Eruditorum Press

Wicked.

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: Vault of Secrets

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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 18th, 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.
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A Country That Instinctively Hates The Foreign (The Last War in Albion Part 44: Dave Thorpe’s Captain Britain)

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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. 
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Outside the Government: The Nightmare Man

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It’s October 11th, 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.
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The Last War in Albion Interview

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Why the title “The Last War in Albion”?

First, to be perfectly honest, because I like how it sounds. I knew I wanted to treat the Moore/Morrison rivalry as an occult war, partially for the obvious sensationalism, but also because I liked the idea of treating their beliefs in magic entirely seriously. And I liked the word “Albion” because it gave the whole thing a kind of mythic flavor – a sense that what they’re fighting over isn’t quite a real place at all – while still stressing the Britishness of the project.

And once you have that, the “last war” just feels appropriate. Like its a closed-off piece of history that one can write a dispassionate account of. Which, of course, I’m not actually doing, but which remains the underlying illusion or structure. In reality I suspect that this is Albion’s last war in the same way that World War I ended all wars, but I think the eschatological lens sharpens everything in a useful way. 

Why write this much about this topic?

There are a lot of reasons, really. I think it can support that kind of work, first and foremost. I think you have an extraordinarily gifted generation of talent that came out of the UK in a particular period, and that had a huge influence on art and culture despite working in what is, in fact, a pretty marginal field. And I think that’s an interesting story that’s worth telling in detail. But you’ve also got, in Moore and Morrison, a really interesting division. I think underlying their mutual dislike is a really interesting philosophical and aesthetic difference, and that you can trace the ramifications of that difference out, using a really big canvas to get a sort of epic history. And that seems interesting. Literary criticism and biography as epic history isn’t something that’s been done a lot.

I was also interested in the question of influence. So much of the feud between Moore and Morrison comes down to arguing over who ripped off from who, which always struck me as a rather banal way to talk about influence. So I wanted to treat the question of influence seriously, trying to show how any attempt to follow a thread of influence back results inevitably in finding more influences than you expect, and that any claim to have come up with an idea first is always murky at best. And, perhaps more importantly, trying to show how something can wear its influences on its sleeve while still being a very new and interesting idea. And that requires a wide lens and a willingness to spend a lot of time in the historical trenches, so to speak. 

But perhaps most importantly, because I love so much of the material in question. There are loads of things I’m beyond excited to get to reread and to write about, from major works like Promethea, From Hell, The Invisibles, Sandman, and Transmetropolitan to idiosyncratic picks like Angel Passage, Brought to Light, The Filth, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Planetary.…

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Outside the Government 17: K-9

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At the time I queued this, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter is less than $500 from ensuring thrice-weekly posts until we get to A Christmas Carol. If you’ve not backed yet, consider throwing in for one of the lower-level rewards like the ebook. 
Let’s start with the salient and strange fact: there exist people in the world who have watched this. This is an underlying truth of everything that exists in the world of greater media. Somebody’s seen it. Actually, in many ways the stranger and more salient fact is that something like six thousand people are going to read an essay on K-9, the Australian K-9 spinoff that is why the character vanished from The Sarah Jane Adventures for most of Season Four. And some number of those people are going to eventually pay money for a book containing this essay, or pledge money to a Kickstarter to help fund the writing of similarly arcane essays. To quote a similarly arcane object of media, these things’ existence is possible, but not very likely. So why does K-9 exist? For the same reason The Web of Fear exists: people thought they could make some money.
We are, however, at a sort of cultural end here. This is a deeply remote object. It exists and had some traceable impact on the world, and it did in fact come off of Doctor Who, and that’s the sort of thing we make sure to look at here. But in many ways that is all one can do: look at this thing. It passed through the world, and that is worth understanding. Because this thing is dead and sterile. Its Wikipedia article, in 2014, still proclaims with some measure of confidence that it is coming back. 
This does not appear to be true. Back in 2012 there were murmurings of a second season. There doesn’t seem to be any particular movement on that. The series’ official Facebook page – which is seriously about the only place anything about its current life is documented – reveals that its co-creator, Paul Tams, is currently running a Kickstarter for his and Bob Baker’s latest children’s television series Marti, starring a superhero meerkat. This Kickstarter actually launched at about the same time as mine, looking for £20,000 to create a pilot episode of this series. At the time of writing, it has so far raised £139 from five backers. There are still one hundred positions in the closing credits still open for backers. You can get a DVD of an exclusive behind-the-scenes production information for £15 on this Kickstarter, or, at least, you can if it funds. We’ve got til May 31st to make it happen, and for my part, I’m backing because that making-of DVD is going to be one of the most remote and minor objects of Doctor Who history, and frankly, I wanna upload it to a torrent site. So make that £162. (Paul Tams, for his part, has only ever backed one Kickstarter, for 21st Century Tank Girl, which raised £174,130 on April 30th.
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Saturday Waffling (May 10th, 2014)

