Eruditorum Press

They’ll all look up and shout “Save us!” And we’ll look down and whisper “Back us on Patreon.”

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:

The Week in Comics (June 18th, 2014)

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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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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)

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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?…

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Manholes and Lots of Other Gritty Stuff (The Last War in Albion Part 48: Frank Miller, The Mighty World of Marvel)

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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.
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.
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.
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This Week in Comics (And Other Tales)

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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.

All-New X-Men #28

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.…

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Avery the Pirate (The Curse of the Black Spot)

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I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU
It’s May 7th, 2011. LMFAO is at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” with Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Bruno Mars, and domestic abuser Chris Brown also charting. In news, Osama bin Laden has been killed, as has the Liberal Democrat proposal for the alternative vote. While on television, it’s The Curse of the Black Spot. 
Let’s start by raining on people’s parade, shall we? This is not a prequel to The Smugglers. Really, it’s not. The Smugglers specifies Avery’s ship as being the Black Albatross. The prequel to Curse of the Black Spot, meanwhile, sets it on the correct historical ship for Henry Avery (more properly Henry Every, it appears) to have been on, the Fancy. More broadly, Curse of the Black Spot depicts all of Avery’s treasure being thrown into the sea, which would make it difficult for it to then be found in Cornwall. And since Curse of the Black Spot is universally recognized as a Doctor Who story that contains no plot holes or errors whatsoever and is indeed a beloved story that is universally praised in much the same way that Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks is, these are clearly conclusive proof that it is not in fact a prequel to The Smugglers.
In addition to embodying narrative consistency, The Curse of the Black Spot marks the moment where Doctor Who makes a direct response to Downton Abbey, in this case by casting its lead actor. The analogy is not entirely straightforward, to be certain. Downton Abbey is set, at least at this point in its history, at an Edwardian manor. Curse of the Black Spot is set on a 17th century pirate ship. 
And yet both texts ultimately focus on the intersection of noble duty and money within the context of British identity. When Hugh Bonneville is playing Robert, Earl of Grantham, he plays the noble patrician whose paternal sense of duty is presented as the last beautiful glimmer of a fading light. Here, as Henry Avery, he inverts it straightforwardly: he is the noble man gone wrong – an officer and a gentleman who has turned pirate. 
What this is not, at least, is a commentary on the particular era or history that Downton Abbey explores. This is obvious, really – it’s not as though Stephen Thompson was writing the part for Bonneville. He was given the brief “pirates” and picked a specific historical figure because he was intrigued by the broad strokes of his biography. Short of the specific casting decision that took place, there’s not really a way to spin that as a commentary on Downton Abbey. But after the decision, when it became Doctor Who casting the star of the new biggest show on television, the connection became inevitable.
So what we have is in effect a visibly authorless text. Nobody consciously made The Curse of the Black Spot as a response to Downton Abbey, and yet the aggregate of individual decisions made it impossible for Curse of the Black Spot o be anything other than a commentary on Downton Abbey.
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Street Corner, Two in the Morning, Getting a Taxi Home (The Wedding of River Song)

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In this image, Clara is disguised as an empty room. 

It’s October 1st, 2011. Dappy is at number one with “No Regrets,” while Maroon Five, One Direction, and several bands without numbers in their names also chart. It is also the hottest October day in history, and the day in which New York City police arrested seven hundred people during Occupy Wall Street. And it’s the day Doctor Who’s sixth season wraps with The Wedding of River Song.

The obligatory introduction out of the way, let’s start where we left off. This is, after all, an episode about answering questions. So let’s just give the answer. “By adding another twist to the A Good Man Goes to War/Let’s Kill Hitler subversion of the epic and having River heal the Doctor.” That, at least, is what the plan seems to be. We’ve already discussed the nightmare that production on Season Six turned into back with Let’s Kill Hitler, and so we don’t need to go into it here, but suffice it to say that the distinction between Moffat’s first draft and the shooting script is in this case largely theoretical. As a result, like Let’s Kill Hitler, this is an episode of television in dire need of fine tuning. To quote that post, “it’s not so much that the episode does the wrong things as it is that the episode doesn’t quite put the emphasis on the right beats.”

