the most part, they’re as satisfying as they need to be for the amount the show built them up – if fans inflated the minor mysteries further, that’s their problem.
And when anything falters, it’s willing to get through on sheer bravado. Moffat returned to the two-parter on the back of Sherlock, and built one with a corker of a cliffhanger.
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Outside the Government 20: Wizards vs Aliens

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One of my favorite moments in About Time, a book series I don’t get to talk about much anymore having long since gotten ahead of them, is in its critique of The Sensorites, a story that is wrongly, if understandably, unloved. Miles and Wood open by saying, “Opinion is divided over this: the common reaction is ‘why?’, but the correct answer is ‘awww… bless’.” Which pretty much sums up not only The Sensorites but Wizards vs Aliens, a strong contender for the single most heartwarming origin story of any television series ever.
Following the death of Lis Sladen, Russell T Davies didn’t want the Sarah Jane Adventures production team to be out of work. He also didn’t want the BBC to abandon production of children’s drama. And so he came up with a suitably high concept series that he could oversee from a distance (much as he had Sarah Jane Adventures), this time while caring for his partner, whose diagnosis with a brain tumor led to Davies’s abandonment of his “break out in America” plan. 
It is, to be fair, a good premise. The start of the first episode, which begins with a standard sort of “pagans chanting in a stone circle” thing, goes far enough to confirm that magic is real, then drops a spaceship onto the stone circle and has the wizards abducted by aliens who triumphantly proclaim that they have come for Earth’s magic, is a triumph of mashing up genres. Really, the entire idea is long on cleverness – what’s basically a Harry Potter knockoff gets invaded by what are basically the default setting of Doctor Who aliens. The tropes of each, unsurprisingly, prove good fits for one another. Davies is well aware that the types of stories you can tell with fantasy and science fiction are basically the same, and is slyly taking advantage of the supposed distinctions between the two iconographies to make a decent playground.
And it does. It’s a clever hook, and while Davies’s suggestion that it could run for ten years is almost certainly over-optimistic, it’s not a huge surprise that this is currently on its third season. It fills the same role that The Sarah Jane Adventures did of providing good, classic, and well-made children’s television. It’s got much of the same commitment to diversity, making the extremely good decision to have Benny, the nerd character, be played by a black man. Although to be honest, its commitment to diversity is visibly weaker than that of The Sarah Jane Adventures. There’s no equivalent character to Maria or Rani, and instead we’re generally using the two boys setup of Merlin, only with clear analogues of Clyde and Luke in the leads.
But on the whole, this is a loving and full-throated homage to the classic tradition of British children’s television. And, in turn, a celebration of the classic tradition of British children’s literature, which, fair enough. If you’re making a list of things the UK can legitimately have a sense of national pride in, its legacy of children’s fiction is absolutely something that should be on that list.
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Some Incomprehensible Biological Process (The Last War in Albion Part 69: The Greening of Gotham)

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If you were expecting comics reviews today, they went up last night.

This is the nineteenth 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 fifth 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, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s apocalypse in Swamp Thing was a strangely muted affair, not so much ending the world, or even substantially altering it, as engaging in a semi-graceful climbdown from the eschatological rush.
“I feel that I have become an essential part of some incomprehensible biological process. The house is an organism hungry for madness. It is the maze that dreams.” – Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum

It is not fair, however, to frame this as a failing on Moore’s part. For all that he was rapidly becoming the golden boy of DC Comics, Moore was never going to be allowed to fundamentally and irrevocably alter the nature of the DC Universe, and he was certainly not naive enough to think otherwise. He had, after all, by this point, already had his plans for a story called Who Killed the Peacemaker? This story would provide sweeping and transformative take on some obscure superheroes that DC acquired when it bought out the failing Charlton Comics in 1983, vetoed by DC on the grounds that it would render the characters unusable, resulting in the proposal being reworked as Watchmen with original characters that could be cordoned off from DC continuity, with the first issue coming out the month after Swamp Thing #50. The idea that he was going to get away with destroying heaven and letting the primordial darkness reign once more was unlikely to have seriously crossed his mind.
Figure 518: Swamp Thing #51 marked
a change of direction for the series,
with Swamp Thing seeking to rescue
Abby from prison.
Indeed, his next story arc, a three-issue tale that brings Swamp Thing into conflict with Batman, is largely about reiterating this precise point. It is easy and tempting to draw a dividing line between Swamp Thing #50 and the story that commences with Swamp Thing #51. DC does exactly that in the collected editions of Moore’s Swamp Thing, ending the fourth volume, A Murder of Crows, with issue #50, and commencing the fifth, Earth to Earth, with #51. And there is a marked shift in tone between the apocalyptic battle on the shores of hell itself that takes place in issue #50 and the much smaller scale story of Swamp Thing attempting to rescue an imprisoned Abby that follows it.
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Comics Reviews (The Fifth of November, 2014)

, 4

As ever, from least favorite to favorite, with everything being something I willingly paid money for.