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Hello all. Looking halfway decent for The Sarah Jane Adventures to go thrice weekly, so that’s nice. I’ve been writing those this week. Finished the first four of the seven posts. And then straight on to A Christmas Carol.

So, I’m working on promoting the whole Kickstarter thing. For a variety of reasons, I’d like to have an interview about Last War in Albion I can link to. So I figure I’ll lash together some reader questions into something or other and put that up on Tuesday so I can link to it.

So. Questions about Last War in Albion. From the very obvious and basic to strange and arcane points people wonder. Fire away, and I’ll start off answering in comments before transferring the whole thing to a blogpost.…

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The Old Straight Tracks and the Sacred Stones (The Last War in Albion Part 43: Hulk Comic)

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The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion has made it to its first stretch goal! Next up is a commitment to blogging through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

This is the second 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: The 1976 launch of Captain Britain, Marvel’s first comic created for exclusive UK release, was filled with a lot of fanfare, but under the hood the fact that it was blatantly created by Americans was altogether obvious…

“I am Elen, Goddess of the old straight tracks and the standing stones! Once only in seven times seven score years can mortal man gain the powers of Earth and Fire from the stones of this place.” – Grant Morrison, Captain Clyde

The fact that only sixteen issues into his own series Captain Britain not only needed to be propped up with a high profile guest star, but had to be propped up by the exact character he was demonstrably designed as an imitation of speaks volumes about the problems the series was facing. And these problems can hardly be called a surprise – of course a series with a hook of “Britain’s very own superhero” is going to be lackluster when it’s produced by a bunch of Americans with a minimal-at-best connection with Britain. At least Claremont was born in the UK, even if he moved away too young to have any meaningful memories of it – but Herb Trimpe’s UK bona fides consisted of having vacationed there once, an experience that seems to have mostly left him with the view that he “didn’t believe that a superhero could be popular in England.” But as tenuous as the initial creative team’s connection to the UK was, Friedrich’s arrival marked the point where the series became a revolving door of creators with no connection whatsoever – Trimpe left after issue #23, with John Buscema, a longstanding artist most associated with The Avengers, drawing seven issues before being replaced by Ron Wilson, around which point writing duties became a complete mess. Issue #36 was plotted by Friedrich but had dialogue entirely written by Larry Lieber, issue #37 was scripted by Len Wein, with Larry Lieber joining Bob Budiansky for plotting duties, and issues #38 and 39 were plotted by Bob Budiansky with dialogue by Jim Lawrence. By this point the comic had long since deteriorated to where it was no longer profitable to print it in color, and with issue #39 it was cancelled entirely and, in the usual Marvel UK way, merged with another title, in this case the newly reminted Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain.…

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How to Read The Last War in Albion

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Occasionally the comment is made, whether as an accusation, a complaint, or a compliment, that The Last War in Albion is a difficult text. You can see – it’s right there on its embryonic TV Tropes page.

