Eruditorum Press

You have always been one of us

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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Sunday Pancaking (July 13th, 2014)

27

To be honest, it’s been a bit of a week. We flew back from Phoenix on Tuesday, stayed in New York for a few hours so we could see the first show of Seeming’s tour, then got home to discover that user error on the part of the realtor showing our apartment meant that our beloved kitty Coraline had escaped.

As Coraline is a blind kitty with respiratory issues that lead her to go into sneezing fits and spray snot everywhere when she’s stressed, we were, as you might imagine, not optimistic about her recovery, and the few days since Tuesday have not exactly been highly productive.

Then, this evening, we got a call from someone saying they were pretty sure they had our cat in their backyard. They’d seen the flyers we’d posted, despite living a solid two blocks outside the radius we’d thought to flyer, and now we are joyfully dealing with the cat phenomenon known as “non-recognition aggression,” as her sister Lettie seems to have decided she’s actually a Nestene duplicate. (Lettie is, of course, handling this in the completely appropriate way, which is to say mostly hiding behind furniture and hissing at her.)

So life is good, but I’m at an utter loss for anything to talk about this week, and honestly, am too busy stopping every fourth word I type to go pet Coraline some more. So I’m going to get back to Secret Doctor Who Project, which I’m trying to finish a chapter of before I wrap up Swamp Thing (twenty parts, I’m guessing) and move on to the extra essays for the Williams book in the hopes that I can get that out before the equinox. Which will probably require I make it more than four words without getting up to adore a kitty.…

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Outside the Government: The Middle Men

, 27

It’s August 12th, 2011. “Party Rock Anthem” will never die. Never. In news, in the UK at least, it’s all riots, as protests over the death of Mark Duggan expand into riots in Tottenham, which in turn spark riots across the country. Cameron’s government responds with a strong law and order platform that includes such reasonable things as a six month prison sentence for stealing a case of bottled water. In the US, meanwhile, it’s mostly just reeling from the aftermath of the latest debt ceiling showdown. 
While on television. More perhaps than any other episode of Miracle Day, “The Middle Men” is a sequel to the previous. We’ve talked already about how Miracle Day is in many ways an expanded version of Children of Earth’s structure, with each pair of episodes serving as a distinct phase of the operation. But with “The Categories of Life” building to the cliffhanger it does, “The Middle Men” ends up having very little to do except to resolve its plot lines. And so we get the final disposal of Colin Maloney and the Cowbridge camp.
What’s odd, then, is how much of this episode feels at a slight disjoint to the previous one. Certainly they have dramatically different themes. “The Categories of Life” is straightforwardly an attack on particular political trends that builds towards a shock death. “The Middle Men,” on the other hand, is making a more philosophical point. The phrase “middle man” appears twice, once in reference to Colin, and the other time as a self-description of Ernie Hudson’s character. The thematic implications are in classic Miracle Day fashion, crashingly unsubtle. 
Although the particulars of how this is put together are, to say the least, elusive. Ernie Hudson’s character appears to be intended as a suggestion that the evil is not, in fact, individual actors but a fundamentally corrupt system. And yet Colin is equally clearly held up as an individual evil. And the larger message of the story, hammered home in Gwen’s monologue before blowing up Cowbridge, in Ralph’s intervention to save Esther and Rex, and, in one of the story’s few moments of grace and subtlety, in the nameless camp worker who silently aids Gwen’s escape, is the power of individual actions and defiance in fighting institutional corruption. And in many ways this is a strong point of the episode. It is, after all, a sensible transition – “The Categories of Life” is about institutional horror, and “The Middle Men” offers a meaningful response to it. 
Which ought to render Ernie Hudson’s character a more substantive villain than he is. His entire speech about a vast and faceless system, after all, cuts against the moral message of the story. Everything else is declaring that, actually, the system isn’t what matters, the willingness of individuals to take a stand or to remain violently complicit with the system is. And yet he’s not really challenged – instead he’s given a fairly significant voice within the narrative, serving as the major bit of exposition for the story, even if that exposition amounts to little more than a contextless word that could mean anything.
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A Secret Story (The Last War in Albion Part 52: Wein and Wrightson’s Swamp Thing)

