Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

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: A Study in Pink

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It’s July 25th, 2010. Yolanda Be Cool vs D Cup are at number one with “We No Speak Americano,” with a duet between Eminem featuring Rihanna, Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg, Professor Green featuring Lily Allen, and 3OH3 featuring Ke$ha also charting – in fact, only two songs in the top ten are not collaborative: Eliza Doolittle’s “Pack Up” and JLS’s “The Club is Alive.” In news, the World Cup wound down with England eliminated the day after The Big Bang following a pathetic showing against Germany, and Spain ultimately winning in a scrappy final against the Netherlands. Also, Wikileaks releases over 90,000 internal logs of the US Military to a variety of news sources. 
While on television Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s massive hit Sherlock debuts with A Study in Pink. Why do Sherlock episode by episode? For one thing, because its production is bound up in Doctor Who’s. The shows respond to each other and learn from each other, and are, as countless critics have noted, a bit similar in some key ways. Yes, they’re also different. Hence “Outside the Government” at all. But to be perfectly honest, you learn more about the Moffat era watching Sherlock than you ever did about the Davies era by watching Torchwood. So here we are. Sherlock from the ground floor: A Study in Pink.
The more one thinks about A Study in Pink the more it becomes evident that it is quite a strange thing. What does it mean, after all, to create an introduction to a show featuring one of the best-known and most iconic fictional characters in existence? One cannot meaningfully introduce Sherlock Holmes as a character, as any introduction one makes is going to be immediately subsumed by the impossibly large paratext of a century of Sherlock Holmes. In its own way, it’s the same problem Moffat faced with The Eleventh Hour – how do you launch a program that’s already massively familiar to viewers and where everything you introduce is going to be read in context with years of existing material. 
With The Eleventh Hour, Moffat solved the problem by simply putting the program’s best foot forward and playing to all of its strengths as much as possible – an unapologetic charm offensive that worked. In effect he did everything he wanted to do differently, but in an episode that highlighted only the most superficial of his changes while mostly stressing what had remained consistent. But this was a solution for a program that had been on the air just a few months earlier. The solution isn’t quite going to work here. Nevertheless, A Study in Pink is, like The Eleventh Hour, an exercise in saying “here’s how it is.” It is at times almost television as FAQ – a narratively sequenced list of answers to questions beginning “how are you going to handle…” 
That it works is in some ways remarkable. More than almost anything else Moffat has ever written, this is an episode that relies on nothing save for his gifts at humor and exposition.
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Make Me a Warrior Now (A Good Man Goes to War)

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In this image, Clara is not cleverly disguised as a light, but
rather as a restoration field.

It’s June 4th, 2011. Pitbull and several other people are at number one with “Give Me Everything,” with Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, LMFAO, and Bruno Mars also charting. In news, the Arab Spring rolls on through its increasingly grim summer as civil war breaks out in Libya and grows progressively closer in Syria, with NATO forces helping out in Libya. Congressman Anthony Weiner finds himself embroiled in exactly the sort of scandal you should avoid with that surname. And World IPv6 day takes place. Rock on.

