Elizabeth Sandifer
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The Universe Cries Out Like A Newborn (Lets Kill Hitler)
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| 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)
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?…
The Best Way To See Glasgow (The Last War in Albion Part 49: Glasgow Comics Mart, Moore’s Last Captain Britain Strips)
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.
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| 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.
The Week in Comics (June 18th, 2014)
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.…
That Have Bred The Most Terrible Things (The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People)
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| You, um, might want to get a doctor to look at that. |
It’s May 21st, 2011. Bruno Mars is at number one with “The Lazy Song,” which is unseated after a week by Pitbull and several other artists with “Give Me Everything.” Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, David Guetta, and LMFAO also chart. In news, the EU agrees to a bailout for Portugal, Ratko Mladi? is arrested in Serbia, Queen Elizabeth II makes the first monarchal visit to Ireland in a century, Oprah Winfrey’s talk show goes off the air, and Herman Cain declares that he’s running for President.
On television, meanwhile, it’s The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People. Perhaps first and foremost, this is the story that seems to have scared the production team off of two-parters for a while. It is in many ways easy to see why. Despite a very strong first episode cliffhanger, both halves of this feel overly long. This is mostly due to specific problems introduced by Matthew Graham – instead of using the extra space to better develop characters, he simply goes overboard with numerous flatly developed characters (quick, name a single character trait of Dicken’s. Actually, being able to remember which one Dicken is counts). Instead of elaborating or developing his various themes, he just repeats them over and over again, endlessly reiterating, for instance, the bit about the eyes. Significantly emphasized things don’t even end up mattering – Cleaves acquires headaches in the second episode that are stressed a bunch, contribute nothing, and then cleared away with a miracle cure at the end of the episode. It’s bizarre and disjointed and ultimately rather unsatisfying.
But in many ways it’s not the particulars of why this doesn’t quite work that are most significant. It’s sufficient to note that they just don’t. Yet again. This isn’t unique to two-parters – it’s not as though the one-part episodes in any given season are devoid of crap. But there is a reasonable sense that the two-parters are prone to faltering for some reason or another. The reasons differ, but they seem to flounder when they’re not season finales. Moffat, in particular, has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to make the two-parter work, saying in more than one commentary that he believes the trick is to have the second episode begin in a markedly different place than the first one leaves off.
Certainly The Almost People attempts that, devoting its second episode to the existence of a Ganger Doctor, but in doing so it reveals the potential problem with the approach, which is that it ends up feeling like the real premise of the story doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. This isn’t helped by the fact that the basic version of the premise – the Gangers getting loose – takes a third of an episode to get established. It is in many ways the same problem that plagues a lot of episode ones in the classic series: the gravity of the cliffhanger often distorts the storytelling.
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Without It, I Couldn’t Survive (The Doctor’s Wife)
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| Cleavage is magic |
It’s May 14th, 2011. LMFAO remain at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” with Jennifer Lopez, Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry, and Bruno Mars also charting. In news, Queen Elizabeth II becomes the second-longest reigning British monarch, Manchester United beat Liverpool’s record of eighteen top flight victories, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is charged with rape, and for only the second time ever the Morganza Spillway is opened.
While on television, The Doctor’s Wife. To steal a phrase from Lawrence Miles’s review of City of Death in About Time, it is, of course, one of the best things ever. It’s also something I’m going to get to come back to, admittedly in a few years, since it’s by Neil Gaiman, one of the protagonists of The Last War in Albion. So the interesting question of how this fits into Gaiman’s larger career mostly belongs to that project. Still, a preview of the argument: after American Gods, Gaiman’s career kind of loses momentum, consisting mainly of things that feel safe and like what one would expect from Gaiman. It’s not that Gaiman is writing bad stuff in any meaningful sense, but it felt in many ways like he had become a predictable writer who was going to turn out subtle variations of the same basic thing. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, this changed and he entered a new and largely more interesting phase of his career, and while The Doctor’s Wife can’t reasonably be said to be singlehandedly responsible for that, it is nevertheless a significant transitional moment.
