Eruditorum Press

This is not a place of honor

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.

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Outside the Government 19: Doctor Who Confidential Redux

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It is strange in some ways to realize that Doctor Who Confidential has been going on this whole time. It’s not, after all, like anybody watched it. I mean, a few people did, but it was only ever available in the UK, and, well, how to put this nicely… it’s not like it was ever very good. It was fun enough in its first year when it was only a half-hour long and focused as much on the series’ history as on the making of the new series, but the decision to expand it to a forty-five minute format just as they were properly running out of nostalgia trips was, to say the least, puzzling. Instead Doctor Who Confidential became a sort of generic making of show.
But even given that, there are some problems. The making of Doctor Who is indeed interesting, but it’s not necessarily ten-and-a-half hours of interesting for every single year of production. There are only so many times poor Danny Hargreaves can demonstrate styrofoam debris and air cannons while maintaining any sort of semblance of keeping things fresh, and only so many compelling scenes that can be wrung out of Ailsa Berk teaching people in monster costumes how to do the correct funny walk for this week’s episode. As a result, by the end Doctor Who Confidential had become a sort of hodgepodge of strange things, such as the mildly infamous “Karen Gillian drives a car episode,” in which a significant amount of the episode was turned over to, well, Karen Gillian driving a car. But equally, it’s why there exists a montage of the women playing the Weeping Angels dancing to Lady Gaga, which is self-evidently a thing that should exist. (And to their credit, they did montages for both “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” which is good, as picking which song would make the better choice is nearly impossible.)
But let’s pull back the lens a little and look at what Doctor Who Confidential is, or at least, was. First and foremost it was a program on BBC Three, a channel that exists specifically to pull a “younger” audience. It’s going slightly too far to say that Confidential was a children’s program, but it was, with its ostentatious use of pop music and position on BBC Three, clearly meant as a program for teenage fans of the series. In this regard, it fits into a long tradition of Doctor Who being a program with a very, very well-documented production. There’s a generation of people working on Doctor Who who point to the Terrance Dicks/Malcolm Hulke book The Making of Doctor Who as a huge and seminal influence on their being interested in television. Hell, Peter Capaldi became interested in television in part because of things like Barry Letts responding to fan letters by sending him scripts and his interview with Bernard Lodge for a fanzine. So it seems almost certain that there will be another generation who learned how television was made and became fascinated with it because they saw Doctor Who getting made every week on Confidential.
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Deep Breath Review

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This review is supported the kind patronage of 140 people at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider becoming a patron and supporting future reviews. 

If anyone cares, the number one single is Nico and Vinz’s “Am I Wrong.”

Let’s work from Cardiff, shall we? It’s a late summer day, with the temperature peaking at 16 degrees, and not really moving far off of that. The episode starts at 7:50, a carefully chosen timeslot that sits ten minutes before even the earliest of childrens’ bedtimes, making it nearly impossible to keep them from watching. Twenty-nine minutes in, just as the Doctor is realizing that he’s Scottish and the story finally starts to bother with the plot, the sun sets. (In London, it’s twelve minutes earlier, just as Clara is seeing through Vastara’s veil and the Doctor is climbing up on the rooftops.) Fifteen minutes from the end, as the Doctor asks the cyborg what he thinks of the view, civil twilight gives way to nautical twilight. (In London, it’s right as Clara passes out because she can’t hold her breath anymore.) US transmission skews later – I’m typing this bit half an hour before transmission, right as the sun is going down, so it’ll start in civil twilight and continue through to the nighttime proper.

This feels like something that the series, under Moffat, has been working towards and never quite getting. Moffat has been complaining about the problematic relationship between barbecue forks and Doctor Who ever since the end of Season Five, and now, finally, he gets a run of episodes that starts in the dying days of summer and will run right through the height of autumn, before coming back for one last flourish for the solstice. And the first one transmits right across the sunset, starting right in the golden hour. The orange glow of the late day and the coming autumn permeates the episode. So this is our mission statement: a crepuscular series.