Meanwhile, on television, it’s Doctor Who’s first midseason finale. As we said, in his last season finale, Moffat took the structure of narrative collapse to its breaking point. Instead of averting the collapse, he let it happen in its entirety: the Doctor was locked in an inescapable prison, the TARDIS exploded, Amy was dead, and the universe ended. And then he built up a new story in its place. With A Good Man Goes to War, he fully realizes this approach, creating the definitive narrative technique of his tenure – what I will call narrative substitution. 
Where narrative collapse is based on threatening the basic functioning of a narrative structure so that further storytelling becomes impossible and then averting the collapse and reaffirming the structure, narrative substitution works by initially appearing to tell one type of story, and then rejecting that story, typically on ethical or ideological grounds, generally by revealing that the story was in fact an entirely different type of story all along. In hindsight The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang is an example of narrative substitution where the first narrative is rejected via an unaverted narrative collapse. But with A Good Man Goes to War we get a much more straightforward and pure example of narrative substitution – in many ways, in fact, the definitive one.
This is, in one sense, the big problem with it. In reality, A Good Man Goes to War is a savagely, furiously angry story. It indulges audience expectations for nearly its entire length before not only frustrating them, but damning them. Moffat will use the structure of narrative substitution again, but he will never again do it with quite this gusto. His future narrative substitutions are textual games that assume an audience who is on the lookout for the substitution and carefully watching the shells as they are cycled about the table. But this one is a trap – one that baldly tries to lure the audience into a specific misreading of the story just to turn around and punish them for doing so. It is angry and cynical in a way that not even Robert Holmes ever quite managed. Holmes could be masterfully petulant, yes, but when he wrote a story out of spite it was always a case of following the brief perfectly so as to expose the stupidity of it, audience be damned. But this is a story about satisfying supposed audience expectations, giving people exactly what they say they want, only to rip it away and condemn them for wanting it.
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Saturday Waffling (April 26th, 2014)

36

Behind on everything, as the fact that I had to publish the first part of the current Last War in Albion chapter without the omnibus. Still need to ship out replacement orders on the Kickstarter, edit the Nimon video, and get the Last War in Albion Kickstarter together. All hopefully over the next week, assuming these allergies/this sinus infection doesn’t just kill me.

Had my sister over for dinner this evening, and we ended up watching Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with the Moffat commentary tracks, which are particularly fabulous commentary tracks. (The Forest of the Dead track is basically my favorite commentary ever.) Which got me thinking, as I love good DVD commentary but find that the ratio of good commentary to commentary tracks consisting only of actors whinging about how cold a location was is often frustrating.

So. DVD commentaries – for Doctor Who or otherwise – that you’ve found particularly insightful and interesting.…

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The Promethean Age (The Last War in Albion Part 41: Marvel Comics)

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This is the first of an unknown number of parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. The omnibus for this chapter is not quite ready yet, and I’ll post it next week.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Alan Davis had a vibrant and popular creative partnership in 2000 AD on the D.R. & Quinch strips, but the roots of their collaboration go back to 1982 and their work together for Marvel UK…

“The Promethean age had been announced; the time of men as gods who bore fire in the palms of their hands had come.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods
This is hardly surprising for what was, by the time of D.R. & Quinch, a well-honed creative partnership. Moore and Davis had been working together since June of 1982 when Moore, having made his bones on the Star Wars and Doctor Who titles published by Marvel UK, was given the reins of Marvel UK’s Captain Britain, at the time an ongoing series in the monthly anthology Marvel Superheroes. Davis had been drawing Captain Britain for the comic since September of 1981, where he made his mainstream debut illustrating a script by Dave Thorpe that served as the character’s first appearance in that title. But the history of the character stretches back considerably further.
Figure 307: Uncanny Tales, one of the many
pulp magazines published by Martin
Goodman.
To understand the nature of Captain Britain as a character it is necessary to understand Marvel UK, which in turn requires an understanding of Marvel Comics. The company originated out of the broader publishing portfolio of Martin Goodman, born Moses Goodman in 1908 to Lithuanian immigrants to the United States. Goodman’s family was large and poor, and Goodman had to drop out of school in the fifth grade to enter the workforce, and finally started traveling the country as a teenager, riding the rails and staying in hobo camps throughout the Great Depression. Eventually he returned to enter the publishing industry, rising through the ranks at Eastern Distributing Corperation, and then jumping ship to form his own company, Newsstand Publications with Archie Comics cofounder Louis Siberkleit. In 1934 Newsstand Publications went bankrupt when their distributor went under, leading Silberkleit to depart the company, but Goodman managed to convince creditors that he could turn the company around, which he proceeded to do.
Goodman’s business model was based on trend-surfing. He changed the insignias on his titles regularly, creating different lines to house different sorts of books, and was ruthless about pushing out clones of successful titles. The bulk of his magazines were pulps in the classic model: All Star Adventure Fiction, Ka-Zar, Two-Gun Western, Uncanny Tales, and, in a title that Goodman would use later to more success, Marvel Tales.
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Q&A of the Damned

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Sometimes I get asked questions. Sometimes I answer them. And sometimes I compile those answers and post them here on a week when I’ve not gotten around to writing something better.