AXIS #4

I’ve been getting this out of spite, out of a general commitment to know what’s going on with Marvel, but after the miserable slog that was Original Sin, this, another overly serious take on “what if heroes WEREN’T HEROIC ANYMORE,” is just a bridge too far. I’ll pick up number nine, but this “heroes are villains and villains are heroes and the Avengers and X-Men are going to war again” baloney is just too much.

Miracleman #13

I was commenting on Tumblr that increasingly, it’s difficult to straight-facedly recommend many of the classics of 80s comics to people who didn’t grow up with them. This is no exception – it’s still brilliant, and you can see so many of the roots of what Alan Moore and his successors would go on to do in it, but everything here has been done better eventually, even if only by Moore himself. At $4.99 for sixteen pages, it remains impossible to straight-facedly recommend.

Chew #44

In some ways this is an improvement for Chew, a series I’m reading in a sort of vigorous demonstration of the sunk costs fallacy. It’s narrowly survived so many culls of my pull list. It’s trying to do something interesting here, and I have hope that part of that being interesting is doing something more interesting than the pile of generic shock deaths it’s pretending to be here. But right now, it’s still just hope.

Gotham Academy #2

This is currently a triumph of style over substance for me, but it’s such a complete triumph of style that I’m going to stick with it in the hopes that it fulfills the brilliance of its premise soon. It’s a book one so wants to see succeed, but it’s still not quite.

The Amazing Spider-Man #9

This was very much why I stuck through eight very generic issues of this. It’s clever and fun and bold, and feels like it’s determined to be a brilliant Spider-Man story that will be remembered for decades. Whether the future history of superhero comics means that a 2014 Spider-Man comic is, as a cultural object, capable of being remembered for decades is uncertain, but it’s everything one could reasonably want out of a Spider-Man comic.…

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Us vs Gallifreybase vs Th3m

91

Pushing Last War in Albion until tomorrow – was just about to image it up when this crossed my desk, and I want to deal with it.

So, in the wake of Dark Water, the site usvsth3m ran a piece entitled “16 sexually confusing feelings that Doctor Who fans have had since The Mistress revealed her secret.” It’s a fun piece that reveals the pathetically blinkered attitudes of a lot of Doctor Who fans for what they are, which is to say the attitudes of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic assholes. It’s a sobering reminder of the at times appalling attitudes of orthodox and longstanding fandom, and was absolutely something worth doing. And to their credit, they played nice and clipped usernames, thus avoiding publicly naming and shaming people for their actions, not that publicly naming and shaming the person who said that they felt “as though something sacred has been violated” because the Master was a woman now would have been in the least bit unreasonable.

Which is probably why the forum tried to demand that the site take the article down and banned the writer over it on the supposed grounds that they’re a “private” forum and that one needs permission of people to quote their posts off-site. Like the entirely sensible people they are, usvsth3m aren’t backing down in the least, and more power to them.

But let’s be clear here. GallifreyBase’s claim that they’re a “private” forum is absolutely ludicrous given that they have open registration and nearly 80,000 members, which is to say, about the entire population of Bath. The forum is private in the same way that the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium is private, except that Yankee Stadium only has a capacity of about 52,000.

What this amounts to is the largest single community of Doctor Who fans declaring that they have the right to have their views go uncommented on and unreported on. It amounts to a declaration that scholarly research and ethnography on Doctor Who fandom is forbidden. It amounts to a declaration that journalists can’t cover Doctor Who fandom. It is a morally indefensible position that actively aims to have a chilling effect on entirely legitimate topics of media research and journalism.

I’m sure that many of you are members of GallifreyBase. If so, please use their Contact Us form to tell them your views on their efforts to stifle freedom of speech.

And seriously, check out usvsth3m. They’re a lovely mixture of fun “wants to go viral” content and leftist politics. And really, in a war between a cesspit embodying the worst aspects of Doctor Who fandom and a site with an interactive “Slap Michael Gove” game there’s only one side you can possibly be on.