But in this case there’s something more. Almost all of the major storyline of the season is resolved at its center, with the revelation of who River Song is. All that’s really left for The Wedding of River Song to do is to square away how the Doctor cheats death. But this is not actually a particularly interesting question, simply because there are so many ways to do it. On top of that, the out of order nature of the season means that the whole thing is necessarily a bit of a shaggy dog story. The big climax of this arc already happened in the season premiere. All that’s left to do is to pull back the curtain and reveal how the trick was accomplished, which is by definition the least interesting part.
So yes, ultimately the entire mystery of the season is “the Doctor gets away by hiding in a shapeshifting robot.” This is not a particularly effective plot beat, and the fact that it’s placed so close to the end of the episode makes it bear more weight than it can possibly support, but again, as we’ve seen, with these two episodes in particular it’s important to try to discern intent, not so much in order to argue that the episodes are secret works of genius, but rather as a sort of archeological process to uncover what would have happened if Moffat had actually had the chance to revise any of this. 
Clearly the actual key beat of the story – the actual climax upon which everything hinges – is the scene atop the pyramid.
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Saturday Waffling (June 7th, 2014)

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Hello everyone. I’m out of town for the weekend and checking the blog minimally, so will keep this brief.

So, many of us have seen the 50th Anniversary poll from Doctor Who Magazine. For those who haven’t, TheSmilingStallionInn gave the top and bottom 40 in a comment over here.

I cannot imagine that this is not enough to fuel a solid weekend’s discussion. So. Thoughts?…

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Silky, Luminous Cobwebs (The Last War in Albion Part 47: Captain Britain in The Daredevils, Psychedelia and Marvel Comics)

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This is the seventh 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 killing and resurrecting Captain Britain, Moore did a series of stories engaging with various points regarding the character’s past.
“These strands… you’re made of them too… everything’s made of them… silky, luminous cobwebs…” – Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #34
Figure 347: Wardog and Zeitgeist, of the
Special Executive, made their first
appearance in an early Moore strip for
Doctor Who Monthly (From “Black Sun
Rising,” written by Alan Moore, art by
David Lloyd, in Doctor Who Monthly
#57, 1981)
This, however, is just an extreme case of a tendency that Moore displays throughout his Captain Britain run. It is not that he doesn’t introduce new characters. But all of them are clear extensions of characters that predated his run. The Fury is a solid enough villain, but he’s also created to explain where the superheroes of the alternate earth went. Captain UK, one of those superheroes, was mentioned in passing by Dave Thorpe back in Marvel Super-Heroes #379, and her husband, Miracleman, is a barely veiled Marvelman. Vixen herself may be an original character, but Vixen’s gang appeared all the way back in Captain Britain #3. Even the Special Executive are borrowed from Moore’s earlier Doctor Who work. Moore’s Captain Britain is populated entirely out of the existing comic book world of Captain Britain. In this regard, Moore manages to largely sidestep the question of what Britain is. Britain isn’t even depicted in this comic – certainly it takes several steps backwards from the overt political content of the Thorpe era. The Britain of which Braddock is Captain is, in other words, firmly a comic book realm and not a real one. As Moore puts it, “he’s pure Marvel! He’s there in the Marvel Universe with a billion other super characters all around him. You can’t get that same realism.”
In many ways, then, Alan Davis’s account of things is correct in the broad strokes, but incomplete. Moore ramps down the politics and up the cosmic weirdness, yes, but only as part of ramping up the general superheroishness of the strip. In this regard he is closer to Thorpe’s approach than he lets on: where Thorpe attempted to ramp up both politics and his “peculiarly British surrealty,” Moore opts only for the latter. It is tempting to accuse this approach of being apolitical – a dangerous accusation when dealing with an intrinsically nationalist symbol like Captain Britain.
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