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:

May 26, 2014

Outside the Government: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 13

It’s November 15^th, 2010. Rihanna is at number one with “Only Girl (In the World),” with Adele, Take That, and McFly also charting. In news, there’s a G-20 summit in Seoul and Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest in either Burma or Myanmar, depending on your preference in country names. And on the day the second part of this airs, the engagement of Prince William and Catherine Middleton is announced.

While on television, the fourth and final full season of The Sarah Jane Adventures concludes with Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith. There exists a sense in which this is almost unbearable to watch. It’s the last television appearance of Lis Sladen before she died, after all. And it’s an episode whose plot is largely concerned with Sarah Jane falling ill and nearly dying, with lots of talk about whether she’s too old and whether it wouldn’t be better to just hand the job of protecting the Earth to someone else. It is in no way easy to watch in the context of hindsight.

And yet.

Let’s read this in light of the larger themes of the late Davies era, since we are by this point in what we might call the late for its own funeral Davies era. Specifically, let’s bring up the theme of Children of Earth, a critique, of reproductive futurism. For those just tuning in, reproductive futurism is a term coined by the queer theorist Lee Edelman to describe the ideological practice of justifying things in the name of an idealized vision of “the children” with no material investment in actual childhood, with childhood being defined specifically as the absence of any political engagement. It’s not a good thing, and generally speaking people who produce children’s media that embraces reproductive futurism should be shot in the face.

So here’s a reality of the world instead. There are children who grew up on The Sarah Jane Adventures. Children for whom the hastily assembled “My Sarah Jane” tribute was an absolutely essential piece of mourning because the star of their favorite television show unexpectedly died. Children who still went back and watched the show after she died, because they had DVD sets, and who engaged with this story in exactly the same way that we all do now: as a story that’s about death and abandonment and the fact that people grow old, centered on a character played by an actress who, at the time of transmission, was five months from death.

Surely this is a good thing. What, after all, is the point of children’s entertainment if not to help mediate learning about exactly these things. We’ve long asserted here that the value of children’s television and literature is inexorably linked to its capacity to scar children for life and thus to stick in the memory as something fascinating and impossible to quite process. This, surely, is why. Because people die and awful things happen in the world. There are crocodiles, as one children’s show put it once.

…

May 24, 2014

Saturday Waffling (May 24th, 2014)

Elizabeth Sandifer waffling 69

Happy Saturday, everybody. If you missed the announcement yesterday, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter has been updated with newly lowered stretch goals, such that we’re only $600 away both from Volume 5 and from thrice weekly posting for Miracle Day. There’s still a quartet of of custom essays available, as well as James Taylor’s art for the Grant Morrison portrait used in the banner and, of course, loads of ebooks, print books, and other fun goodies. For a variety of reasons, I could really use to see this get up above $8000 and into the $9-10k range, so if you’re on the fence, please consider what might tip you off of it and let me know.

So, we could discuss the flickering image of Peter Capaldi in orange silhouette, but I think that might be a short thread. Instead, it occurs to me, I don’t think I’ve ever done a basic old introductions thread here. So, dear readers, who are you? What do you do, whether for fun or money? How long have you been reading the blog for? Where did you find out about it?…

May 23, 2014

Past Legislation’s Newgate Reach (The Last War in Albion Part 45: Captain Britain in Marvel Super-Heroes, William Blake)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter seven 7

In an effort to keep momentum in the final week of the Kickstarter, I have compressed the stretch goal schedule. Volume 4, on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, is now unlocked at $7000, which, at the time of writing this, we’re only $53 away from. Volume 5 is now at $8000, Volume 6 at $9000, and so on. Thrice weekly posting of Torchwood: Miracle Day is still at $8000. Also, there are two new rewards offering James Taylor’s the original art from the Kickstarter banner.

This is the fifth 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 a short-lived run by Dave Thorpe that ended when editor Bernie Jaye and artist Alan Davis balked at a planned story about the Irish Troubles, Alan Moore was given the opportunity to write Captain Britain.

