Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO 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 (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)

45

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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A Great, Great Partnership (The God Complex)

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No, no, that’s fine. I’ll find a different table. Really. It’s OK.
It’s September 17th, 2011. Pixie Lott has the number one slot with “All About Tonight,” with Olly Murs, Calvin Harris, and Ed Sheeran also charting. In news, a petrol pipeline explodes in Nairobi, killing 100, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is passed, putting an end to the practice of Prime Ministers getting to call for an election at a time they find strategically satisfying, and, on the day this story aired, a protest organized by Adbusters brought a thousand people to Zucotti Park in New York under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street.”
This last event did not end up getting any media coverage at the time, however, leaving plenty of room for everyone to pay attention to Doctor Who instead. And Doctor Who obliged, serving up a fairly marvelous episode with The God Complex. Let’s start with the less interesting bits, and build up to the real point. First of all, an obligatory complaint: the “Amy Williams” line is absolutely awful. Even if you try to pack in redemptive readings like that the Doctor is trying anything to break Amy’s faith in him so he can save her, the truth is that the episode doesn’t actually refute the Doctor. Of the writers on Doctor Who, it’s Whithouse who is most likely to go for a relatively unreformed deconstruction of the Doctor as a hero. This is someone who nicked a bit of Miracleman for a key scene in Being Human, so, you know, his influences are at least clear and consistent. And so the idea that the Doctor might not be a hero or worth having faith in isn’t something he pushes beyond the most superficial level in the script. In this regard, much as I like Whithouse as a writer, he’s behind the rest of the season, where Moffat has long since taken the “dark” hero notion on board and then moved past it. But that’s not a problem for the season – The God Complex ends up stating a set of positions that stories like A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song exist to surpass. It really does think it’s “I wasn’t talking about myself” line at the end is the height of thematic resonance. Which it isn’t, but it’s a useful stooge in that regard.
But within that, taking a character who had previously been defined in part by the fact that her marriage was “Mr. and Mrs. Pond” and not her husband’s name, because that’s just how it works for a character like Amy, and reverting her to her maiden name to put her in her proper place and disabuse her of these silly ideas she has is absolutely horrifying. And within this episode, that’s what happens. “Amy Williams” is treated as Amy’s “correct” identity, while Amelia Pond is a deviant little girl who’s too invested in fairy tales. It should never have seen transmission, and is, for my money, the single most misogynistic moment of the Moffat era, and possibly of the new series altogether.
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Saturday Waffling (August 9th, 2014)

30

So, first of all, I have a bit of nice news – after polling the people who have backed the Patreon to fund reviews of Season Eight, the consensus is that people want the reviews to be open for everyone to read, which means those will be posting right here, replacing the Waffling for Saturdays. I will get reviews together as fast as I reasonably can so that people can have a discussion thread for the episodes as well.

Given that the Patreon backers are being so nice, you might consider joining them, not least because my apartment just ran out of heating oil, which means that half the Patreon is already spoken for, because it’s always bloody something isn’t it.

I want to talk a bit about the reviews at some point, if only to muse about the difference between writing TARDIS Eruditorum and writing episode reviews as the season goes, and on what criticism that’s based in the immediate present ought do differently than criticism that’s historicized, but that may be a next week topic anyway. In fact, I think that’s probably best.

Meanwhile, the Williams book has one and a bit extra essays left, which I’m hoping to take out this weekend.

As for talking, as we’re now exiting the “big summer blockbuster” phase of the year, what was your favorite big film of the summer? What did you actually see? What did you opt to pass up? And is there anything left this year you’re really looking forward to, film-wise?…

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The First Flower Grew (The Last War in Albion Part 56: America a Prophecy, The Demon)

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This is the sixth 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. 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’s first arc on Swamp Thing was a massive success, and DC immediately began a new promotional campaign for the book. Moore, Bissette, and Totleben, meanwhile, moved on to their second arc, the first issue of which drew its title by a print by Francesco Goya called “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” This print shares thematic ground with the work of Goya’s British contemporary William Blake, who wrote of Ahania, the female emanation of the mad god Urizen, who represents a higher form of intellect than the monstrous attempt to condemn the world to single vision. In Blake’s The Foar Zoas, Ahania was separated from Urizen and fell into a slumber, until eventually Ahania cast off her death clothes.
“It’s where Darkseid fell through existence to his doom. Leaving hell deserted. And there, in his absence, the first flower grew. So begins the myth of a new creation. Apokolips reborn as New Genesis.” – Grant Morrison
She folded them up in care in silence & her brightening limbs / Bathd in the clear spring of the rock then from her darksom cave / Issud in majesty divine Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy clapping his hands his feet his radiant wings / In the immense as when the Sun dances upon the mountains / A shout of jubilee in lovely notes responding from daughter to daughter / From son to Son as if the Stars beaming innumerable / Thro night should sing soft warbling filling Earth & heaven / And bright Ahania took her seat by Urizen in songs & joy.” For both Goya and Blake, in other words, some sense of balance is required – it is just that Goya fears the passions of man running unchecked, while Blake fears the prison of law and religion weaved by reason. 
Figure 414: Sullen fires glowing across
the Atlantic to America’s shore. (America
a Prophecy Copy A, Object 5, written 1793,
printed 1795)
And in another sense, Blake is closer still to Goya, on an almost literal level. It is, after all, once Urizen has been bound by Los, the fallen, human form of Urizen’s opposite number, Urthona, that Los’s emanation, Enitharmon, is split from him and gives birth to the monstrous serpent Orc. Orc, within Blake’s mythology, is the spirit of revolution, and makes his most substantial appearance in America a Prophecy, the first of Blake’s three “continental prophecies,” in which Blake reworks the recent political history of the world into another iteration of his mythology.
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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)

111

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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