The early returns seem largely positive. A fair number of people seem unimpressed with anything that isn’t Peter Capaldi, though virtually everyone is at least on the same page about him, it seems. GallifreyBase’s episode poll is around 72% rating it as an 8-10, with only six people proclaiming that they’d rather listen to a tape loop of leaf blower noise, which is pretty good, but it’s worth noting that of that 72%, 31.87% are picking 8/10. So well-liked but not an insta-classic, apparently.

Which seems fitting. This is an episode with a lot to do. A premiere of a new Doctor is as much about showing the potential of the rest of the season as it is about being brilliant in its own right. Ultimately, more important than whether people absolutely adore Deep Breath is whether they stick around for Into the Dalek. And clearly, this is something the production team is mindful of, as they decided to just drop the inevitable Dalek story into the second slot to try to offer as big an opening one-two punch as they could possibly manage.…

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Let Them Bleed Now (The Last War in Albion Part 58: Rape)

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This is the eighth 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UKhere. Finding volume 3-6 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 third arc on Swamp Thing featured a tremendously disturbing scene in which it is revealed that Abby has been being raped by her dead uncle who has taken over her husband’s body. This is one of several instances of rape within Moore’s work, a point that has been controversial in the past, and which Moore has addressed at length.

“These precious things; let them bleed now. Let them wash away. These precious things; let them break their hold on me. ” –Tori Amos, “Precious Things”
Figure 427: The issue ends with Black Canary
saying, “liberated ladies aren’t supposed
to say things like this, Batman, but you
know what? You’re my hero!” as she kisses
him. (Written by Michael Fleischer, art by
Dick Giordano and Terry Austin, from The
Brave and the Bold #166, 1980)
Moore, after all, had already criticized the depiction of sexual violence in comics back in his “Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies” essay in The Daredevils, where he blasted the tendency for comics to “start dishing up evil, sordid little adult fantasies,” particularly highlighting the use of bondage. In that essay, Moore recalls “a particularly charming Michael Fleischer story that appeared in DC’s Brave and Bold [sic] during which the usually quite capable Black Canary spent almost the entire issue tied to a chair wearing only her underwear, while the villain of the piece delivered such memorable and sensitive dialogue as ‘you squirm so prettily, my dear.’” In the face of the use of sexual violence as a form of overt entertainment in which the reader is meant to take the same sort of pleasure as the sadist who is tying up nearly naked women, Moore’s decision to use rape to produce one of the single most horrific moments in his entire Swamp Thing run can, for all its genuine flaws, still reasonably be seen as a form of progress. 
The bigger problem, and one that hangs over every individual instance of Moore writing about rape without quite connecting directly with any of them, is that Moore’s commercial success would eventually lead to a wave of imitators who embraced his more explicit style while discarding trifling things like the underlying commitment to feminism that led Moore to want to depict rape as a serious and genuine object of horror.
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Comics Reviews (August 21st, 2014)

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Let’s try something different this week – instead of grades, a somewhat more idiosyncratic countdown from my least favorite thing I picked up this week to my pick of the week.

The Unwritten Apocalypse #8

Long a book I’ve meant to sit down with when it’s all done, that being the way in which Carey’s previous Lucifer worked best. It got some new momentum when it reset to #1 and added “Apocalypse” to its name, but at this point that momentum has fizzled, and I find myself wishing the book would get to its final arc, as it feels ready for it. Not unpleasant, but not entirely compelling either.

Fables #143

Well, at least the sense of an ending and of some scale is creeping back into the book, such that I’m prepared to believe that they’ll stick the landing. But I think it’s pretty clear this series is going to have ended up running some seventy-five issues longer than it should. It’s gotten to an annoying state of being too big to sell well in trade, and too many arcs were mediocrities. Buying out of a glorious sunk cost fallacy, basically, but it could yet work out.

