Eruditorum Press

Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception

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:

Outside the Government: The New World

, 28

It’s some time in early July, 2011. Let’s go with US transmission, since that is first transmission. So July 8th, 2011. Does that mean we should do Billboard charts for these? Yes, let’s. That means Adele is at number one with “Rolling in the Deep,” with Pitbull and Lady Gaga placing and showing. We are approximately one month into Doctor Who’s new “midseason break,” and from now on the break is going to feel like it takes forever. In news, News of the World is announced to be no more. On a spiritually related note, the Anthony Weiner photo scandal happened. And, the day this episode airs, the final Space Shuttle mission launches.
So, to start, we’re back on thrice weekly posting for the next couple of weeks. The next three, specifically – the final two episodes of Miracle Day, which are interspersed with the back half of Season Six, will go back to twice-a-week treatment, with Doctor Who on Monday and Torchwood on Wednesday. I am also pre-emptively doing away with all sense of what a post length is for Miracle Day. I’m covering it episode-by-episode, but if an episode only has a couple hundred words to write about, well, it’ll be a short post that day. 
All of this sounds rather grim, so let me also put in at the outset that I, at the time, rather liked Miracle Day. Of course, at the time I rather liked Torchwood Season Two as well, and that turned out poorly, so there’s certainly the possibility that this is all going to get very hostile and dour within a few entries, but for now, at least, my vague guess for where we’ll end up with Miracle Day is more or less redemptive. Equally, there’s no point in dodging the overall narrative here: after the stunning success of Children of Earth, Davies took Torchwood to America and promptly killed it. Miracle Day is a massive critical flop that did poorly enough that nobody really wanted to make more Torchwood after it was done. 
All of which said, “The New World” is a puzzling little thing. Much of why this is true is down to the circumstances of its production. Following the end of their time running Doctor Who, Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner were basically sent to the US with the intention being that they’d generate some high-profile American co-productions, starting with the fourth season of Torchwood. Whatever high hopes they started with ultimately faltered a bit – Gardner has managed to get a production career going on a number of b-list shows like Da Vinci’s Demons, but Davies ultimately left the US after Miracle Day, albeit for reasons entirely unrelated to that show’s success or failure. (His partner had brain cancer, and he returned to the UK to spend time with him and care for him, abandoning the show he was developing for Showtime in the process.) 
No small part of this was down to the choice of US co-producers, namely Starz.
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Saturday Waffling (June 28th, 2014)

26

Got in quite late this evening, so not a lot of lead-up. Projects are all going just fine. Swamp Thing probably won’t quite be ready for Friday, but the first entry or two will be, so the omnibus will just be late. I’m thinking of waiting until the end of the chapter and making this omnibus a free promotional thing anyway, with only Kickstarter backers getting the in advance version this time. So we’ll see.

But discussion. So. First off, minor (but all publicly released and announced) spoilers for Series Eight of Doctor Who, but. A debut episode featuring the Paternoster Gang and called “Deep Breath.” With no other information whatsoever, what would you guess this episode is about?

I think it’s clear that they’re bringing back the Myrka, personally.…

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Someone Fabulous Like Me (The Last War in Albion Part 50: Alan Moore’s Image)

, 11

This is the tenth and final part of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrapped his Captain Britain run with a characteristically ambiguous story full of ambivalence over the nature of Britain itself. After a few installments written and drawn by Alan Davis, Marvel UK launched a solo series for the character.


“I always new I was a special, lovelier-than-average person. It only makes sense that Jesus would turn out to be someone fabulous like me.” – Alan Moore
Three months later, Marvel UK relaunched Captain Britain as a comic in its own right, with the idea being that the comic would also get US distribution and feature exclusively UK-created material. In practice this meant that Captain Britain was accompanied by a reprint of Steve Moore’s Abslom Daak strips from Doctor Who Weekly, a reprint of the first Night Raven strip from Hulk Comic, and a strip featuring the Free-Fall Warriors, obscure backing characters from a Doctor Who Monthly strip written by Steve Parkhouse.
Figure 369: Alan Davis revisits a famous
panel. (Written by Jamie Delano, in
Captain Britain #2, 1985)
This time around Captain Britain was written, on Moore’s recommendation, by Jamie Delano, who had impressed writing the Night Raven text pieces after Moore gave them up. Delano’s run faces the exact problem one would expect following Moore’s, which is that there’s not a lot to work with besides bringing back Moore’s own concepts. Sure enough the Crazy Gang appears, as set up by Davis, allowing Davis to recycle his best panel from Marvel Super-Heroes #377, followed by a version of the Special Executive from a hundred years earlier than the original called Gatecrasher’s Technet. By Davis’s account, it was not an especially happy collaboration – Davis described Delano’s scripts as “dark, strange, cerebral,” tales that “didn’t fit in the super hero genre,” and claims that he “was the senior partner, initially supplying plots and long story, then mutilating and reworking Jamie’s scripts,” which led to Delano departing the title after only thirteen issues. Davis, by this time, had found work in the US and was largely uninterested in continuing to work for Marvel UK wages anyway, leading to the demise of the series after its fourteenth issue, a conclusion written and drawn by Davis. After that the character reverted to the American superhero he always in reality was, making a couple of appearances in Claremont-penned X-Men annuals and a suitably dreadful two issue appearance in Captain America before Claremont and Davis used him along with some X-Men castoffs to create Excalibur, a supposedly British superhero team that was written and published in the United States and consisted 80% of characters created by Americans, a move that essentially brought the character full circle a decade after his creation.
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This Week in Comics (June 25th, 2014)