“Uncharted pantheons, past legislation’s Newgate reach, in cryptic masks to sing his teeming mind behind.” – Alan Moore, Angel Passage

Figure 334: Alan Davis’s first page
of Marvelman art featured a reworking
of Garry Leach’s iconic panel. (See Figure
326. Written by Alan Moore. From “The
Yesterday Gambit,” in Warrior Summer
Special, 1982)

Some ambiguity exists over how exactly Alan Moore was hired. Jaye suggests that Paul Neary and Alan Davis each independently vouched for Moore, but in Davis’s telling he only “had met Alan a week or so earlier, when Des [sic] Skinn asked me to help Garry Leach on the Marvelman art.” Dez Skinn remembers things in the exact opposite order, claiming that Moore suggested Davis as Leach’s replacement on Marvelman, much to Skinn’s consternation, as he thought that “there are only two super-heroes strips in one country of 55 million people. You can’t have the same pair of guys doing both.” Moore, for his part, openly admits to not remembering the order of events. Any of these orders are possible, ultimately – Davis’s first Marvelman art appeared in the Warrior Summer Special for 1982, and he took over the art full time in October. Moore’s first Captain Britain came out in between the two, in July.

Regardless of how he got the job, however, it’s important to note that Moore’s work on Marvelman predates his Captain Britain work. His basic approach in both comics is, after all, the same – a swift reconceptualization of the character created by examining and cherry picking aspects from a chaotic and only hazily remembered past. With Marvelman, however, Moore had the marked advantage of starting his story with a more or less blank slate.

…

May 22, 2014

Outside the Government: Lost in Time

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 17

Last War in Albion will run on Friday this week.

It’s November 8^th, 2010. Rihanna is at number one with “Only Girl (In the World),” with Katy Perry, Nelly, Cheryl Cole, and Duck Sauce also charting. While in news… I’m at an honest loss to find anything interesting. The US Federal Reserve is apparently going to buy $600 billion in bonds, there’s a kerfuffle about a contrail in California that people think is a missile, and Nigel Farage is re-elected as the leader of UKIP.

While on television, it’s similarly boring as The Sarah Jane Adventures airs Lost in Time, which is, unfortunately, an absolute mess. Even more unfortunately, the reasons for this aren’t particularly interesting. Its central conceit – sending Rani, Clyde, and Sarah Jane to different time periods where they each have to recover an object made of unobtainium – turns out to be a damp squib. Instead of, as with The Empty Planet, focusing things on the quality of the dynamic among its main characters, this means that everyone spends the story with one or two guest characters. With only fifty minutes of story to deal with, this means that nothing gets fleshed out in any detail, and the whole thing feels rushed.

As with Laight’s previous story, it’s difficult to work up much of a reason to blame him, in other words. The story seems misbegotten from the start – to be fundamentally ill-suited to the series and episode structure it’s written for. It’s The Great Game done for The Sarah Jane Adventures. Only The Great Game relied, ultimately, on its sense of a countdown and inevitable reveal of Moriarty. The individual mini-adventures work precisely because they’re not the point of the exercise. Lost in Time has no such end reveal. Its climax centers around a magical black man who never really gets explained, with a final resolution that’s cribbed from Blink as blatantly as Sarah Jane’s entire plot in the episode is cribbed from the first episode of the 70s horror anthology Shadows.

The result is that the episode becomes three not particularly engaging mini-episodes. Clyde gets to fight against Nazis and tell them how racist they are, which, while certainly true, feels like a shockingly lazy attempt to give Clyde a racism plot of the sort that the series has quite sensibly avoided for the preceding twenty-one stories featuring him, and doubly so when the story is based around a racially caricatured magical black man. Sarah Jane hunts ghosts from the future in a story that mostly involves her explaining the plot repeatedly to a poorly acted guest star. And Rani meets Lady Jane Grey and convinces her of the merits of having her head lopped off in a plot that oversimplifies history to the point where it long since stops making much in the way of sense. (The event instigating Jane Grey’s fall is now Mary showing up outside the Tower of London, as opposed to the Privy Council switching sides, which has the odd effect of removing all sense that the monarch requires any sort of broad base of power to rule.)

…

May 21, 2014

Outside the Government: The Empty Planet

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 11

It’s November 1^st, 2010. Cheryl Cole is at number one with “Promise This,” with Bruno Mars, Rihanna, Cee Lo Green, and Nelly also charting. In news, eruptions of a volcano in Indonesia kill hundreds and force hundreds of thousands to evacuate. The Independent launches a tabloid called simply i, a title designed to drive autocorrect mad. And on the second day of this story’s transmission, the Republican party makes massive gains in the midterm elections, taking control of the House of Representatives and winning six Senate seats.

