Eruditorum Press

None of you understand. We’re not locked in here with you. We just lost our keys.

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 (August 7th, 2014)

9

Right. Fun week. Pick of the week’s idiosyncratic, I’ll freely admit.

Bravo, by Greg Rucka

Not a comic, but certainly adjacent, Greg Rucka, writer of numerous very good comics, one of which is reviewed later in this comic, has a novel out as of a few weeks ago. The second in his Jad Bell series, which he seems to be focusing on now in his prose writing, which has, at other times, involved his phenomenal spy series Queen and Country and his quite solid PI/procedural Addicus Kodiak series, which executes a hilarious on the spot conversion from being a good old-fashioned detective series where the detective is a private bodyguard to suddenly being an assassin espionage procedural Tom Clancy sort of thing about human trafficking. Astonishingly weird.

In any case, it’s Rucka on one of his strongest themes, which is gender. The first Jad Bell was a kind of cute little “action movie in a theme park” book that played with conventions in some neat ways, but felt to me like a bit of a slender thing, so it took me a while to get around to this. Was pleasantly surprised – did some neat things with perspective and overlapping narratives, and ends up being a strange sort of romance between two heroes of ever-so-slightly different genre movies, while the political world of the book executes a series of disasters and big events that feels like you could suddenly have an important character with the surname Carlyle turn up and the plot could carry on seamlessly to something else. If you like Greg Rucka’s work in general, do check this out. And to be clear, I am very much interested in Greg Rucka’s work in general. If nothing else, his work is increasingly a series of very smart leftist takes on some genres with traditionally right-wing leanings, and that’s a really interesting aesthetic project.

(I really wish he were British. I’m half tempted to pretend via Queen and Country, but it’s cheating. I get him for 52 and a bit of Final Crisis, and that’s it. Oh, and Morrison’s Batman, a little. J.H. Williams is a background figure in that, and I really can’t ignore Williams.) A

God is Dead Book of Acts: Alpha

I admit, I’m not really reading God is Dead. After the issues Hickman had any hand in, I basically completely lost track of the plot, and wasn’t enjoying it enough to bother. Jill is still enjoying it, so I’ll freely admit the problem is me. But in any case, the bit anyone really cares about here is Alan Moore’s story, in which he finally explains Glycon for everybody, and makes a Honey Boo Boo joke in the process. Gratuitous as all hell, utterly “for fans only,” and in no way worth the $5.99 price point. A+ (Pick of the Week)

Guardians of the Galaxy

I am Groot. A

Lazarus #10

And Rucka again. Lazarus has been shockingly good. I think it may be Rucka’s best-ever work, or at least, it has a chance to be when it all shakes out.…

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Yes, I Shall Come Back (The Girl Who Waited)

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For once I’ve picked the image because it illustrates a point and not to make
a bad joke about it. So I’ll just give you a bad joke with nothing to do with
the image. What’s brown and sticky? A stick.
It’s September 10th, 2011. Example are at number one with “Stay Awake,” with Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, Olly Murs, and Calvin Harris also charting. There’s not exactly been a ton of news in the last twenty-four hours, with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces declaring a state of emergency, along with Barack Obama, the former covering Egypt, the latter Texas. While on television, it’s The Girl Who Waited. 
The Girl Who Waited marks one of a handful of times that more or less the entire Doctor Who fandom was properly blown away and surprised. Nothing about Tom McRae’s previous Doctor Who story, the largely unloved Tennant Cybermen two-parter, really suggested that he was capable of this story. And so when McRae was announced as the writer, a large swath of the audience was not particularly enthused. It wasn’t until the title, which magnificently baited the audience by drawing unapologetically on the Moffat era’s established iconography and mythos, that things started to seem a bit more interesting, and not until the revelation of the story’s real premise, the heavily aged Amy Pond, that it started to become clear that, far from being a dud filler episode marking time between the big River episodes on either side of this half-season, The Girl Who Waited was a stunningly interesting episode in its own right.
First and foremost, The Girl Who Waited is a piece of superlative character work. There’s a school of thought, not entirely unjustified, that suggests that Karen Gillan’s interest in Amy declined over the course of the show, and that she phoned in large swaths of Season Six and more or less the entirety of Season Seven. There’s another that says that Gillan was actually fine, but that Moffat ran out of things to write about the character, hence her spending most of Season Six as fridge bait. This school of thought is, as we’ve seen, self-evidently ludicrous, but it’s worth acknowledging as well. Both, ultimately, end up treating Amy as something of a problem companion in this period. But in many ways, both lines of criticism almost necessarily have to avoid this story (and it’s telling, I think, that the “Moffat is an arch-misogynist” crowd mostly steers around this story in their criticisms) in order to work.
Certainly, whatever one might say about her in Season Seven, Gillan is absolutely on fire here, managing to distinguish Young Amy and Old Amy as real and distinct characters through a host of subtle but deliberate ways. Old Amy carries her body differently, speaks with a slightly different timbre, and genuinely, properly feels like a different character to Young Amy. The entire episode is set up to live or die by the strength of Gillan’s performance, and she rises to the occasion magnificently in a way that anchors everything around her.
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Miracle Day and Death