It would be churlish of me to suggest that this is untrue, but it is at least my hope that it’s not excessively true. So in the interests of populism, some observations and comments on how The Last War in Albion is structured and suggestions on how to get the most out of it.
First of all, I want to stress that I have never written Last War in Albion with the idea that the audience should understand all of it. The general idea is that if you don’t understand one bit, there’ll be another one along in a few sentences anyway. Part of the fun of Last War in Albion is its sweep and its scope. Given that, a bit of confusion is not only OK, it borders on the desirable. Certainly it helps emphasize the scale of the thing.
So, big picture: there’s an bit of joke underlying its structure, namely the never-ending essay in which paragraph transitions are maintained across entries. The structure is consciously based on comic book series and on the idea of serialization and cliffhangers. A single blog post isn’t the whole story, or even a complete story in and of itself, but a single element in a story. This is, these days, how single issue comics work, for better or for worse.
Plenty of people, in response to that format, “wait for the trade,” as the saying goes – that is, wait until a story is completed, and then buy a collection of issues to read in one shot. Plenty of comics are consumed that way – nobody reads Watchmen or Sandman as monthly serializations anymore, and there’s a strong case to be made that both are improved in trade. 
For exactly this reason, I publish the equivalent of trades for Last War in Albion alongside the first installment of a chapter. If you can’t spare or don’t want to toss $2 at the trade, that’s fine too – you may find archive diving more satisfying. Certainly it’s a very different project when taken in chapter form as opposed to in blogpost form, and I imagine it’ll be different yet again in book form.
I really don’t want to say it’s better in chapter form, though. For me, things like the parenthesis that would not die are much better in blog form, where the start of the parenthesis isn’t in the same entry as the end, than in chapter form, where its just a really long parenthetical. 
For me, the blog format highlights the larger structure of The Last War in Albion, which is pointedly not just a description of a bunch of comics but rather an account of the entire world in which those comics exist. Inasmuch as it is military history – and obviously that’s the conceit – it’s the sort of military history that’s focused on the causes and consequences of the war as opposed to on the mechanics of the battles.
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Outside the Government: The Great Game

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For the record, The Sarah Jane Adventures will start coverage next week with an Outside the Government, with The Nightmare Man running on Wednesday. There is still just over $1000 to go on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter before that run will be upped to thrice weekly – it would need to do that by a week from today in order to impact the first week’s posting schedule. 
It’s August 8th, 2010. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Beautiful Monster,” with Wanted, Flo Rida, Eminem, and Swedish House Mafia also charting. In news, violent protests break out in Pakistan and India over entirely unrelated issues. Sarah Palin’s daughter calls off her engagement with Levi Johnston due to his failure to not have children with other women. Wyclef Jean, in a memorable Wikipedia turn of phrase worth quoting “confirms he is to announce plans” to run for the Presidency of Haiti. (He is deemed ineligible to run eventually.) The World Sauna Championships are permanently abandoned when Russian finalist Vladimir Ladyzhensky dies during the competition. Also, Elena Kagan is sworn onto the Supreme Court. 
While on television, just two weeks after it showed up, Sherlock takes its bow. In so many ways, The Great Game appears the perfect response to The Blind Banker – a corrective that shows that Sherlock has learned the lessons it needed to learn. This is, of course, nonsense – The Great Game was in fact the first episode of Sherlock shot, with the season being made essentially backwards, and even if it weren’t, it’s not as though the production of a television show would allow Gatiss to look at the script for episode two and go “right, I see what I need to do differently.”
All of which said, The Great Game is notable for finally and decisively putting to rest the idea that Sherlock is going to be a procedural that does a case every week. Instead it highlights the degree to which solving a mystery is an almost incidental process for Sherlock that holds no meaningful suspense. By the episode’s end the question of “can Sherlock solve the mystery” has been in effect entirely drained of any dramatic tension – so much so that Sherlock is, by the episode’s end, a solid mystery ahead of the plot. Under the hood, this episode is just a rapid-fire succession of perfectly ordinary episodes hung together by the countdown/bomber plot, which is to say, wrapped into a parody of a season of 24. 
Few if any people actually talk about the five cases of this episode, and it’s a pity, as they’re all actually pretty good. Taking down cases with an average of eighteen minutes to spend on them is not straightforward, and Gatiss manages to make each of the five cases feel distinct and interesting. The first makes an interesting play and subversion of the epic. On the one hand, it’s a case that requires that Moriarty have been inside Baker Street itself, and more importantly, it’s flagged as Sherlock’s first-ever case.
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A Pair of Links

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An extra post this week, even if it is quite short. Because I have a pair of links you might be interested in, dear readers.

First, Jessica Greenlee and the fabulous folk at Fanboy Nation have an interview with me up, which you can read right here.

Second, if you’ve noticed the fact that there’s a pretty picture as the banner on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter. And that the cover of the Last War in Albion ebooks is now a really cool and well-designed cover as opposed to the vast expanse of monochrome paisley that dominates this blog. As is usually the case when things I’ve done look nice, it’s down to James Taylor, who has a blog post describing how he made both images up here.

See you tomorrow with The Great Game.

Also, we’re only about $250 from the first stretch goal, and $1250 from the accelerated schedule on the Sarah Jane Adventures posts. Thanks again to everybody. Please continue spreading the word, or, if you haven’t spread the word, go about doing so.…

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