Eruditorum Press

A magical ritual to pay our rent

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:

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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Comics Reviews (7/24/14)

14

Amazing Spider-Man #4

Perfectly competent new character introduction, but I honestly can’t think of much to say about it past that. Introducing characters is easy. Using them interestingly is the real test. B+

Daredevil #6

Hm. So, Waid’s Daredevil, at its genesis, was about getting the character away from the shadow of Frank Miller. And man, that shadow looms over this issue with its suggestion that Daredevil’s father was abusive and the return of focus to Daredevil’s mother, which was very much a Miller invention. And yet this is also doing goofy adventure fun, and setting up a trip to Wakanda. Which is… I mean, it’s easy to be nervous when the next issue is called “Law of the Jungle.” Plus there’s a lot of sharp political stuff here. All in all, it’s a strange issue that doesn’t quite tip its hand about where it’s going, which is a lot more interesting than Daredevil has been in a while. B+

Doctor Who (Eleventh Doctor) #1

Oh, good – this is the first Al Ewing coming in the list (Al Ewing and Rob Williams, in fact, but I’m not familiar enough with Williams to talk about him in the general case). That’s good – he’s got three books out this week, but I want to talk about this one first. Ewing’s an interesting writer for me. First of all, he’s a long-time fan and Kickstarter backer, full disclosure. And he’s a solid comics writer. He hasn’t, for my money, had his big iconic series yet, but he’s also yet to write anything that didn’t work for me, and I’m really looking forward to the first project where he really nails his colors to the mast and shows what he’s capable of. (I should note I haven’t read his British work yet, only his Marvel stuff.)

And, I mean, the licensed Doctor Who comic was never going to be it. But damn, this is really impressive. it’s easy to do crap with a licensed property like Doctor Who – you get very little room to say anything major or significant about it, because that’s left for the television series. So you’re left with very self-contained, inward focused stories, or very sterile continuity romps.

Ewing and Williams manage to do neither of these, instead telling a story that’s really quite compelling. There are a lot of really good tricks here – a deft use of narration that gives it a sense of size and scope, a really tight theme, a fantastically well-defined character. The result is something that feels like the best bits of the Virgin era – where the grandeur of the Doctor is paired with the everyday in a really compelling, interesting way. There’s a moment where Ewing drops from the narration for a moment, as the Doctor comes back to the main character, who’s clearly (to the reader) suffering from depression. They chased an alien for a bit, then the Doctor left, like he does, and then suddenly he comes back.…

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Outside the Government: The Gathering

, 25

It’s September 2nd, 2011. Katy Perry is at number one with “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).” In the five days since Let’s Kill Hitler aired, the Battle of Tripoli wrapped up. That’s about it. And Miracle Day ticked one week closer to being over, of course. 
It being an odd-numbered episode, tit’s time for the show to revamp itself once again, with characteristic subtlety. Now we’re in a big metaphor about the financial crash. Way back with Partners in Crime, I suggested that Davies got very lucky with Donna, creating a character who was visibly about the anxieties of ordinary middle class people in a declining economy. Now Davies has the exact opposite luck: he’s decided to make this show focus on the financial crisis, and he ends up doing it after the London riots and two weeks before the Occupy movement kicks up. He’s almost, but not quite, as completely screwed over as Mark Gatiss is in this regard, but that’s for Monday. 
It’s not that Davies’s approach is wrong in light of the Occupy movement and all of that. But there’s something casually jarring about it. The empty streets and quiet resignation of the world isn’t a bad guess for what the world would be like in the wake of crises like the ones Torchwood has shown, but it’s a guess that lacks all of the immediately compelling and arresting imagery of the world it’s being transmitted into. Even before you take up any questions about the quality of what “The Gathering” has to say about the world, you’re stuck with the fact that summer of 2011 just doesn’t quite feel like the time to be saying it. It feels not entirely unlike the Pertwee era in Season Eleven, or the Troughton era in Season Six – however good it may be at a given moment, it’s become a tired and old-fashioned sort of show. 
One need only look over at Doctor Who to get a sense of this. However awkward Let’s Kill Hitler may be, almost nothing about Doctor Who in this era is playing it safe. Whereas Torchwood feels the exact opposite at this point – like it’s just using a well worn playbook with minor variations to tell stories that, if they’re not past their sell-by date, it’s only because someone slapped on a new label with a later date. To be honest, the biggest impact Miracle Day has had so far was keeping A Good Man Goes to War from using Jack like it was originally intended to. This isn’t a show that knows why it exists anymore, save perhaps to be a big American co-production. It exists to try the formula that worked in the UK in the US, in the hopes that it’ll make more money. And even that’s been quietly usurped by Doctor Who, which has finally hit it big in America and had major episodes done with co-production money from an American network. 

