Eruditorum Press

Watery tarts distributing hammers and sickles

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: 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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An Image Post

21

Rushing to pack and just had a bunch of things blow up in my face in a frustrating and time consuming manner, so I really have no time to generate extra content for this week.

Accordingly, here’s a Frank Miller-drawn cover to Marvel Premiere in the period where they were reprinting the early Doctor Who Weekly strips. This contained parts 5-8 of The Iron Legion and a Steve Moore backup strip, and came out in November of 1980, the same week as the second part of Days of Future Past and the first part of State of Decay, and a week before the first appearance of Abelard Snazz in 2000 AD.

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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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