, , 15

Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues. She’s also my wife, and would be as happy as I would be if you backed my Patreon campaign for weekly episode reviews of Season Eight of Doctor Who. Then come back here and read her being righteously and beautifully angry. 
It’s November 28th, 2013. Martin Garrix’s “Animals” tops the charts only to be ousted by Lily Allen’s “Somewhere Only We Know” two days later. Elsewhere in the world, mass protests are occurring in Thailand as tensions between the opposition party and the prime minister’s family (read: his exiled brother) mount and, apparently, The New York Times has shown it’s first front-page nipple. So there’s that. 
On TV: in a world in which no one can die, a young woman who has suffered what would formerly have been a fatal blood clot in her lungs. She is pregnant when this happens and is currently connected to all manner of drains and tubes and medical equipment in order to allow this fetus to gestate in her essentially dead body. She and the fetus she is carrying were deprived of oxygen thanks to that blood clot and her husband and parents look on in horror at the entire ordeal. Both the young woman and her husband were paramedics and understood the limits of what modern medicine could do, neither of them wanted her preserved this way. The Miracle destroyed any autonomy in death this young woman would have and should have had. 
Except it wasn’t the Miracle that caused this. It was us. Her name was Marlise Munoz and she was 33 years old when she died. Her husband did everything right, but there was nothing to be done. She was brain dead. But, the definition of death for John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas was somewhat more… flexible. They kept her heart beating for weeks because of a loophole in the law stating that life support could not be revoked from a pregnant woman despite her wishes. It was only when the hospital was sued for the “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse” and they admitted that the fetus was developing “abnormally” that Marlise was allowed to rest.
Miracle Day goes out of its way to make a parallel of our world, a world in which this could happen. It builds a platform for an argument about the treatment of illness, dying and death in our culture. It meticulously constructs a modest proposal indicating the natural extreme of our death-denying culture. So, after all that effort, what does Miracle Day end up saying about death? Well, it says nothing at all.
No, that is perhaps a bit harsh and untrue. Miracle Day clearly says that the way we treat the sick and the dying is bad and we should feel bad. Which is worth examining.
There is an inherent classism in healthcare on a global scale. Despite the long list of countries who have decided that healthcare is a basic human right, globally, healthcare is available only to those who have the means.
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Saturday Waffling (August 2nd, 2014)

26

After a couple of people suggested it, I decided to try crowdfunding Season Eight reviews. So, if you are interested in a weekly column about Season Eight of Doctor Who as it airs, in which I will engage in almost certainly wrong speculation like any other punter and attempt to analyze television on the fly, I’m doing it as a Patreon campaign. It’ll run exactly twelve weeks, charging you a dollar every week if you back it. And if enough people back it, I’m throwing free ebooks at all backers, so it’s hopefully a pretty good deal.

I haven’t worked out the exact logistics yet, but expect that reviews will be posted in a manner that will allow for discussion, and that the Saturday Wafflings for the twelve weeks that Doctor Who is on will also be open threads about the episode, so people can discuss here or wherever. And I’m probably going to participate in both threads, so if you can’t or don’t want to pay $12, you’ll still probably hear my thoughts. Might get around to linking my Tumblr as well, where I’m sure I’ll end up discussing them.

I feel a little odd doing this one, to be honest. but equally, to be honest, I’m going to have one book out this year compared to four last year, and the Last War in Albion Kickstarter was half the Eruditorum one (not a surprise in the least, or a problem), and it’s always something with money, so while we’re by no means in any seriously bad situation, we could also use a kind of profitable thing, so, here it is. A thing people will hopefully enjoy in exchange for a small amount of money. You can back it here. Thanks very much if you do. I appreciate it. 