So we shuffle grimly towards a finale in which everything has been arbitrarily reconfigured yet again.
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The Things That He Might Remember (The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon)

, 91

In this scene Clara is cleverly, albeit tastelessly, disguised as
a swastika. 

It’s April 23rd, 2011. LMFAO are at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” while Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, Adele, and Katy Perry also chart. Since Christmas, the Tunisian government has fallen, Hosni Mubarak has resigned in Egypt, and civil wars have broken out in Libya and Syria. Spring is in the air, as it were. While in the news during this story, Prince William and Catherine Middleton are married in Westminster Abbey.

It’s been just over three years and one month since this story aired. This is an odd gap to try to historicize within. It’s recent enough that it’s still easy to remember exactly how this felt on transmission, with the Moffat era’s brief quasi-imperial phase (aka “the bit Toby Haynes directed”) marching on with something that felt fresh and innovative. And yet it’s old enough, or, at least, Doctor Who’s style has changed enough since it that rewatching it, what jumps out is how little of this story would be done this way in 2014. At the time the tagline, acknowledged in interviews by Moffat, was that they were opening the season with what felt like a season finale. And sure enough, that’s the effect given, not least because of its two part structure.
But rewatched, it’s striking how slow bits are. The first episode uses half its runtime for what is in effect a massive slab of exposition, delivered before the Doctor has even begun investigating the plot. Yes, there’s a lot to cover between the Doctor’s death, how the Silence work, and a recap on River, but the way in which the episode repeatedly re-illustrates the concepts, contriving to show us the Silence making people forget multiple times, or finding multiple excuses to have River and the Doctor reiterate that they meet out of order, is striking simply because it’s the sort of thing isn’t done anymore. The series taking that kind of time to lay out exposition in 2014 is unimaginable. 
There are ultimately two things that are lost in this. The first is the more obvious, which is Moffat’s exposition scenes. These have always been one of Moffat’s talents, simply because he’s adept at using the skills he honed in sitcoms for years to smooth out exposition, so that the scenes are full of gags and little brilliances that hum along. For all that the first half of The Impossible Astronaut is pure and unadulterated exposition, it’s also an opportunity to just let a very good cast do their thing. The four-man TARDIS crew is scintilating, and everybody gets a constant stream of good moments here. It’s telling that this ends up being the last time we see River in this mode – on every subsequent appearance, her primary role is to haunt and destabilize the narrative. But here we get her as a wisecracking, thrilling, fun character in her own right. This sort of willingness to luxuriate in spinning your wheels and just let an entertaining and skilled cast be entertaining and skilled rapidly drains out of Doctor Who after this story, for better and for worse.
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Saturday Waffling (July 19th, 2014)

4

The first fifteen parts of the Swamp Thing chapter are done. Total will be more than twenty, not quite sure how many more. Twenty-five tops, I’d say. Probably a bit lower. Probably going to be twenty-three or some utterly odd number like that where there’s no intuitive sense of an act structure.

Best parts so far are Part Four (7/25), Part Eight (8/22), Part Ten (9/5), and Part Twelve (9/19).

Best cliffhanger is Part Eleven, although I’m also very proud of where Part Six takes up and leaves off. Total chapter length is currently 43,595. It is longer than the Flood book. 