Back tomorrow with the start of our coverage of the fantastic “Swamp Thing attacks Gotham City” arc.…

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Don’t Look Away (The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone)

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Oh shit oh shit I need a new caption joke.
It’s April 24th, 2010. Usher and will.i.am are at number one with “OMG,” with Lady Gaga, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the worst ecological disasters in history, and Standard & Poor’s downgrades Greece’s credit rating, worsening the Euro crisis. Also, flights resume following the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, and we reach the last few days before the UK general election.
While on television, the first-filmed episode of the Moffat era. In the history of Doctor Who, there are two standard tricks that people have come up with to smooth the transition for a new Doctor. The first originates in 1966 with The Power of the Daleks, when Patrick Troughton’s debut was consciously and deliberately overshadowed by the return of the Daleks. Basically, you use existing characters as guest stars to lighten the load a bit on your main actor while he beds in. Variations were used in Spearhead from Space, Robot, Time and the Rani, The Christmas Invasion, and Deep Breath. The other, only ever executed once, but terribly clever all the same, is to film the first few stories out of order so that the new Doctor’s debut sees the actor self-assured and with a more developed take on their character, creating a strong impression so that the audience will subconsciously fill in the gaps when subsequently shown the earlier performances. It was used in Castrovalva. Moffat, faced with the change of the entire lead cast and most of the production team, made the sensible decision to do both, filming The Eleventh Hour as Smith’s fifth episode, and using this two-parter, featuring big iconic returning monsters and a major returning guest star, to let everyone bed in. 
On broadcast, this worked well. As we already discussed, The Eleventh Hour is the one Moffat episode even his detractors tend to embrace, making the exact big splash and statement it was supposed to. And this slotted into the season order nicely, feeling like a big turning point and an event, as opposed to like a production team desperately trying to get up to speed. In hindsight, a number of gaps are present, of which Matt Smith’s hair is only the most obvious. Many are subtle and along those lines – the decision not to pare back Alex Kingston’s makeup once she’s in camouflage, for instance, was a sensible one from a realist perspective (why would she redo her makeup, after all), but it smothers Kingston’s performance. 
But others are larger. Moffat is eventually going to develop a much more nuanced sense of what can be handwaved away and what needs explanation, but here he several times gets bogged down doing exposition about things that could be handled intuitively, while missing key bits of setup. The fact that the gravity globe is never explained in episode one makes what would actually have been a quite cool cliffhanger into a bit of a “blink and you miss it” moment.
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Dark Water Review

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This review was brought to you by 169 people on Patreon. There’s still one left, if you want to be number 170.

This was always going to be the tricky one. Part one of two. I’ve actually never written a review of a partial story before. I mean, arguably An Unearthly Child versus 100,000 BC, but they are by distinctly different writers, and have their origins in different places. My point there was that it does make sense to treat them differently, even if it also makes sense to treat them as one. I sort of did with End of Time Part One and End of Time Part Two, but that was a slightly joke. So I think this is the first time I’ve ever really tried to think extensively about the aesthetic goals and merits of individual parts of multi-part stories. 
Let’s start with the raves on Twitter, and the GallifreyBase ratings, which are 84.62% in the 8-10 range, 36.53% at a 10/10. Which is around what you’d expect a huge season finale to get if it’s working well, honestly. And as always with Moffat, it’s about expectations. In more ways than one. Everything that’s going to make headlines assembled the way you’d expect. Everything that’s based on clues given away in early episodes goes how you’d think. Yep, the Cybermen are using the dead. Sure enough, the Invasion homage is the cliffhanger. Missy is indeed the Master, which is a twist, but hardly the most shocking of them. The episode’s biggest twist came at the very beginning. 
It’s a good twist. Danny, the sublimely ordinary good man, turns out to have no secrets, and dies in the most ordinary, mundane, banal way imaginable. A plot contrivance par excellence, existing only to set a larger story in action. It’s played well – for all that “he was hit by a car, it came out of nowhere” is a classic lame twist, the decision to start with Clara frantic and surrounded by post-its explaining the past of the series, as though there’s some terrible secret she’s about to reveal, hides the twist perfectly.
And it’s a big enough premise to immediately escalate the stakes. Getting the volcano scene out of the way early, as Clara’s actually very clever and desperate attempt to get the Doctor to do the impossible for her when she needs it, works wonders as well. It’s a one-two punch that quickly and efficiently ratchets the tension up to a breaking point.
It’s also worth looking at these sequences in terms of just being brilliant. Clara’s betrayal is such a perfect encapsulation of her character, good and bad. But what really makes it is the Doctor’s reaction, and it’s the details of Peter Capaldi’s performance that really makes it. Moffat writes them a good scene. But part of what’s so good about it is that it gives them an incredibly large range of ways to play it. It’s just Capaldi, Coleman, and a familiar set. The emotional beats are all clear.
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