Working on Williams-era essays. Being kind of obstinately lazy about it, mostly because it’s been an incredibly hectic few months and I’m enjoying a week or two of not having much to do. But it’s starting to itch at me, so I expect mad productivity will arrive again soon. So far I’ve got four done – Festival of Death, one on the nature of the Guardians, the “Now My Doctor,” and the commissioned essay – still got the Big Finish (probably Auntie Matter?) to do, as well as the Pop Between Realities on Target. Might end up throwing in some other 70s cop shows as well, although really, that essay exists to be a “the story thus far.” Might end up doing Target/Never Mind the Bollocks, Here Come the Sex Pistols. That would be a fun essay. And there’s one more thing that’s not quite a Time Can Be Rewritten, but will be very fun. Then it’ll be on to the extra material for the Logopolis book.

Since we’re on the subject of Season Eight, what are your thoughts on what’s been released so far? If you want to go so far as to discuss the Deep Breath leak or the script leaks, go ahead, but please no spoilers.…

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True Humanity Comes (The Last War in Albion Part 55: The Floronic Man, Goya)

, 7

This is the fifth 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 is available here. 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. Finding volume 2-6 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 changed everything about Swamp Thing (and many things about American comics in general) with his first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, in which he rewrote the character’s origin such that he was no longer a human being turned into a plant monster, but a mass of plant matter that mistook itself as a human being, and with the arc that followed, in which Swamp Thing battled Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, while grappling with his humanity or lack thereof. 
“I thought of Martin Heidegger and his idea that true humanity comes with not bowing to the external world. I decided then that I should never bow to my own morality.” – Alan Moore, Marvelman
Figure 406: The contrast between the red and
green worlds. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Saga of
the Swamp Thing #23, 1984)
But however much Swamp Thing may consider himself to be separate from Abby’s people, he is animate now, and accepts that his place is not to simply sink into the green, but to live in the swamps, experiencing the vibrant ecosystem, and the arc ends with a splash page of Swamp Thing standing, arms spread, greeting the rising sun. It is not, to be sure, a subtle ending. The didactic nature of Swamp Thing’s rhetorical defeat of the Floronic Man and his barbed question to Abby are in fact crashingly obvious, although in a way that productively flags the comic’s intentions going forward. Saga of the Swamp Thing, it is immediately clear, has become an ecologically minded comic. But what is subtler is the degree to which this stems out of Moore’s larger and more surprising decision, which is to spend quite a lot of effort sincerely exploring the question of what it would be like, from a psychological perspective, to be a walking plant. The entire ecology debate between Woodrue and Swamp Thing is framed as the practical applications of the more spiritual experiences both characters have within the Green. The second issue of the arc, entitled “Another Green World” (an homage to a Brian Eno song, as is relatively typical of Moore), demonstrates this well – it ends with Swamp Thing finally arriving to confront Woodrue, but this is ultimately framed as a response to and extension of Swamp Thing’s initial meditations on the fact that “there is a red and angry world.
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Comics Reviews (July 30th, 2014)

8

No pick of the week this week, as I can’t honestly recommend anything point blank on its own merits.

Avengers #33

I gather other people found the “Captain America hurtles further and further into the future” arc rather more aggravating than I have been – for me, the done-in-one style of it has at least partially covered for Hickman’s tendency to dramatically over-estimate how much of his overly elaborate mythos the reader will remember from issue to issue. But here we run aground – a hugely decompressed issue that consists almost entirely of Hickman’s “big ideas,” which, far from being his strong point, are, for me at least, rapidly being revealed as a kind of sad and pointless exercise that tarnish his books. D

Cyclops #3

Really sad to hear Rucka is off this imminently, as he was the selling point, and more to the point, as this is quite good, and I suspect it won’t be as good when Rucka is replaced. Nice character work. A bit of an exposition dump in the middle, but the start and finish are lovely, and I’m terribly excited for next issue. B+

Guardians of the Galaxy #17

Well, it ends at point B, having started at point A, and I suppose that’s about what you can say here. I’ve talked before about how Bendis periodically has issues that do not particularly recommend his approach to structure. Case in point. C

Hawkeye #19

It’s strange to watch the book that, as Tom Ewing has pointed out, clearly became the model for how Marvel was going to work, i.e. throw weird takes at the wall and see what sticks, and has become such utter, high profile awards bait also abandon all sense of a release schedule and to clearly be marked for conclusion as Fraction apparently walks off to creator owned books after the trainwreck that was Inhumanity.