14

Experimenting with tone a bit on these, for a couple of reasons, most of which are ones of trying to find a purpose for these while also enjoying doing them quite a bit. For the first few I was leaning towards comics evangelism, since I know contemporary comics are a niche medium. But someone asked me for some recommendations for good comics from the last few years the other day, and I had to admit, there weren’t that many that I enjoyed in a “tell other people to check them out” sort of way – more a cautious “if this is your sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it all right” way that is all too true for a lot of comics.

Which is the other odd thing in writing about contemporary comics, which is that their sales are pathetic. For fun comparison, this week’s pick of the week sold 34,839 copies last month. Its runner up, the mega-successful Saga, sold 55,442. The top-selling comic of last month was the first issue of Original Sin, all the way up at 147,045. These numbers are expanded a bit by digital, but honestly, not by much.

Comics, in other words, really are a niche medium, and while it’s worth pointing to the good bits that shouldn’t be as niche as they are, when we are talking about Underwear Fetishists Punch People #Whatever or Countably Infinite Crisis on Fifty-Two Sins #0.437 Deadpool vs Batferret the truth is that this is an idiosyncratic paraphilia that we should go ahead and be honest about. Which is to say, since we’re largely discussing my embarrassing Marvel habit, let’s all acknowledge that anyone who gives a shit about how the latest issue of Guardians of the Galaxy is can therefore be assumed to be a fetishist as well.

Which is to say that I’m going to stop pretending that I’ll drop a comic just because it’s terrible every month. I don’t drop the equivalently priced Starbucks mochas just because they are essentially sugar weaponized into a slow-acting poison. I’m much more interested in this being a thoroughly partisan, modern equivalent to a fanzine column that will simply mouth off recklessly about where mainstream American comics should be looking at any given instant. Because with an audience as small as comics have, the fanzine is actually finally appropriate, as opposed to when they started and represented a tiny and irrelevant minority of the audience.

All of which said, they’ll be taking a week off next week, as I will be out of town and will not be able to get to the shop. Looking at what’s coming out, it’ll be Uber or Lazarus fighting for Pick of the Week (which will always be something I can recommend with a straight face that someone who is not me read), with Rocket Racoon and Moon Knight the dark horse candidates. Though if it’s a crap week, I could always pick Miracleman. Even though the really interesting issue of that is going to be in August.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 80 (Grey’s Anatomy)