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Outside the Government (End of the Road)

, 11

It’s August 26th, 2011. Katy Perry is at number one with “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a song that sounds suspiciously like it is about having fun. How ghastly. In other outdoor places, rebel forces begin the battle that will seize Tripoli and overthrow the reign of Muammar Gaddafi. In a more indoor flavor of news, a dying Steve Jobs steps down from Apple. Also, there’s crap on television to tolerate. 
It is in some ways helpful and convenient for Miracle Day to cough up an outright bad episode, if only so that the rest of the season can be put into some sort of perspective. Like “Rendition,” “End of the Road” is essentially a bottle episode concerned with getting the story from point A to point B. Also like “Rendition,” it runs into the problem that there is not actually very much room between point A and point B. Unlike “Rendition,” it doesn’t cover this up with an extended piece of ludicrous goofiness involving ripping apart an airplane to chelate someone’s blood with degreaser. This is, shockingly enough, a pity.
Instead what we have is a return to the bad old days of Season Two of Torchwood, with an episode that is just completely misconceived and misbegotten. The plot consists entirely of Captain Jack sitting around in a room all episode. Sometimes, for variety, they cut to a hallway, or even have some characters go outside. There’s the most impressively expedient character death ever as Nana Visitor’s character is blown up in a thoroughly contrived car bomb once her exposition is resolved. Esther’s sister comes back purely to motivate Esther to do something stupid again. The episode doesn’t even entirely understand where its reveals are, dropping the discovery that Charlotte works for the Families in a completely swallowed plot beat. The contact lenses acquire magical new powers out of nowhere. And the plot holes are worse and bigger than usual. (I particularly like that Jack is brought to the Colasanto estate so that Angelo can tell him how the Miracle started despite the fact that a) Angelo doesn’t know and b) Angelo is dying and apparently can’t speak.) 
So it’s an incompetently made mess. Fair enough. And certainly some of the problems – the use of American cult film/television stars for hazily defined cameo roles, the plot holes, the tendency to bring in seemingly major events just to motivate a plot development and then discard them – are endemic to Miracle Day in general, merely coming to a particular head here. The writing credit speaks volumes – “Story by Ryan Scott, Teleplay by Ryan Scott and Jane Espenson,” which is to say, they had a script in particularly dire shape and handed it off to Jane Espenson in a desperate attempt to fix it. (Also rather sizable is the fact that Jane Espenson gets script salvage duties, which is to say, Russell T Davies isn’t even involved enough to be doing rewrites.) 
But what really stands out is the degree to which this isn’t normal for Miracle Day.
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The Week in Comics (7/16/14)

6

A new Wicked and the Divine this week. And it’s brilliant, spoilers. But, also spoilers, it’s not my pick of the week.

Fables #142

I honestly couldn’t tell you why this book is still running. I mean, I suppose soon it won’t be, so that makes sense, but we’re at the point where I look through it and I cannot identify a single character having anything interesting happen to them. It’s turned to a meandering pseudo-epic that’s just retreading the same ground. I’m starting to be unconvinced I even care how it ends. D

Moon Knight #5

I could have sworn this came out a week or two ago, so I’m not sure why it only appeared in my shop today. Bit of a… Ellis does an entire action issue to let Declan Shalvey show off. Declan Shalvey shows off. Result. Ellis does things like this occasionally, and I’m never entirely convinced by them from a readerly perspective, but I see why they’re done and what the point is, and I respect them. Very much a comic lover’s comic, this one. B

Ms. Marvel #6 (Pick of the Week)

This is an absolute delight. I compared this to Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man run last time, noting that Wilson is doing a masterful execution of that formula, and that’s true, but there’s also a wonderful splash of Gillen and McKelvie’s Young Avengers here, with a protagonist who’s as 2014 as it’s possible to be. Doge speak, video game references, discussions of fanfiction, and a character who’s grounded in the world. The discussion between Kamala and Sheikh Abdullah is as good as her teamup with Wolverine. This is a joy of a book, and one that I suspect pretty much anyone who likes superheroes at all would enjoy. Top notch. A+