Much of this, one suspects, comes down to the fact that Neil Gaiman found himself with something he’d not really had to deal with since American Gods: someone who could edit him with real authority. This doesn’t happen to major writers late in their careers very often, but in this case Gaiman is working under someone who is every bit as good a writer as he is. There’s a palpable sense of Gaiman having to up his game here and push himself, and it pays off with an episode that’s not just one of the absolute best Doctor Who stories of all time, but a high point of Gaiman’s career.
It’s worth talking a bit about Moffat and writers. Moffat has generally avoided being terribly open about how he works with the writers he commissions, rejecting Davies’s approach of actively and openly rewriting people. This is, broadly speaking, a good thing, at least in terms of being fair to creators. But equally, it doesn’t mean that there’s no editorial oversight. Gaiman has talked about The Doctor’s Wife going through loads of drafts, including some very specific comments from Moffat. That doesn’t mean that Moffat wrote all or most of The Doctor’s Wife, but it does mean that he shaped it heavily. Many of these edits were matters of budget – Gaiman had a not entirely realistic sense of what could be accomplished on Doctor Who’s budget, and had to be revised downwards several times.
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Saturday Waffling (June 14th, 2014)
Finishing off the initial set of revisions on Baker 2 today (which is to say Friday), although there’s still new essays to add, and at the time of queuing this it’s an open question whether I’ll actually get through the Logopolis post tonight. I’m cursed with a morning appointment and may actually need to sleep. How ghastly.
In any case, extra essays. Currently thinking a brand new Pop Between Realities entry, Tomb of Valdemar, probably Romance of Crime… is there a good Tom Baker/Mary Tamm Big Finish? One of those could be neat. Also an essay to be called “The Shada Variations” that will do what you’d expect, an essay on the nature of the Guardians and the Key to Time… might see if I can dig up those K-9/The Mistress audios that existed at one point. Open to suggestions on other content.
Other projects – the next Last War in Albion chapter has been idle for a week or so, and I’m itching to get back to it, not least because I only have three weeks to finish it and it’s still monstrously nowhere near done. And Secret Doctor Who Project is in the very end of Chapter Three and will probably be done when I can direct a solid day’s work on it, which I’m hoping to do next week sometime. I am still behind where I want to be on that, and this is a source of stress, although I’m hoping that what are likely a pair of mega-chapters
In other news, Jill and I have been watching The Time Meddler, which led me to remark that the episode three cliffhanger is one of Doctor Who’s best ever, which in turn made me want to do a Top Ten Cliffhangers list before I realized that would be work and I should just ask you all for your favorites.
So. What’s your favorite Doctor Who cliffhanger?…
Manholes and Lots of Other Gritty Stuff (The Last War in Albion Part 48: Frank Miller, The Mighty World of Marvel)
This is the eighth 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: After his initial forrays into the characters past, Moore’s Captain Britain strips took a turn towards the psychedelic in the later issues of The Daredevils.
“Noo Yawk is grim, and gritty, and realistic. There are big black buildings with little white squares on, and water towers, and manholes and lots of other gritty stuff.” – Alan Moore, “Grit”
In this regard it is perhaps easiest to think of The Daredevils as Marvel UK’s conscious response to Dez Skinn’s success with Warrior. While Warrior was always a mess in terms of its finances, the buzz and attention it drew turned plenty of heads. The problem was that Warrior made its name off of original content, whereas Marvel UK was still first and foremost a company that existed to publish reprints of American comic books. And so for all that The Daredevils was Marvel’s attempt to create a magazine for adult comic fans who liked Warrior, it had to do so without actually having the budget to publish original British material like Warrior. All it could afford for original comics content was Moore and Davis’s Captain Britain strip.