Mighty Avengers #13

I scolded someone the other day for declaring that people oughtn’t refer to this book as the Black Avengers, and this issue largely proves my point, with a story that’s very much about race and American history. Which is not entirely what anyone would, on the surface, expect from a white British writer, but that is much of this book’s charm. And it has the single best last word of any book this week.

The Fade Out #1

Brubaker is always an odd one for me – he’s undeniably good, but his propensity for doing straight up, traditional genre pieces tends to leave me a bit cold. I still will buy any #1 with his name on it. Not sure I’ll go for #2 here, as this seems like a straight up noir book without much in the way of new ideas, but it’s very well executed, and if you have any love of noir (I can take it or leave it), this is probably your pick of the week.

Trees #4

This is increasingly just feeling like Ellis is trolling the readership. He’s said it might only go for one arc, but it’s unfathomable that this is actually a single arc story – it’s clearly structured as an ongoing. Ellis is, of course, more than capable of pulling off a surprise and making this work, and I’m certainly not criticizing it, but I am wary of it. Within this specific issue, meanwhile, are at least two great scenes. Interesting, and if you can go at it with a “journey is more important than the destination” attitude, it surely won’t disappoint, but I’m still wary.

New Avengers #23

Hickman plays to his strengths with a bunch of lovely character beats, followed by a twist that’s been a long time coming and that really, properly spices this book up a bit.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 31 (The Eternity Clock)

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Frezno has done such a nice job continuing The Nintendo Project that I felt like I should let him play on this blog too.

1985 was a very eventful year, when one looks back on it from a broad perspective. Swap out your wide-angle lens and zero in towards two of the important moments of that year, for our purposes. In England, Doctor Who was supposedly struggling to entertain the masses. The Doctor, he of bright coat and bravado, faced off against deadly foes like the Bandrils and the tree mines. The final straw came just as Peri Brown was running away from a cannibal with bushy eyebrows. The program failed to get a passing Grade and was put on hiatus. As has been noted, this was the first major blow to Doctor Who in the 1980’s. One could argue it was the blow that eventually killed it. It got better, though.

You know what else got better? Video games. 1983 saw video games in North America face their own Ragnarok at the hands of over-indulgent capitalists. Howard Scott Warshaw, unfairly maligned man that he is, did what he could. The world ended. It was up to a red and white box from a land that did not exist now. It transcended the sea between worlds and became corporeal, becoming a magical grey box that was bigger on the inside. The Nintendo Entertainment System was born. Video games existed again. Put the wide-angle lens back on, and zoom out to track the course of history that stems from this grey box’s success. The NES gives way to the Super NES. Plans are made to give the Super NES an upgrade, a CD expansion. Nintendo works in tandem with Sony on this, but creative differences cause it to never happen, relegated to a different universe where we all have pods in our ears. Sony, to its credit, uses this knowledge to create the Playstation. Its success gives way to Playstation 2, and then to Playstation 3… and that leads us back to a world where the anoraks have taken over the asylum since the novel days, and Doctor Who is The Biggest Thing On Television. Naturally, licenses are made and agreed upon, the ever-present billowing dress of Lady Capitalism securing the creation of something that will make plenty of money. This, friends, is Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock.

It would probably help, then, to define what The Eternity Clock is. Aside from being a mystical video game Macguffin to be collected. Doctor Who dabbled in video games before. None of them really turned out to be all that good. This isn’t even the first Doctor Who video game since it came back; there were a handful of adventure games with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond running around solving puzzles. The Eternity Clock goes in a different direction, and turns the Doctor Who video game into a cinematic platformer, not unlike Prince of Persia or Another World. Really, it’s the best direction one could have gone with when considering a Doctor Who video game.…