, 16

This is the second 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: French postmodernists Deleuze and Guattari used vegetable metaphors to argue against the notion of fixed identity, while Alan Moore got a phone call from Len Wein, acting as a representative of the assemblage known as DC Comics.
“It’s a secret story. It’s a story of two brothers.” – Neil Gaiman
Figure 382: Detective Comics gave DC
Comics its name, was the reason Jack
Liebowitz had a financial stake in the
company, and, in its first issue, featured
an appallingly racist cover.
The Time Warner subsidiary known as DC Comics has its origins in the merger between National Comics, itself a merger of two companies initially formed in the mid-1930s by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a World War I veteran turned pulp writer, and All-American Publications, which, at the time of their merger was co-owned by Jack Liebowitz, who had also come to own National Comics after forcing Wheeler-Nicholson out. National Comics’ two major publications were Action Comics and Detective Comics, the latter of which was the title that had given Liebowitz a stake in the company, as he underwrote its publication. All-American Publications was a 1938 partnership between Liebowitz and Max Gaines, and published a number of other significant characters: the Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman, most notably. The companies, due to the shared presence of Liebowitz, were always stablemates, but after Liebowitz bought Gaines out, leaving him free to create the competing EC Comics, they officially merged into one company in 1944 under the official name of National Perodical Publications, although they were by this time generally referred to as DC Comics, a name they’d officially adopt in 1977. 
During its early days, unlike what would eventually become its sole major competitor, DC invested hard in superheroes, churning out characters to follow its initial smash success with the adventures of Superman in Action Comics. This began with Batman, created by Bill Finger, with Bob Kane on art, which appeared in Detective Comics, and eventually expanded to a large and familiar stable of characters. The breadth and success of this line meant that when superheroes went out of fashion at the end of World War II, DC, unlike Marvel/Timely, did not entirely abandon superheroes, publishing title featuring Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman continually through the 1940s and 50s. And when the superhero comic proved a useful way of getting around the censorship imposed on the industry in the wake of psychologist and public intellectual Frederic Wertham’s 1954 attack on comic books, it was DC that jumped back upon that bandwagon, developing new versions of many of its old superhero properties and eventually, in 1960, teaming several of them up in the Justice League of America, a move that prompted Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four for Marvel.
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Comics Reviews (July 2nd and 9th, 2014)

4

Since we have two weeks of comics here, I’m doing two picks of the week. No idea if both or either are from this week, last week, or what.


All-New X-Men #29

After an issue where I felt utterly lost we get one I understand, at least. Not sure about the ending, mind you – the time travel is still way too muddy and full of characters I can’t keep straight. But the Angel/X-23 love plot is a nice ending. I’m still not loving this particular phase of Bendis’s X-Men, though. Hoping that whatever shakeups are planned with Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier get things flowing a bit better. C

Avengers #32

These “Steve Rogers moves ever forward in time” issues are… not exactly a solid gold premise, even as the individual issues are pretty good. There’s an increasing sense of sound and fury in Hickman’s run that’s worrisome – the mysteries and secrets are stacking ever higher, with each issue being more and more setup and very little payoff. There’s a staleness that can set into a book when it goes too long without a feasible jumping on point, and we’re at thirty-two issues since the last usable one. I suspect that, when all is said and done, Hickman’s Avengers run will be looked at as something of a let-down, and as a wasted opportunity in terms of feeding out of or into the movies. C-

Captain Marvel #5

A book that feels like it’s been rolling along at a simmer for a bit too long finally bursts out and does something interesting. There are satisfying echoes of the start of Messner-Loebs’s Wonder Woman run here – the balance between alien weirdness and real drama is satisfying. I wish some of the plot revelations had come earlier – I suspect this arc could have lost an issue without serious damage. But we appear to have reached the parts of the arc that are important and that do belong there, and that’s exciting and fun. Still not one of my favorite books, but this is a solid issue that delivers some real entertainment. B+

Daredevil #0.1 and #5

A pair of Daredevil issues, each of them functionally one-shots. I believe 0.1, also called Road Warrior, is a reprint of a digital “Infinite Comic” – certainly the panel layout seems to suggest that. (No splash pages, and every page bisects neatly at the halfway point) It’s a prequel to the current Daredevil run, and is, like most of Waid’s Daredevil, a perfectly satisfying little adventure. #5 fills in some backstory on Foggy Nelson that was left mysterious for four issues, and is… a perfectly satisfying little adventure. It’s hard not to wonder if Waid’s Daredevil is on a downward slope at this point – certainly nothing in the six issues so far of the San Francisco iteration suggests the book has a raison d’etre. Pleasant, but unambiguously for the sorts of fans with large pull accounts. B-