Original Sin #6

Oh for God’s sake, this issue doesn’t even pretend to have anything happen. It’s not even bothering to spin its wheels. It’s just letting them sit there, sinking banally into the mud. Why is this eight issues? Why is this comic happening? Why is it being inflicted on all Marvel readers by making it a big crossove? Please make it fucking stop already. Argh.  F

Original Sin #3.2 Hulk vs Iron Man #2

Hm. The whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, I fear. Although it’s starting to become clear how this is going to pay off the end of Gillen’s Iron Man run, and the last page is great, as are several of the earlier ones, there’s also a sense that this is going to resolve timidly and banally. The question of exactly how Tony tampered with Bruce’s gamma bomb is being danced around to the point where it’s all but inevitable that it’s not actually going to be Tony’s fault. Which is fine, and even preferable, but feels too telegraphed at this stage. All in all, this isn’t quite working for me, although it’s better than the first issue. C+, though I really hope that actually is a better grade than the first issue.…

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Outside the Government: Immortal Sins

, 7

It’s August 19th, 2011, and the last week in which “Party Rock Anthem” is at number one. In news, Michele Bachmann briefly appears to be a credible Presidential candidate due to the inherent silliness that is the Ames Straw Poll, and not a lot else happens. It’s a dull enough week that Miracle Day’s “Immortal Sins” is actually one of the highlights.
Though truth be told, more than any other episode of Miracle Day, this is the showpiece. Two interleaved stories that are virtually two-handers, one of which finally and triumphantly gives us the Gwen/Jack content that the show has been missing, the other one of which gives an effectively touching and tragic love story that sets up a bunch of background on the Miracle. Rex and Esther are pushed almost entirely to the margins of the story, while Oswald sits out another week entirely. This is, more than any other episode of the run, one that is made for people who were familiar with Torchwood and invested in it as a long-running show as opposed to as a new thing on Starz.
It is in many ways the Gwen/Jack scenes that are the highlights. Eve Myles has always been Torchwood’s strongest element, and she’s always been capable of getting John Barrowman to up his game. Gwyneth Horder-Payton, directing, doesn’t have to do much more than get some basic camera angles on a car and let the two of them go, and through some marvelous use of mirrors to control how the characters can and can’t look at each other she makes their scenes together absolutely sing. Underlying it is an absolutely majestic dynamic: two people who are absolutely best friends but who are also immediately ready to accept that only one of them is walking away from this. Their joy at being saved, accompanied by their firm reiterations that they take back nothing they said, is marvelous, and it’s almost certainly the best set of scenes in Miracle Day.
The scenes with Jack and Angelo are not quite as solid, but are still quite good. Espenson writes a relationship deftly and efficiently, and Daniele Favilli plays Angelo with deft humanity, making his betrayal of Jack seem like an inevitable price for Jack’s hubris in assuming he can charm his way out of everything. Espenson makes a couple really deft decisions, including giving Jack the faux-confession scene in which Barrowman, for the first time in Torchwood, gets to play the character as the libidinous rake he did in the Eccleston season of Doctor Who.
Ah, yes, Doctor Who. Because that’s the other thing “Immortal Sins” does – play up Torchwood’s heritage as a product of Doctor Who, with explicit acknowledgment of both that show and The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is, to say the least, weird. Not least because attempting to fit Miracle Day into any sort of coherent shared universe with Doctor Who is, shall we say, a challenge. Not necessarily a huge one – it’s not exactly unbelievable that the Miracle would fail to come up in any of the on-screen conversations we see within Doctor Who.
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The Numb and Silent Depths (The Last War in Albion Part 53: Pasko’s Swamp Thing, Loose Ends)