Disney World?

I enjoy it, but less than I want to. The immaculately well-designed plastic experience should appeal to me utterly. But something about it just feels… the fact that it ideologically wants you to resist approaching it as the artificial experience that it is rubs me the wrong way. I remember doing the “behind the scenes” tour when I was, like, twelve, and being disappointed that it didn’t go behind the scenes enough. I want to approach Disney World on a level of pure artificiality, in full awareness of its underlying fakeness and cynicism. And it doesn’t want to let me. To me, Disney World should consist of doing things like saying “Man, Splash Mountain is a great ride. Is there like, a movie it’s based on or something?”

Are you keeping a running tally of all the things you’ve said in a funny caption that Clara was disguised as? If you aren’t, can you please update me on someone that is? 

No, and no, but I can tell you off the top of my head that it’s a candle, some crown moulding, River Song, a hospital roof, the BBC logo, and the number two. The gag is building, shaggy dog style, to an utterly disappointing payoff.

On the subject of interviews – if you were allowed to ask Davies and Moffat just one question what would it be? (And to make it tricky it has to be the same question for both of them.)

I mean, this is actually not really on the subject of interviews, because an interview is based much more heavily on flow and arc than it appears. I mean, even an interview like my one with Alex, which was an e-mail interview where he reworked my questions a bit… actually, that’s a really good example. My original question list was in places quite different (I prompted for things on specific songs at times, and he often cut that to pick what he presumably thought was a more interesting song for a given point.), and almost all of the little interjections on my part are actually things he added.

But the shape of the interview is very much mine. There’s a conscious move from talking about the album as a whole, then larger philosophical themes, and then transitioning to the material. The form of a question might change – I had originally pitched the Goodnight London question in terms of the earlier demos, several of which I have copies of, with the idea that we might use clips to talk about the evolution of the song, which Alex ultimately decided he didn’t want to do, so he rephrased the question almost completely. But he still answered the question I asked, just without providing clips of the acoustic demo/military choir/big dumb synth-rock versions. So that still became what it always was – a question about the material process from writing a song to recording an album track.…

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People and Cars and Concrete (The Lodger)

63

In this scene, Meglos is cleverly disguised as a Silence ship.
It’s June 12th, 2010. David Guetta is at number one with “Gettin’ Over You,” with Eminem, Alicia Keys, and a duet between Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber also charting. Chris Brown postpones a UK leg of his tour because he can’t get a visa due to the fact that he’s a domestic abuser. The trial of Rod Blagojevich begins, and the World Cup kicks off in South Africa, with England playing their first game, a frankly dismal draw with the United States most notable for goalkeeper Robert Green badly fluffing a routine save. 
While on television, or, rather, slightly later in the day on television, Doctor Who offers a bit of late season levity as a calm before the storm. What’s interesting about The Lodger is, in many ways, just how influential it was. Smith’s Doctor had, from the start, been a creature of eccentricity and physical acting, but it’s not until Gareth Roberts wrote him as the funny man in a good old-fashioned comedy double act that the character became what is now the default and recognized version of the character. As with every major development in the Moffat era, this is at the moment visibly polarizing, but equally, given the sizable bloc of people who quite like the Moffat era, seems destined to eventually settle down into a consensus good thing, with the people who currently hate the Moffat era with a passion eventually fading away as its immediacy dissipates, leaving the Moffat era, like every other popularly successful era of Doctor Who, reflected upon primarily by the people who love it. 
Which is to say that the question of whether the post-Lodger characterization of the Doctor is any good is ultimately just one I’m not that interested in. Nothing is loved by everyone, but Smith’s post-Lodger Doctor is loved by loads of people, which is frankly good enough. Populism is not equivalent to quality, but the particular eccentricities of a version of the Doctor are a means to an end, and populism pretty much works to determine whether or not they’re succeeding at that end. 
Let’s instead, then, look at exactly what quietly changed with The Lodger and why it worked. The Lodger, of course, is itself an adaptation of a Gareth Roberts comic for Doctor Who Magazine featuring the Tenth Doctor and Mickey. “Adaptation,” in this case, is a terribly loose term. Several of the specific gags are recycled: the Doctor playing football, the sonic screwdriver/toothbrush confusion (although the subject of the gag switches), the “talk the girlfriend into doing something with her life” bit, and even the detail of the Doctor making an omelette are preserved. But “The Lodger” is basically a sequence of one-page gags based around the idea that the Doctor is good at everything, framed by a kind of sweet story about the Doctor trying to make things work between Rose and Mickey. 
The Lodger is straightforwardly a comedy, but its basic joke is different.
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The Pleasure of Smelling a Flower (Vincent and the Doctor)