Lazarus #9 (Pick of the Week)


The conclusion to an arc, and the thing that jumps out at me the most is that you can still basically jump in here and understand everything that’s going on.…

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Outside the Government: The Categories of Life

, 27

It’s August 5th, 2011. Yep. LMFAO again. In news, terrible flooding strikes Thailand, the US manages one of its periodic narrow aversions of global economic catastrophe by increasing its debt ceiling, but suffers a downgrading to its credit rating anyway, and some guy named Mark Duggan is killed by the police in London, but really, what are the odds that that’s going to go absolutely terribly. 
While on television, Miracle Day reaches the halfway point. “The Categories of Life” is a ruthless, effective thing. It is not quite a surprising piece of television – it is an episode built around major character death, which is by this point an absolutely bog standard trick that television pulls. But Jane Espenson has been around the block more than enough times to execute it correctly, and “The Categories of Life” is a well-worked example, with the standard approach of focusing the episode heavily on the character you’re about to off, and initially making it appear that they’re going to be newly minted as a primary character before unexpectedly killing them.
There is a certain degree to which this is an inherently flawed practice, especially given how common the episode structure is. The use of shock deaths as a default way of adding tension to a show has become a cliche and a crutch – an easy way to generate the feel of something being a “major episode.” Torchwood has been plenty guilty of this in the past, most infamously with the finale to Season Two, but it’s hardly a Torchwood-specific vice. 
The most infamous version of this phenomenon, named by comics-writer Gail Simone in reaction to a particularly grim plot twist in an issue of Green Lantern, is the trope of “women in refrigerators,” a trope whose naming serves to identify and condemn the tendency to use female characters for the job of being gratuitously killed in order to anger and motivate male characters. And the killing of Vera Juaraez, the series’ most promising new character, in order to give Rex some more man pain, fits squarely and frustratingly into this tradition, so much so that the means of her death – being incinerated in an oven – has to go down as the most bitter joke Jane Espenson has ever written. 
And yet for all of this, “The Categories of Life” bristles with a potential not previously seen within Miracle Day. Part of this is the fact that Miracle Day has been consciously configured to take character death off the table. Shock character death is, it has to be admitted, a materially different trick in a show where nobody can die, and the fact that the previous episodes contained three separate instances of a character who visibly should be dead being shown to be alive, including the gruesome eyeball-in-a-crushed-car scene at the end of “Escape to LA,” further emphasized the illusion that this was a show that wasn’t going to kill characters. And so killing Vera feels wrong and shocking in a way that other television deaths don’t. 
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Outside the Government: Escape to LA

, 6

The schedule for this week will be Miracle Day on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, comics reviews on Thursday, Last War in Albion on Friday, and Waffling on Sunday. 
It’s July 29th, 2011. LMFAO remain at number one. Forever. In news, Amy Winehouse dies, Congressman David Wu resigns over a rape allegation, and Congress decides to ignore the ten year term limit on FBI Directors to keep Robert Mueller in place.
While on television, more Torchwood. “Escape to LA” falls in an interesting place within Miracle Day. Not to look ahead too much, but with the next installment, “The Categories of Life,” Miracle Day finally hits a point where you can say with a straight face that it’s working. Which is to say that “Escape to LA” is another component of the awkward start that doomed Miracle Day. And yet in almost every regard the worst of that start is over, and the series is finally starting to get to the things it’s going to do well. It’s just that it doesn’t actually do them well yet, leaving that as a topic for Wednesday.
Here, though, what is interesting is that “Escape to LA” is in many ways a bespoke episode. In hindsight this has been an element of past episodes – the entire series thus far has been unusually focused on single episode storytelling: the instantly disappearing Soulless, the single episode villain of Lyn Peterson in “Rendition,” et cetera. But “Escape to LA” takes this to, perhaps, its furthest extent. Ellis Hartley Monroe, Jack’s father, and C. Thomas Howell’s nameless assassin are all single episode characters who exist to show up, make the plot of this single episode work, and then disappear into thin air. 
This is, to be sure, an odd move for a ten-part series focused on a metaplot. Some of it is clearly motivated by a desire to do some stunt casting, although it’s not clear that Mare Winningham or C. Thomas Howell are particularly big gets. They’re both competent and respectable American actors, and the US equivalent of Torchwood getting, say, Richard Briers for an episode. But the decision to structure entire episodes around the ability to get them in for two days of filming creates a bizarre effect, in that “Escape from LA” ends up weirdly disconnected from the episodes on either side of it even as it picks up the plot from “Dead of Night” and sets up the plot of “The Categories of Life.”
Perhaps the most bewildering is Rex’s father, a scene that exists in strange isolation from everything around it. In an episode that hinges in a large part on the consequences of Esther’s inability to leave her family alone, Rex’s decision to visit his father (a father who is clearly known to the CIA, as Esther says she found mention of him in his file) has no consequences or implications whatsoever. It’s barely set up, little yet paid off. And within the scene there’s precious little content – clearly Rex and his father do not get along and never have, but there’s not even a hint of why.
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Saturday Waffling (July 5th, 2014)