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The Angels Have the Phonebox (The Angels Take Manhattan)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a frankly alarming
haircut.
It’s September 29th, 2012. Script are at number one with “Hall of Fame,” with Psy, Pink, Ne-Yo, and, with an impressive seven letters, Example also charting. In news, resolution is reached regarding the lockout of NFL referees, and, the day after this story airs, the Jimmy Saville story starts to break as it comes out that ITV is planning on airing a documentary accusing him of being a pedophile. 
On television today, however, the last of five episodes in Doctor Who’s 2012 mini-season. The decision to frame the first portion of Season Seven with two returning monsters is interesting. Asylum of the Daleks served as Moffat’s most aggressive feint, at least in terms of the audience, with everything it was sold as disappearing in a haze of Jenna Louise Coleman. But if that story was aggressively forward-looking, here we get the flip side: a story that cannot possibly look forward. All of this is ultimately framed by the paratext: by the fact that even before Asylum of the Daleks aired, Coleman had been announced as the next companion and the departure of the Ponds had been set for this story. To some extent this has been the major problem with this entire run of episodes: it’s clearly just 2012’s filler before we get to 2013, where the main event is, both because of the fundamentally forward-looking nature of the hype machine that fuels Doctor Who and because 2013 – 50 = 1963. But as with Asylum of the Daleks, this paratext is fundamental to understanding the structure of The Angels Take Manhattan, an episode that from the first frame only makes sense if the audience goes in knowing that it’s Amy Pond’s departure story. 
Equally important, however, are the Weeping Angels. “I know how they work,” River says at one point, in a line that is more revealing than it initially appears. The Angels have always been defined, after all, as a game. The heart of their success is that they recognize that the true form of a Doctor Who monster is simply as a set of rules, and that the art comes in telling a story where those rules pay off. The Angels work according to a very simple rule, and, more importantly, one that fundamentally serves as a metaphor for the medium in which they are ensconced. They are, in every sense, governed by the act of looking. Combine with a solid visual design and you have a hit.
But the story draws equally heavily from Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, which quietly reworked large swaths of the Angels’ conception, expanding on the fundamental link between the Angels and televisual storytelling with its chilling injunction that the image of an Angel becomes an Angel. This tied the Angels inexorably into Doctor Who’s qlippothic tradition, which is to say, they represent the border of narrative possibility: an already collapsed and decayed story that is at once called into existence and fundamentally unspeakable within the confines of the existing narrative.
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Breakfast Blog Closing Imminently, Replaced By Craven Capitalist Consumption (A Prequel)

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I’ll admit it, I’m properly excited.

I liked where Doctor Who was going at the end of the Matt Smith era, even if I was at moments ambivalent about precisely where it was. And it feels like the change of Doctors is being used to take a breath, get in under the hood, and finish making the show they’ve been trying to make since 2011.

I think Capaldi’s a fantastic actor. He’s got a slight ostentatiousness to him that sets him apart from most of British television, where he spends most of his time lurking. He has the strange quality of underselling everything while still stealing scenes, which is of course the central joke of his ludicrously oversold Malcolm Tucker.

I still believe in Steven Moffat, in a very “I hitched my heart and soul on this series a long time ago, and I’m seeing it through to the very end” way. I remain calmly convinced that this will be seen as one of the great eras of Doctor Who, whatever may come in two or three years. I like the infusions of new talent, I mostly like the old talent they’re retaining or bringing back, and I like the sense of confidence it feels like the show has.

And I like that I don’t have to do it for TARDIS Eruditorum, to be perfectly honest. I like that I can see the end of that project, and that for a solid chunk of that end I get to be absolutely immersed in a hopefully fantastic chunk of my favorite show.

There was never any way I wasn’t going to write about it at all, though, now was there? And the exact means took me a while. I thought about doing it on Tumblr or somewhere out of the way, quietly. And I thought about trying to work for a larger site. Slate was very nice last year. And ultimately, I decided to just run a Patreon and do them for, well, you guys. The sorts of people who come to this blog on a Saturday. Which I tend to assume is pretty coextensive with my fanbase, such as it is. “My precious quasi-fame,” as Joss Whedon had it.