On television, meanwhile, The Empty Planet. It is, in many ways, the exact episode that The Sarah Jane Adventures needed in the immediate wake of Death of the Doctor. As majestic as that story was, it required moving the focus away from the actual cast of The Sarah Jane Adventures and towards the larger legacy of Doctor Who. Here, then, is the counterbalance – a story in which Sarah Jane (and indeed the entire rest of the cast) drops out early on, allowing the adventure to focus essentially exclusively on Clyde and Rani. Unlike the previous Sarah-lite story, the sublime Mark of the Berserker, this is not a story in which Sarah Jane’s absence is filled by the other major supporting characters. There is no return of Maria, nor Luke and K-9. Not even the extended supporting cast – Haresh, Gita, or Mr. Smith – make significant appearances, and although there’s a welcome return of Jocelyn Jee Esien as Clyde’s mother, that too is essentially a cameo. Perhaps more importantly, whereas Mark of the Berserker hinges on the return of Sarah Jane at a crucial moment to put everything right, The Empty Planet really does leave her on the sidelines for the entire actual plot (she has three scenes and seventeen lines in the whole thing), allowing Clyde and Rani the opportunity to resolve things on their own.

That this is even possible as a thing for the show to do speaks volumes of how much effort has been put into building a supporting cast, and how strong that cast is at this point. To follow up a joyous homage to everything that the show originated from with a story that casually throws everything that the show didn’t invent for itself out the window is tremendous. Doubly so because it works. The Sarah Jane Adventures doesn’t need a trace of Doctor Who to work – it can and does get by on nothing more than the characters it’s built for itself. It may be a show that launched as a spinoff, but that’s not what makes it work. All of this is very much worth emphasizing. As is the basic fact that for much of this story’s runtime it is in effect a two-hander with a non-white cast. For kids. This is a show worth having.

So much of this, however, comes from the basic dynamic of Clyde and Rani. The Empty Planet plays at a romance plot between them, settling pleasantly in an ambiguous space into which a relationship can easily be read, but in no way has to be.

…

May 19, 2014

Outside the Government (Death of the Doctor)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 21

The Kickstarter has less than $1000 to go before Torchwood: Miracle Day gets the same thrice-weekly coverage that Sarah Jane is. I just added a new reward where you can get all four volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum in ebook form for $15, which is $5 cheaper than you’ll get them anywhere else.

It’s October 25^th, 2010. Bruno Mars is at number one with “Just The Way You Are (Amazing),” while Duck Sauce, Cee Lo Green, Wanted, and Katy Perry also chart. In a moment of being somewhat personal, then, I should note that Katy Perry is charting with “Firework,” a song that, whenever it comes up, I think of a very dear friend I was particularly close to at this moment in history, and specifically the fact that boom does not fucking rhyme with moon. In light of this, news seems almost superfluous, but let’s note that the International Space Station hits the record for the longest continuous human occupation of space. Woo-hoo.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Death of the Doctor. It is, obviously, the marquee episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ fourth season. Featuring not just one but two major guest stars, the lion’s share of the budget, and Russell T Davies himself on scripting duties for his only Eleventh Doctor story, it’s not clear that there are ways that the series could have trumpeted any louder that this was a big episode.

And yet none of that is what jumps out. As with Enemy of the Bane, it’s impossible to look at this now and not have it feel rather elegiac. This is the last time that Sarah Jane Smith and the Doctor will ever appear on camera together. That run of adventures started with Jon Pertwee in 1974, and ended with Matt Smith thirty-six years later. It’s a huge deal of an episode in that regard. Let’s face it, one of these days someone is going to get Davies out of retirement to write something else that features the Doctor, even if it’s just a comic book or something. But nobody is ever going to get Lis Sladen to appear on screen with Peter Capaldi. It can’t be done.

Given this, it’s nice that her last adventure with the Doctor is at once so retrospective and so forward-looking, combining loads of classic series montages with a very up-to-date “here’s Sarah Jane adventuring with the present of the show” plot. Davies lets his inner anorak cut loose, working in jokes about Peladon, a reference to the unseen adventure that provides the backstory for Timelash, tries and fails to solve the regeneration limit, and even briefly lampshading the complex relationship between City of Death and Mona Lisa’s Revenge. Anyone coming to this story for the raft of obvious sentimental reasons will find a wealth of exactly what they’re looking for. In particular, the sequence in which Jo and the Doctor make their peace over him not coming back for her is wonderful, giving a satisfying alternative to the vision of post-TARDIS travel mapped out with Sarah Jane back in School Reunion.