81

The hotel I am in has deeply mediocre wi-fi, so I’m going to make this quite brief.

In the most recent Doctor Who Magazine, Steven Moffat posed a neat trivia question of the sort that TARDIS Eruditorum thrives on: in what Doctor Who story does it become unequivocally the case that the Doctor is not human? Moffat points out, for instance, that it’s not An Unearthly Child. Sure, the Doctor says he’s not from Earth, but the series is full of humans that live on other planets. So when, he asks, is it absolutely unequivocally stated.

Bonus points for whoever can convincingly argue the latest point at which you can believe the Doctor is human. Let’s stipulate also that we take all statements made by characters as true unless there’s an active reason to believe otherwise – so no going “well the Doctor could have lied when he said…”

I’ve seen some discussion on it, but I’m curious what you lot settle on.

Oh, and due to the same poor wi-fi, next week’s post order is going to be screwy – I should be running Albion on Tuesdays while Eruditorum is thrice-weekly due to Thursdays being comics posts, but I don’t think I can process an image-heavy post on hotel wi-fi, so I don’t know what will be what day.…

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Outside the Government: Dead of Night

, 19

It’s July 22nd, 2011. LMFAO is still at number one, and my cheeky decision to do Billboard charts means I can’t get more than the number one single, so we’re going to be bored on charts for a while. I could switch back to UK charts, but really, this feels funnier. In news, the final Space Shuttle mission lands, and Anders Breivik kills seventy-seven people in Norway. 
While on television, Dead of Night. For the most part, the arrival of Jane Espenson was a major boon for Miracle Day. She is, after all, flat out one of the best writers of genre television working in the United States. Having trained under Whedon, she went on to amble about any number of shows, including a sizable stint on Battlestar Galactica, where she quickly shed the label she’d acquired on Buffy as your go-to writer for the light and funny episodes, instead establishing herself as a flexible writer who could make almost anything sing. She is, by any estimation, very, very good.
And it’s clear from the breakdowns of episodes that Davies picked her to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the show. Davies surely provided some lines here – “they’re so alive” is, for instance, almost certainly him. But Espenson is clearly set up to do the bulk of the actual writing – she’s the one with the job of making a majority of the scripts work. The trouble is that she’s been dealt a strangely unworked through hand. There’s a dramatic shift in tone that’s taken place between “Rendition” and “Dead of Night.” “Rendition” wanted to play at being a procedural – at being a story about what would actually happen if the Miracle took place. Yes, it cut corners in some key spots, but there was a real effort being spent to figure out what actual problems might spring out of this premise.
One episode later, however, that’s in tatters. We’ve got magic painkillers, the panels discussing what to do have derailed into being excuses to hammer on the pro-life movement instead of actual explorations of the premise, and suddenly the focus is on this Soulless cult, which is terribly ill-defined. Indeed, this is where the entire Oswald plot, dodgy to begin with, really gets into the realm of the fundamentally problematic. The problem, in a nutshell, is that you’ve got a fundamentally satiric idea – a celebrity cult around a pedophile murderer – being employed for entirely serious purposes. The “everybody falls in love with the horrible killer” story is doable, hence it having been done loads of times, but the point there is always to highlight the absurd notions involved in celebrity itself.
But this seems to be trying to employ that idea for serious purposes – as part of a quasi-realistic thriller. Although to be fair, this point could use unpacking. Certainly there’s an embrace of the ridiculous throughout Miracle Day. “Rendition” had loads of it alongside the Vera Juarez plot, and so does “Dead of Night,” with its magic contact lenses and all.
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My Multi-Dimensional Enfolded Realities Concept (The Last War in Albion Part 51: Len Wein’s Phonecall, Rhizome)

, 8

This is the first 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: Alan Moore wrapped his Captain Britain run not long after getting a call from Len Wein with an intriguing job offer.