So here we are, a week from curtains up. $236.75 per episode, at the moment, according to the Patreon, which you are enthusiastically reminded you can still back if you would like to help support my decadent phase, as I eke dollar after dollar out of my tiny legion of fans to sustain my lifestyle of excess and grandeur. No, seriously, I need to buy heating oil this month. That shit’s expensive.

So, the plan is that reviews will go up here as soon as I can get them done. Which is reliant on how I watch the episodes, which, see, here’s the thing. I don’t have cable. It’s expensive, and I don’t actually watch much television. So I just buy Doctor Who on an iTunes Season Pass, which delivers the episodes to my hard drive in a way that’s trivial to output to the TV, and I’m happy as a clam.…

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All The Black is Ripe in Green (The Last War in Albion Part 57: The Burial, Rape)

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This is the seventh 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding volume 3-6 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 resurrected the Jack Kirby creation Etrigan for his second arc of Swamp Thing, taking particular relish in writing the demon’s rhyming dialogue, such as an extended monologue in sonnet form beginning “The toys about the nursery are set, for idiot chaos to arrange at whim”

“God will bury you. Nature will bury you. Time will bury your bones unseen. Total and absolute. Infinite amplitude. Till all the black is ripe in green.” –Seeming, “The Burial”
“The toys about the nursery are set, for idiot chaos to arrange at whim. He drools and ruins lives, his chin is wet and old or young, it matters not to him. The gracious lady and her root-choked beast have come to save the innocents from harm, to spare them from the monkey’s dreadful feast. What noble souls they have! What charm! And see! The children’s uproar brings to life their guardians: that most dedicated breed! Yet she betrays her husband, he his wife, though both of them are kind to babes in need. Should innocence be mollycoddled thus? I fail to see the reason for the fuss,” he says, before continuing with a few more stanzas. It is perhaps no surprise that Moore would excel at writing Etrigan, given that his speech patterns allowed Moore to slip into the iambic rhythm he usually relies on to make a passage bigger and more portentous. 
Figure 421: Matt Cable, dying from a
drunken car crash, is possessed by a demonic
force in the form of a housefly. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John
Totleben, from Saga of the Swamp Thing #27,
1984. Click to enlarge.)
The second arc introduced other sizable elements of Moore’s run as well, however. On a story level, it continues a plot that Moore inherited from Pasko regarding Matt Cable and his descent into alcoholism. Moore has Cable get into a drunken car crash that kills him, allowing a mysterious spirit appearing in the form of a fly that offers to save him and that then crawls into his mouth, seemingly possessing him. On a practical level, it introduced a new editor for Moore in the form of Karen Berger, who would edit the remainder of his Swamp Thing run before going on to oversee the recruitment of other British writers and artists to create comics in a similar vein.
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Comics Reviews (August 14th, 2014)

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All-New X-Men #30

Faced with the need to fill an issue before “Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier” wraps up and screws with the status quo, Bendis delivers what one might call a classic issue of X-Men, which is to say, one with no plot and all character beats. This is the strange parody of the X-Men as a franchise: it is in practice a relationship book/soap opera that occasionally degenerates into usually borderline incomprehensible sci-fi. So this, at least, is playing to its strengths. It’s the first issue where I’ve liked X-23, and the Jean/Emma stuff is quite solid too. Still not entirely enamored with Bendis’s take on Emma, but look, this is what X-Men comics exist for, so no reason to complain. A

Amazing Spider-Man #5

Dan Slott continues to be very good at writing Spider-Man. Much like All-New X-Men, this is a calm and efficient execution of what you’d expect a Spider-Man book to be, and with a solid cliffhanger. All the same, I’m feeling a bit lost in it – my decision to skip Superior Spider-Man because I was unimpressed with the premise feels like it’s not paying off, and like the renumbering to #1 is not entirely successful. It’s not that I don’t follow the plot, but I’m not engaging very thoroughly with much of the secondary cast. Perhaps I’m just not big on Spider-Man right now. Don’t know. But this may be one I drop soon to save some money. B+ on the merits, but a personal C.