…

May 17, 2014

Saturday Waffling (May 17th, 2014)

Elizabeth Sandifer waffling 18

Morning everyone. It’s been your sort of standard issue busy week around here – lots of Kickstarter stuff and e-mails to reply to and a side of writing. Chapter Three of the secret Doctor Who Project is somewhere just shy of 2000 words, and Chapter Eight of Last War in Albion is just north of 5,000, and currently very fun, and also a complete mess where I have little to no idea of the overall shape other than “it’s probably chronological” and nothing like a guess on how long will be. But I get to type “Nukeface” a fair amount, and I have to admit, that’s kinda fun. Plus, the obligatory Blake section comes absolutely gift-wrapped for this one, and that’s always nice.

Meanwhile, it’s just starting to get warm enough that I’m looking longingly at the air conditioners. Actually, the temperature is still fine, but only if I leave the windows open, and the humidity has been going nuts, so it’s just that ghastly time of year where no matter what, you feel slightly sticky at all times. Which is to say, summer is icumen in.

Any fun summer plans, anyone? I’ve somehow acquired the brilliant plan of “go to Phoenix for a week at the beginning of July,” which will be an entertaining exercise in seeing just how much of my ability to endure the horrors of Florida summers has completely evaporated over the last four years.

…

May 16, 2014

Outside the Government: Vault of Secrets

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 5

The Kickstarter may have made enough to get through The Sarah Jane Adventures thrice weekly, but there’s still a ways to go before Torchwood: Miracle Day gets the same treatment. And we’re just $1200 away from securing Volume Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Plus, I’ve just posted the second chapter of the secret Doctor Who thing, which is, if I may say so myself, quite fantastic and worth throwing a few bucks at. Just fifteen days before the window to see it serialized as I write it closes forever. All of which is to say that if you’ve not pledged yet, now’s a lovely time to.

It’s October 18^th, 2010. Cee Lo Green continues to be at number one with the charmingly euphemistic “Forget You,” while Bruno Mars, Labrinth, and Duck Sauce also chart. In news, John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, completes a takeover of Liverpool FC. There’s a bunch of back and forth over Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in which it’s overturned and then returned a couple times in court cases, including, notably, a day in which President Obama simultaneously appeals a ruling declaring it unconstitutional and declares that the policy will end during his presidency. And Mary MacKillop becomes the first Australian saint.

While on television, it’s The Vault of Secrets. In any other season, this would have been the season premiere. There’s a formula, after all – every season kicks off with a story featuring a monster borrowed from Doctor Who. Sure, this, depending on your perspective, either breaks the formula by hinging on the return of a monster from The Sarah Jane Adventures instead or stretches it to its breaking point by grabbing the android men in black from Dreamland, but it’s still recognizably filling that slot: the story focused on drawing from The Sarah Jane Adventures’ mythology – both its own and what it borrows from its parent series.

But by shedding both the premiere status and the easily promoted monster The Vault of Secrets changes the formula slightly. In terms of the arc of Season Four, this is unambiguously a good thing. The Nightmare Man was the outright perfect story for Luke to depart with, and focusing on making sure that departure works instead of opening with something that’s easy to make trailers about is both brave and smart. Even if The Vault of Secrets had featured Sarah Jane, Rani, and Clyde encountering a Silurian, it still would be, on the whole, the better decision to open with The Nightmare Man.

But that does raise something of a question: why isn’t this story a Silurians story? Or something else from the Doctor Who vaults – your choice, really. It’s obviously not that this season is lacking in references to Doctor Who – heck, this story opens with a wonderfully cheeky nod to The Pyramids of Mars. But equally, there is a real shift in the nature of things when The Sarah Jane Adventures starts drawing on its own past instead of leaning on Doctor Who.

…

May 15, 2014

A Country That Instinctively Hates The Foreign (The Last War in Albion Part 44: Dave Thorpe’s Captain Britain)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter seven 18

The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion is just $1500 away from committing the blog to running through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Also, Last War in Albion will be running on Thursdays for this and the next two installments.