, 44

On October 6th, 2011, the American medical soap Grey’s Anatomy aired the fourth episode of its eighth season, entitled “What is it About Men.” The conceit of the episode was straightforward and clever: Grey’s Anatomy, normally a show dominated by and framed in terms of its female characters, did an episode in which the female characters were all pushed to the periphery and the focus was instead on the male characters. The voiceover narration that clumsily sets up the theme for a given episode, instead of, as normal, going to title character Meredith Grey or, as occasionally the case, going to a single other character, is instead split among all of the male characters, who opine about masculinity. 
This is, to be clear, a genuinely interesting take. Grey’s Anatomy is a heavily female-driven show, both for better and for worse. It passes the Bechdel test essentially every episode, which makes this episode’s unrepentant flunking of it an appreciably interesting thing. Because it is not as though this is suddenly an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that is envisioned as being “for” a male audience. This is still clearly conceptualized as women’s television, which is problematic in a number of ways, not least of all its existence as a category. All the same, the effect of “What is it About Men” is still interesting and worth highlighting: it provides a relatively rare cultural moment of the female gaze being applied to male bodies. It is first and foremost an episode about defining what masculinity is, and, crucially, defining a vision of masculinity that is desirable to women.
All of which is lead-up for the reason we care, which is that one of the major plot lines of “What is it About Men” concerns a crush at a sci-fi convention when five hundred people rushed the doors to try to be one of the first fifteen through them and thus to win a limited edition bit of Doctor Who merchandise (a plastic TARDIS signed by Russell T Davies). We should perhaps, because we are all anoraks of the most pathological sense, note that the actual TARDIS displayed was a perfectly ordinary and easily purchased toy that uses an electromagnet to make the TARDIS hover and spin over a base, and that the toy in question is clearly from the Moffat era, making the Davies signature an inexplicable anachronism. It is, in other words, seemingly written by someone who has looked Doctor Who up on the Internet as opposed to by a committed fan. (The episode also lands slightly astray on A Song of Ice and Fire, declaring a character to look like a Dothraki princess when that is at best a puzzling description, and then blithely overlooking some deeply inappropriate and stalkerish behavior in the course of that plot line. But then, valorizing completely inappropriate and abusive male behavior actually demonstrates a fairly thorough understanding of that fandom, doesn’t it?)
Nevertheless, there’s something of a cultural watershed here. If you told an American Doctor Who fan on October 6th, 2001 that a major piece of American network television would use the word “TARDIS” multiple times, it would have been unthinkable.
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The Universe Cries Out Like A Newborn (Lets Kill Hitler)

, 77

In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a duplicate of
Amy Pond’s infant daughter made out of synthetic flesh that
is sentient and has an identity but that is going to be callously
murdered in Amy’s arms just to hammer home the horrific
abuse that she has suffered and that the Doctor fails to understand
until River shows him how he has been blind. 

It’s August 27th, 2011. Wretch 32 is at number one with “Don’t Go,” with Emelie Sand, Maroon 5, and Christina Perri also charting. In news since a good man went to war, the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, fled to Saudi Arabia to receive medical treatment for injuries sustained during an attack by protesters upon the Presidential Palace. The Arab Spring also progressively heated up into the Syrian Civil War, and South Sudan becames a country. In tremendously symbolic news, the Space Shuttle program ended with STS-135, commanded by Christopher Ferguson. Anders Breivik did unimaginably terrible things. And Muammar Gaddafi’s government effectively falls in Libya the week this story airs.

While on television, Doctor Who is back after its summer break with the provocatively titled Let’s Kill Hitler. It is, unfortunately, here that we must abandon any pretense that Doctor Who under Steven Moffat can be said to consistently work. By any measure, this is clearly where it goes off the rails. The reasons for this are, on the whole, complex. First and foremost, the series seems to have turned into a production nightmare at this point. Moffat, as has been well documented at this point, simply turned out not to be as fast a writer as Russell T Davies was, and found overseeing fourteen episodes of Doctor Who and three double-length episodes of Sherlock while writing six of the Doctor Whos and a Sherlock (or two) to be more than he could manage while actually ever seeing his children or breathing. It’s an understandable problem – the schedule Davies maintained was inhuman, as The Writer’s Tale amply demonstrates, and the solution come to after the botched production of this season – slowing down and not trying to maintain quite as mad a production schedule for Moffat’s two hit shows – was a sound one.

And so Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song were the last two episodes shot for Season Six, and even still the scripts were appallingly late – to the point where they had to start preproduction without scripts in hand. What was shot were in effect Moffat’s first drafts. This introduces a degree of sloppiness to proceedings – a word that is a problematic bedfellow for Moffat’s puzzle box complexity. Last season Moffat made an entire reveal out of a fake production gaffe. This season, even if there are no howling continuity errors, there’s a constant sense that Moffat is making it up as he goes along. 
This is exacerbated by the basic twist implicit in Let’s Kill Hitler. There is a basic grammar to a season of Doctor Who that had, by this point, been well-established.
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Saturday Waffling (June 21st, 2014)

33

Happy summer.

Been working on the next Last War in Albion chapter for three days straight. It’s officially the longest chapter to date now, and still not done. So, first off, let’s have fun – take your guess on what the final word count of the Swamp Thing chapter will be. The closest guess gets the ebook omnibus of it for free. Clue – it’s at least 24,000 words, since that’s where it’s at now.

Second of all, I’ve been doing these comics reviews, but it occurs to me – I have no idea how many of you actively read comics, or what titles you read. So, comic and me-reading people – what are your pull lists these days?…

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The Best Way To See Glasgow (The Last War in Albion Part 49: Glasgow Comics Mart, Moore’s Last Captain Britain Strips)

, 13

This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Late in his run on Captain Britain, Moore recounted a trip to a comics mart in Glasgow.