, 14

This is the third of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

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: Originally created as a short story in a horror anthology, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing had a brief and glorious run in the 1970s before petering out until 1982, when Wes Craven directed a movie based on the comics. 
“In the end, the darkness swallows everything. Space vanishes. Time is no longer even a memory. All is lost in the numb and silent depths of forever. Captain Britain is dead.” – Alan Moore
Figure 388: Swamp Thing returns to
capitalize on the Wes Craven film.
(From Saga of the Swamp Thing #1, 1982)
It would not do, however, for DC to not have a Swamp Thing comic in publication to go along with the movie (despite onerous conditions related to the sale of the movie rights that meant that DC could not actually produce any merchandise related to Swamp Thing whatsoever), and so in 1982 a new title, Saga of the Swamp Thing, was started with scripts by Martin Pasko, an industry veteran with decades of experience, and art by relative newcomer Tom Yeates. Under Pasko the book was a horror anthology in the same general vein as the Wein/Wrightson issues, albeit with a seventeen-page cap on the stories due to backup stories featuring another cult DC horror character, the Phantom Stranger, and a rather convoluted metaplot involving a spooky child with supernatural powers, a villainous group called the Sunderland Corporation that was hunting Swamp Thing, a reporter named Elizabeth Tremayne and her partner, a doctor named Dennis, both of whom were also trying to find Swamp Thing, and a mysterious illness that was slowly killing Swamp Thing. 
Figure 389: Ramsey Campbell would
go on to write an introduction to the first
collection of Moore’s Swamp Thing stories
where he proclaimed that “the new Swamp
Thing can stand beside the finest works of
contemporary horror fiction.”
Many, though not all of these plot points were resolved in the thirteenth issue of the title, the last by Tom Yeates. After two issues by a guest creative team, Pasko picked up his remaining plot lines, mostly focusing on the Sunderland Corporation, in Saga of the Swamp Thing #16, now joined by a new artistic team of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. Almost immediately, however, tensions began to arise. Bissette had a lifelong love of drawing monsters, and so it was in many ways a natural fit for him, but he and Totleben also came onto the project with ideas for what they wanted to draw, which they sent to Pasko.
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Outside the Government 18: A Romance in Twelve Parts

, 8

A commissioned essay for Tiffany Korta

And so here we are again, at Faction Paradox. Let’s start, just because this is eventually going to be collected in the Matt Smith book, far from any other Faction Paradox material, with an account of what this is. It starts, as with most things these days, in the 90s, shortly after Doctor Who failed to return in the wake of the Paul McGann movie. The movie was used as the occasion to move the license for producing original Doctor Who fiction from Virgin, who had been doing a highly acclaimed line of books featuring Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, to the BBC, who proceeded to do a noticeably less acclaimed line of books featuring Paul McGann’s Doctor.
Among the only books in this line that was acclaimed was a book called Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which featured concepts like the Doctor encountering his own corpse, the declaration that the Doctor’s body is a terrifying weapon, the idea that Time Lords are defined by something called “biodata,” which is simultaneously genetic material and the sum total of their impact upon time and history, and the idea of a big and apocalyptic war that the Time Lords do not anticipate surviving. Given that none of these ideas have ever been reused by Steven Moffat or Russell T Davies, it’s similarly ridiculous to suggest that the other big idea in Alien Bodies might have any impact on the era at all. That idea is the time traveling voodoo cult of renegade Time Lords known as Faction Paradox. 
Miles wrote two more books for the BBC Books line in which he fleshed out these ideas more before a falling out with the editors drove him away from Doctor Who (save for one brief return that had little to nothing to do with his contributions to the Doctor Who mythos), and his ideas were wrapped up in a desperately unsatisfying manner by other writers. Miles, meanwhile, took the concepts he had the rights to, which were mainly Faction Paradox, and shopped them to a variety of small presses that made audio adventures, Faction Paradox novels, and an exceedingly brief comic series. These mostly had very little impact on the world, and we’ve largely checked in with them occasionally as a sort of sad “ah yes, this forgotten and dusty corner of Doctor Who.”
Eventually Faction Paradox’s rights settled in with a charming publisher called Obverse Books, who kicked off their line of Faction Paradox stories in 2011 with a collection of short stories called A Romance in Twelve Parts, which brings us to the present topic. In terms of the narrative of Doctor Who, this is a terribly obscure book. Based on Amazon sales rank I’d guess, and I could very well be wrong, that it sells something on the order of a copy a month, if that. It is a small and minor book with very little impact on the world. 
Of course, it’s worth expanding the view a little bit.
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