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| Figure 354: Two of Alan Davis’s major characters on the cover of Arkensword, a major UK fanzine. |
And so it focused on its non-comics text pieces, taking a cue from the fanzine culture that existed within the UK. Fanzines – a portmanteau of “fan” and “magazine” – are fan produced publications discussing popular media, often though not always within the broad auspices of “geek culture,” with comics being a particularly common focus, although fanzines focusing on all sorts of popular culture exist. Ostensibly distributed at cost with no profit being involved, fanzines were typically distributed either by mail order or at conventions, and proved a training ground for numerous creators: Dez Skinn, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, and Grant Morrison all did work for or on fanzines early in their career. Featuring a mix of original cartoons, fan fiction, interviews, historical features, reviews, criticism, and outright whimsy, fanzine culture was at once vibrant and strange.
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| Figure 355: Brother Power the Geek, written and drawn by Joe Simon, lasted only two issues. |
And, perhaps more to the point, was something The Daredevils actively kept track of with its Fanzine Reviews column. Indeed, that column gives a sense of the broad inventiveness of fanzines as it describes their contents: interviews with war comic artist Joe Colquhoun and Kevin O’Neill, fan fiction, reviews of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, comics by Eddie Campbell, a retrospective on Steve Ditko’s Hawk and Dove comic for DC, trivia quizzes, satirical comics about Doctor Who, an episode guide to the 1960s Batman series, a compendium of ludicrous dialogue from the same series, an article on DC’s 1968 Brother Power the Geek (‘one oft he most brain-blisteringly awful comic books ever produced by human beings,” Moore explains), reprints of iconically dumb comic book panels, a review of Zippy the Pinhead, a cover by Bryan Talbot, and a one page strip by Savage Pencil are all specific features mentioned among the reviews of dozens of fanzines.
This Week in Comics (And Other Tales)
First off, some things that aren’t comics.
Matt Smith (not that one) is running a Kickstarter for his short film, Amigone. I asked him to write up a few paragraphs about it for the blog. He sent along the following:
Hello Philip Sandiferites!
I’m writing because Mr. Sandifer offered me a space to talk about this short film I’m producing and trying to get off the ground. It’s called “Amigone” and I wrote it with my good friend John Scherer who had this delicious idea about a world in which everyone knows the date of their death (as an expiration date, not a hit-by-a-bus date). In it, we have a main character (Mark) who’s known his day for the past nine years and is coming up on his last forty days on this planet. He’s got everything figured out, everything planned, no stresses, but first he has to spend a weekend with his father.
It’s a project John and I are incredibly proud of. John is a marvelous (and award-winning!) director and I’m producing all the various bits and kibbles. We have an awesome team (our cinematographer is fantastic and our assistant director has a great head on his shoulders) and a script we really believe in. It’s looking to be about 17-20 minutes long and will feature bungee jumping! Who doesn’t love bungee jumping?
We’re kickstarting it because it’s looking to be more expensive than either John and I can afford, but we’re making it for as dirt cheap as we possibly can without sacrificing any quality. Hopefully it looks like the sorta thing you would like to support, and if times are tight then just spreading the word is a wonderful gift. You can find it here.
(And of course thanks to Phil for being wonderful and giving me this space and being so supportive. He’s an awesome person.)
It’s a neat looking project, and I hope you’ll consider backing it.
On to comics reviews, now with some non-Marvel things because it was a better week for that. And next week I know there’s non-Marvel stuff because the first issue of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s The Wicked and the Divine hits, and it’s going to be awesome. All titles link to Comixology pages for the books.
Hm. For a while, Brian Michael Bendis’s X-Men comics have been the first thing I read in a given week. Not because they’re my favorite comics, but because they’re usually quick and fun reads, and while his X-Men runs are in no way perfect, they have a sort of vintage X-Men feel that’s usually quite satisfying. Unfortunately, with this issue I find myself hitting the problem I usually have with monthly comics, and, historically, with the X-Men in particular, which is that I apparently can’t remember what happened last time. There’s a mess of future X-Men I only sort of remember the individual backgrounds of, and they apparently attacked last issue and… yeah. This will presumably be better next arc.…