This is the fourth 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: Dez Skinn oversaw a successful revival of Captain Britain as a supporting character to the Black Knight in Hulk Comic, the first Marvel UK comic consisting primarily of material created originally for the UK market. But a little over a year after taking over at Marvel UK Skinn left the company, eventually creating his own company, Quality Communications, where he would publish Warrior, an anthology comic featuring two well-received strips by Alan Moore…

“We’re not supposed to be a country that instinctively hates the foreign and spies on itself.” –Warren Ellis, Jack Cross

Figure 327: Alan Davis’s first published
comics page features a memorable
Z-shaped panel layout as Captain Britain
and Jackdaw travel from dimension to
dimension. (From Marvel Super-Heroes
#377, 1981. Click to enlarge.)

Meanwhile, during the nine months in which Warrior was under development, Marvel had decided to try again with Captain Britain, picking up where Steve Parkhouse had left the character in his Black Knight serial, namely being sent back to Earth accompanied by the elf Jackdaw. Helming the strip were a pair of fresh faces – Dave Thorpe, who had mulled around Marvel UK’s editorial staff for a year and change waiting for a writing gig to open, and Alan Davis, making his artistic debut. Like many British comics creators of the time, Davis was a part-timer who came to comics as a second job, in Davis’s case alongside driving forklifts for a warehouse. Famously, Davis was unaware that comics pages were typically drawn on oversized sheets and shrunk down for reproduction and so drew the art for his first issue at print size, resulting in there not being enough room for the dialogue and in the strip having to be printed in six pages instead of the intended five.

Nevertheless, Davis’s style is recognizable and distinctive from the start. with the cartooning influence that would characterize his later D.R. & Quinch work already in evidence. He’s immediately adept at character design, managing to introduce the strip’s villains, Mad Jim Jaspers’s Crazy Gang, in crisp detail. He shows an immediate aptitude for drawing expressive faces and particularly fluid action – in his first page he manages a visual gag in which Captain Britain and Jackdaw land on what appears to be Earth, with Jackdaw, who lays back as though reclining, crashing onto the ground while Captain Britain lands in a dynamic pose, already prepared to fight.

…

May 14, 2014

Outside the Government: The Nightmare Man

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 33

It’s October 11^th, 2010. Cee Lo Green is at number one with “Forget You,” with Bruno Mars, Kings of Leon, Katy Perry, and Robbie Williams also charting. Since Sherlock wrapped its first season, Lord Pearson of Rannoch stepped down as the leader of UKIP saying that he is “not much good” at party politics. Ed Miliband proved rather good at party politics, becoming leader of the Labour party and beating his own brother to the job. And the US removed its last combat troops from Iraq.

While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures are back. But The Nightmare Man sees The Sarah Jane Adventures arriving in a very different world. It’s still ostensibly a spin-off of Doctor Who, something that will be stressed loudly in two stories’ time but the Doctor Who of which it is a spinoff is gone. It’s still overseen by Russell T Davies, but Davies no longer has the big show. And the big show has done its farewell to Sarah Jane. While one assumes – or at least, one assumed at the time, before Sladen fell ill – that Sarah Jane was an obvious choice of people to have show up in Doctor Who again, The End of Time went to great lengths to make sure that there was no obligation for any Davies-era characters to return.

So it’s a fundamentally strange thing when, following this, the entire Davies era returns like it’s never been away. This is, of course, a short-lived transitional period. The combination of Miracle Day failing to quite generate the expected audience and Lis Sladen’s unfortunate passing meant that the Davies era shuddered to a halt not too long into the Moffat era. Nevertheless, for the first two years the continued presence of the Davies era exerted an odd pressure on the Moffat era. And The Nightmare Man represents the start of that.

Equally, we should note that this is the nineteenth Sarah Jane Adventures story and the start of the show’s fourth season. It is, at this point, a known quantity with relatively little to do other than show up and be itself. Except, of course, for the detail that the other original member of its child cast, Tommy Knight, is dropping down to a recurring role, so it also has to rejig the cast in the first episode. The sensible way to do that, of course, is to focus the episode on Luke. This being Season Four it doesn’t have to go to great lengths to reintroduce the cast – it can just do a Luke-centered episode and then show him the door.

What’s interesting, then, is the nature of the episode. On the one hand, it’s solidly in children’s television territory, with a villain largely modeled off of a clown and a resolution that amounts to the power of friendship blasting the bad guy into submission. But as with the program’s high point, Lidster’s previous The Mark of the Berserker, there’s a second sense of a program grappling with relatively sizable issues.

…

«‹ 119 120 121 122 ›»