Captain Marvel #6

I still suspect this first arc could have lost an issue, as it really bogged down for me in the middle, but the arc really has come together at the tail end, and this is very satisfying. I suspect it would work well even if you’ve not read the previous issues. There’s a lot of buzz on this book, and a really passionate fanbase, and this is an excellent place to try it and see if it’s to your taste. Currently it’s comic book sci-fi with a well-conceived lead in the “realistic psychological take on a good soldier” style that, for instance, Greg Rucka does so well with. Worth checking out. A

God is Dead: The Book of Acts Omega

Bought for the Kieron Gillen story, which is short, ludicrous, and an attempt by Gillen to get people to stop pretending Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis have a monopoly on comedic gratuitousness. It’s a nice sketch for a possible series, and I’d certainly like to see more if Gillen has ideas in this universe, but twelve pages is only long enough to get some gruesome jokes in, and not long enough to really establish the merits of the ideas. I can’t say with a straight face that it’s worth $5.99 for this story alone, and the other two stories are not that good. The main God is Dead arc fails utterly to convince me to try the book again, and Justin Jordan’s “The Great God Pan” is frankly horrible.…

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It Isn’t Really a Disease at All (Closing Time)

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My god, there really is an action figure set based on “Children
of the Revolution.”
It’s September 24th, 2011. One Direction are at number one with “What Makes You Beautiful,” while Pixie Lott, Example, Calvin Harris, and Maroon 5 also chart, the latter continuing to just hover at #2 with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, the US policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is finally repealed in favor of letting gay and lesbian service members serve openly, the NBA lockout results in cancelling a bunch of preseason games, and Occupy Wall Street starts getting some press coverage.
While on television, it’s the sequel to The Lodger, namely Closing Time. “You know that absolutely brilliant thing you did? Do it again” is, as assignments to creative people go, something of the biggest nightmare imaginable. Almost certainly, after all, you used the best ideas you had for the concept on the first go-around. Especially in the realm of something comedic, where you’ve almost certainly done a winnowing process the first time around, since the way being funny tends to work is that you try about five to fifty times as many ideas as you actually need so that you can cut the 80-98% that aren’t actually good enough. So the comedy sequel is an absolutely brutal thing.
And that applies very well here. So much of why The Lodger works is that it gets in, it executes a couple of great gags about the idea of the Doctor trying to live with a perfectly ordinary person, it throws in a romantic comedy plot, and then it finishes up and makes way for the Pandorica. It doesn’t need five minutes more, little yet forty-five. And in a real sense, a sequel is a terrible idea, because it cannot possibly live up to the original. All it can be is “the next best forty-five minutes of Craig/Doctor jokes.” 
And so from the start, Gareth Roberts makes an extremely sensible decision and makes this a different premise. This isn’t “the Doctor moves in with Craig again.” Indeed, in many ways Craig is a completely different character such that, other than a single scene in which he pouts at the Doctor, he’s a basically functional companion who broadly speaking understands how Doctor Who stories work. Given that the entire premise of The Lodger was that the Doctor was living in the spare room of a romantic comedy and mucking everything up, the change to a setup in which the primary guest star is now good at being in a Doctor Who story is such that it barely seems to count as a sequel.
So instead, the story focuses on the fact that Craig’s a father now. What’s interesting here is that this really doesn’t follow from The Lodger in any particularly logical sense. Fatherhood is not a logical follow-up to any of the issues there except inasmuch as sometimes when people fall in love there are babies. Craig isn’t out of character as such, but precisely none of the concerns that defined him in The Lodger are still in play here.
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