“Until very recently it had been my opinion that the best way to see Glasgow was from an aeroplane, or, at the very least, by driving through at eighty miles an hour with the windows wound up.” – Alan Moore, “I Belong to Glasgow”
On October 21st, Moore attended a Comics Mart in Glasgow. An account of this trip is printed in Mighty World of Marvel #9 under the title “I Belong to Glasgow,” alongside the Captain Britain strip “Among These Dark Satanic Mills,” a title that quotes Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” about attempting to build Jerusalem (by then imagined as Liberty, the emanation of the giant progenitor of all humanity Albion) within England via a mental war of creative effort. There he met a twenty-three year old comics fan and sometime writer named Grant Morrison.
Figure 363: Grant Morrison’s last comic work prior
to his 1983 meeting with Alan Moore was an issue
of Starblazer illustrated by José Ortiz. (From Starblazer
#86, 1982)
After a promising beginning writing and drawing avant garde stories in the new wave science fiction style and a superhero strip for his local paper, as well as a couple of stories in the space action digest Starblazer, Morrison had not published a comic in a year, and was at the time more interested in a music career, but was also active in the fanzine scene, and gave Moore a copy of his fanzine Bombs Away Batman, which contained both some positive reviews of Moore’s comics work and an interview with Morrison’s band, The Mixers, in which Morrison asserts Aleister Crowley as one of his influences while one of his bandmates cites Jerry Cornelius.
Moore’s account of the event in “I Belong To Glasgow” is primarily a glowingly comedic take in which he goes on for several paragraphs suggesting that he was only at the event because he was bribed and making fairly generic if well-executed jokes at the expense the Scottish (“While incest, murder and cannibalism have been outlawed for centuries in our own land, in Scotland they are still very much a part of everyday family life”) before settling into the meat of the piece in which he praises “the level of friendliness that we encountered,” a paragraph about Bob Napier’s AKA fanzine, and the declaration that “we had an incredible time” in Glasgow.
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The Week in Comics (June 18th, 2014)

6

Another week, another pile of reviews.

Avengers #31

I grouse about Hickman, but this last chunk of Avengers – since about the issue where Banner found out about the Illuminati – has been good and what you want out of Hickman writing the Avengers. There’s still too much wank about the fundamental nature of order – I roll my eyes at things like “Planet Ultron is an intertwined single system – like a root system that appears to be a forest but is, in fact, composed of just a single tree.” But it’s good comics, and interesting, and the larger plot is working well at the moment. B+

Daredevil #4

Mark Waid’s take on Daredevil – do it as unlike Frank Miller as possible – has stopped feeling fresh and brilliant, but it’s still a reliable bit of fun month-in and month-out. The use of a more thoroughly Miller-style hero to contrast Daredevil with is a neat hook, but equally, the A-plot of this storyline is less interesting than the background characters, and I’m looking forward to when Waid goes back and explains things like what’s going on with Foggy. Still, it’s fun. A-

Fables #141

A book I’m sticking with out of pure inertia at this point, the title has fallen absolutely miles from all of the things it was at the start. One suspects that Willingham is going to end it in a place that I don’t like, simply by virtue of the fact that I don’t think that Willingham and I have much taste in common. I’m curious where it will all end, but at this point that curiosity is all that’s pulling me through the increasingly slow plotting and the increasing excess of continuity. Few stories, if any, deserve an issue 141. C

Iron Man #28

Gillen’s final issue on the title, and a reminder of how many things about this he did well. His characterization is spot on, there’s loads of interesting ideas, and the fact that nobody is going to make sufficient use of Red Peril in the future is absolutely tragic. His run was cut short, and there’s clearly things he never got to do, and I wish I could read the comic he clearly wanted this to be instead of the one it was. But the one it was entertained me more months than it didn’t, and this is as good an execution of the rushed ending as exists. B

The Manhattan Projects #21

This is, for me, the most interesting of Jonathan Hickman’s books right now. And this is a fun issue. In amidst all Hickman’s big ideas and intricate plotting, it’s easy to forget that he’s wickedly funny and excels at single-issue storytelling. This, for instance, is about Laika staging a jail break from a giant alien zoo. It’s delightful. A

Original Sin #4

The nature of this event – the completely bonkers noir comic – is bewildering. I like the bonkers much more than the noir, but it often feels like the bonkers is just there as a sort of joke – a concession to utter ridiculousness in a comic that’s trying to be serious.…

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