In any case, this is a fascinating issue, although very much one that’s actively difficult to follow (to some real extent by design, and by interesting design, in that huge amounts of it are based on sign language. I’m not sure I enjoyed it particularly, but I respected it tremendously. No grade, as I can’t bring myself to criticize it, but I didn’t actually like t much either.

The Manhattan Projects #22

I looked at this issue and realized I have no idea what this book is about, cannot remember the plot, and that this, like every Hickman book I have ever invested in, has completely disappeared up its own asshole in a massive festival of pseudo-intellectual wankery. And then I dropped the book. F

The Massive #25

So here’s an abstract question – do you take points off for a book only actually getting around to paying off its premise over two years in? Because I feel like I’m finally reading the book I wanted to be reading when I started on The Massive, but I’m kind of bitter about it being issue #25.…

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Outside the Government: The Blood Line

, 20

It’s September 9th, 2011. Maroon 5 is at number one with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, India and Bangladesh resolve their border dispute, and a ferry disaster off the coast of Zanzibar kills 240 people. On television, meanwhile, Miracle Day finally wraps up with “The Blood Line.”
You can say this about “The Blood Line”: At least it’s clear that Russell T Davies had something to do with this one. Guessing who did what in a coauthored script is always a bit of a mug’s game, but the writing credits here make it at least somewhat easy to figure out what happened here. Story by Russell T Davies, Script by Davies and Espenson suggests that, in effect, this is by Davies in the same way that The Daleks’ Masterplan is by Terry Nation, which is to say that some notes and scenes were dropped off by cab at Espenson’s door and she proceeded to try to build an episode out of them.
Parts of it are unmistakably Davies, in other words, or at least, Espenson doing an impeccable Davies imitation. Gwen’s whole “the breath” speech is vintage Davies, mixing the structure of Rose’s “this is how I died” speech with content and spectacle that is exactly the sort of thing Davies writes and excels at. The underlying dynamic – a two-sided confrontation at opposite sides of the world, the “introduce blood at both ends” approach, the elevator access to Shanghai, and the basic theatrical “everybody in one room” setup of the finale – is also very Davies-esque, very much feeling like it came from the same mind that approached Rose’s departure from the image of “two levers” or Tennant’s regeneration from the image of the two-chambered box.
So the appearance is that of a story that Davies had a beginning and end in mind for, entrusted to other people for the middle, and kind of wandered away from entirely. This is not necessarily a surprise – it really does appear that Davies was burnt out on sci-fi by this point, and it’s telling the show he’s working on now, Cucumber, is one he’d been talking about while Miracle Day was still going out. This feels like the contractual obligation album. 
But for all of that, there’s an interesting underlying dynamic of the show. It starts feeling like Americanized Torchwood and ends feeling like a Welshed version of the generic American thriller. The final scene is a gratuitous tease for a fifth series that never came, but it also functions as a delightfully unsubtle queering of the show, where the ultra-generic American character who’s been a bit homophobic through the entire series finally gets queered by Jack. (And there’s some properly potent imagery in having immortality come from a blood transfusion – a sort of bizarre reverse-HIV image that feels like something amazing could have been done with it, although we obviously never got to explore it.) The breath is a marvelous image, and handling the tail end of Gwen’s monologue in a time-dilated reaction shot after the climax, unpacking a single breath into a long moment  right before everything goes to hell, is a great shot.
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Build High For Happiness (Night Terrors)