“My multi-dimensional enfolded realities concept had no name until I scrawled a weird geometric figure and explained it to Mark Waid.” – Grant Morrison


Not two years ago, in his very first interview, he’d seemingly summoned the Marvelman job out of thin air, expressing interest in the character at the exact moment that an opportunity to write it came up. So if he did intend to hook a fish out of the aether with his impish suggestion that what American comic books could really use was a creative genius to completely upend everything, he did a good job with it – the very next month he received a phone call offering him the opportunity to do just that. Specifically, Len Wein called him to offer him a job writing Saga of the Swamp Thing.

Figure 377: Brian Bolland’s art for Camelot
3000 was the first step of the so-called British
Invasion of comics that eventually led to
Len Wein hiring Alan Moore.
Several accounts exist of how Len Wein came to decide that of the many English language comics writers of the world Alan Moore was the correct person to offer a failing book about a plant monster living in the Louisiana bayou. Perhaps ironically, Moore’s work on Captain Britain, a character Wein in fact worked on during its first gradual downward spiral in the late 1970s, is the one thing that nobody has ever suggested had the slightest impact in him getting the Swamp Thing job. Three other suggestions are regularly made. The first of these is Moore’s 2000 AD work. Certainly this was a respected publication, and Wein was familiar with it, having already poached Brian Bolland to illustrate Mike Barr’s Camelot 3000 and having worked with Dave Gibbons, who had already been in the early stages of some pitches with Moore to work on some then-disused properties, none of which had been formally submitted by the time Len Wein made his call to Alan Moore in May of 1983. But Moore’s contributions to 2000 AD at this point were a bunch of Future Shocks and part of Skizz, the latter of which was listed among Moore’s past credits when he was announced as the comic’s next writer. Although certainly good, this is not a body of work upon which Moore built his reputation in the UK, and it is in some ways difficult to imagine it impressing a US editor quite enough to make the leap that Len Wein did.
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Outside the Government: Rendition

, 20

It’s July 15th, 2011. LMFAO are at number one with “Party Rock Anthem.” In news, South Sudan becomes independent, and that’s about it. While on television, “Rendition.” And I should note, I did say posts would be short sometimes. 
One suspects that this, more than any other episode, is responsible for Miracle Day going down poorly. An opening episode with rough edges can be forgiven, but the obvious critique of “Rendition” – that it is an hour of people on a plane – is relatively solid. Sure, lots of other things go on, with Oswald, Esther, and Vera all getting meaty (if not entirely functional) plots, but the character that “The New World” established as the new lead and the two familiar characters are, indeed, on a plane all episode, dealing with a deeply silly plot. And the result is an episode that is spinning its wheels visibly.
There are structural reasons. A broad look at Miracle Day reveals that it is basically the structure of Children of Earth slowed down such that it’s a series of five two-parters. Each pair of episodes constitutes a distinct phase of the operation and take on the story, leading to a cliffhanger that moves to something else. On the whole, the degree to which this works generally increases over the course of the season – the episode five/six pair and the episode seven/eight pair are actually both very sharp. The problem really is early on, when it means that Miracle Day spends two hours getting to the point where its main cast is actually assembled and ready to start engaging with the plot. It’s a bad structural gaffe that in no way erases the later, more interesting things that Miracle Day, but that does get the entire thing off to a kind of rotten start.
Under the surface, however, there’s some genuinely interesting stuff going on. Or, at least, trying to. Esther may not be on a plane, but she ultimately spends all episode waiting for one to land. And Oswald is still misfiring badly. Most – indeed arguably all – of what works about “Rendition” are the scenes built around Vera Juarez, the one character who actually gets to explore the idea of the Miracle in a meaningful way. The scene in which she quickly and on the fly reworks the hospital’s triage system is absolutely wonderful, as is the image of a completely ad hoc team of people coming together chaotically to figure out how the world works now. On top of that, Vera is marvelously played by Arlene Tur, who unproblematically plays a hyper-competent badass while also feeling like an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances. She’s very much the season’s breakout character, and this episode, where she gets essentially all of the good plots, is a lot of why. How Tur hasn’t had a meaningful role in anything since this is completely beyond me. 

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t really the stuff that Torchwood is interested in.
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