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Council estates are nothing to be scared of, unless you are frightened of inequality. 
– Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History
Oh boy, creepy children/dolls! I’ve never seen those before!
It’s September 3rd, 2011. Olly Murs is at number one with “Heart Skips a Beat,” with Calvin Harris, Maroon 5, and Emeli Slade also charting. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of news since “The Gathering.” Actually, literally the only thing I can find is that a plane belonging to the Chilean Air Force crashed, killing all twenty-one on board. And, of course, Night Terrors aired.
I have in the past come out on record as saying Night Terrors is my least favorite story of the new series. This sets up a somewhat awkward situation, in that the expectation becomes that I am now going to explain why it is my least favorite story of the new series, which I can do, but the answer is pretty underwhelming: because I enjoy watching it less than all the others. I know. Which is to say, if you’re looking for some definitive argument about why this is the absolute worst episode and Victory of the Daleks or The Sontaran Stratagem or 42 or Fear Her are superior, sorry. It’s just that if you told me I had to watch one of those six, I wouldn’t pick Night Terrors.
Nevertheless, I do think the episode has significant problems that are worth talking about. Although even there, I have to admit that some of the problems it has are not entirely it’s fault. First and foremost, it was painfully poorly served by the last minute decision to switch it with Curse of the Black Spot (a decision taken so late that Night Terrors is featured prominently in the post-Christmas Carol trailer). This proved problematic for two reasons, one of which should have been apparent at the time, the other one of which was wholly impossible to predict and, nevertheless, ultimately the larger problem with the story.
The foreseeable issue was largely structural. This is not what you would call a terribly complex story. It wears its intentions on its sleeve, or, at least, in its title. It’s supposed to be the scary one – the definitive take on the haunted house story. That’s its entire brief: be the extremely scary one. This was, ostensibly, why it was moved: because putting it in the first half of the season meant that essentially the entire first section of the season was scary, dark, and indoors, and by swapping it with Curse of the Black Spot they added a story that was scary, dark, and outdoors instead. But what this ended up doing was moving this story away from the position it would have originally had, where it would have, in effect, served as the definitive statement on how to do straightforward Doctor Who horror before a bunch of other stories started to change things around a bit. Even there it would have suffered coming after The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, which already changed the “scary Doctor Who” paradigm dramatically, but it would have been improved.
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Saturday Waffling (July 26th, 2014)

21

So, I finished the Swamp Thing chapter. 48,210 words. Which means that timber-munki was off by exactly one word. I was tempted to add a “very” somewhere just to make him spot on, but no – send me your e-mail (I’m snowspinner at gmail) and I’ll get you your omnibus.

In other news, I would like to, in a moment of possible hubris, announce my availability for any site or publication that would like episode reviews of Season Eight of Doctor Who, since I’m not doing those on Eruditorum. There are basically two directions I’m willing/interested in going with here. If you own or are friendly with a large-ish site – let’s define “large-ish” as “big enough to get press screening copies of episodes so that I can watch a few days early like I did last season when I was writing for Slate” – you can safely assume I will work for free. If you are a smaller site that can’t offer a perk like that, I would politely ask for a small fee. Everything is quite negotiable, however, so if you’d like me to do reviews for you, please, send me an e-mail and we’ll see what we can work out. Again, I’m snowspinner at gmail.

Which brings us to discussion topics of the week. Hm. Let’s go with “what news stories are you finding most interesting right now?” That’s one we haven’t done yet, I believe. And as this one risks prompting vigorous discussion, allow me to pre-emptively remind everyone that I greatly appreciate the civility and intelligence of my comments section, and will look dimly upon anyone who makes me feel like I should intervene in a discussion.…

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Anatomy Made People Kill Their Children (The Last War in Albion Part 54: The Anatomy Lesson)

, 11

This is the fourth 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 is available here. 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. Finding volume 2-6 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: After a first issue dedicated to resolving the outstanding issues from Marty Pasko’s run, Alan Moore began work on his vision of the title.
“The placques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold their bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children.” – Neil Gaiman
Figure 396: With Moore’s second issue,
he announced himself unequivocally
as one of the most important and creative
figures in comics.
Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, also known as “The Anatomy Lesson,” is a regular on critics’ lists of the best single issues in the history of comics. This is entirely understandable. Upon release it was a revelation to the handful of readers who were actually buying Saga of the Swamp Thing, and its impact upon them (and upon DC editorial, who began aggressively promoting the title in the wake of Moore’s early issues) is largely responsible for how Moore took a book that was near cancellation and turned it into one of the gems of DC’s line. Beyond that, however, “The Anatomy Lesson” is simply a brilliant comic. Even over thirty years later, when almost every trick and device Moore employs has become every bit as much of a comic book cliche as the twenty-year-old Stan Lee style that Moore championed moving on from, the comic buzzes with power, its sense of freshness and originality undimmed by its countless imitators. It is visibly and transparently a work of genius – a shot across the bow at the precise moment in Moore’s career where he most needed to demonstrate just how good he was. 
Under the hood, of course, “The Anatomy Lesson” is simply “A Rag, a Bone, a Hank of Hair” wrapped in a Future Shock. Moore is in many ways straightforwardly repeating the start of his run on Captain Britain here, killing the main character in an initial story focused on wrapping up inherited plot lines and then reintroducing him in his second story. Like “A Rag, a Bone, a Hank of Hair,” “The Anatomy Lesson” spends much of its time paralleling a forensic and clinical analysis of the main character’s dead body with an account of the character’s origin and basic concept.
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