79

This is just showing off, really.
It’s June 5th, 2010. Dizzee Rascal is at number one with “Dirtee Disco,” with Iyaz, Eminem, N-Dubz, and Aggro also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is finally capped, which reduces the spill without actually stopping it. And twelve people die in a killing spree in Cumbria.
On television, it’s Vincent and the Doctor. One of the most interesting innovations that Moffat brought to the program was his focus on bringing in what might be called celebrity writers. His first two seasons feature his most brazen attempts at this, although Neil Cross was no small acquisition and Neil Gaiman was originally supposed to be in the first season, so describing this as a particularly well-structured process might be overstating things. Nevertheless, what jumps out first about Vincent and the Doctor is that it is by Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, creator of Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley, and also the guy who wrote The Boat That Rocked if you want to make him come off not quite as well. 
He is, in other words, not quite the sort of person you expect to be writing Doctor Who. This was, of course, not the series’ first experiment with celebrity writers. Way back in the 1980s it tried to get Christopher Priest to write episodes, and of course, Priest was first approached by a before-he-was-famous Douglas Adams. Andrew Cartmel tried and failed to get Alan Moore to write for the series in 1988, and Stephen Fry’s abandoned script for the early Davies era continues to be the subject of the occasional rumor. And there certainly are cases of reasonably well-established writers making the move to Doctor Who – Philip Martin in 1985, for instance. 
But Richard Curtis doesn’t feel like any of these. He’s not a sci-fi writer first and foremost. And while Philip Martin was well-established, it wasn’t like he had an Oscar nomination to his name. Only Stephen Fry seems in the same ballpark, and Fry has always been a bit of a geek. Curtis, on the other hand, bristles with middlebrow respectability. At least in theory, he writes the sort of thing that people who hate Doctor Who like. Getting him to write an episode of Doctor Who, in other words, is both strange and a shot across the bow. 
What is remarkable about the episode is twofold. First, it works quite well. Second, it’s visibly written by someone who has seen next to no Doctor Who before in their lives. (Curtis has admitted that he was not a fan, and that it was not until seeing The Next Doctor with David Morrissey that he decided to accept Moffat’s invitation to write for the series.) In some ways this is oddly liberating – it is in many ways the first time we’ve seen a Doctor Who story conceived of entirely in terms of what the series has been since 2005. 
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Saturday Waffling (April 19th, 2014)

54

Hello all. Life is good. Wrapped up the writing of TARDIS Eruditorum entries for Series Five yesterday, and got back on finishing off the next chapter of Last War in Albion today. That’s going well, and I’m quite happy with the chapter.

So, let’s see. I don’t think we’ve done a “what are you reading” thread lately if at all, have we?

What are you reading? Should the rest of us be reading it too? For me the answer is the Frank Miller Daredevil run, but that’s for an already discussed reason. It’s… historically very important and easy to see why people made a big deal about, but probably not essential reading for one’s happiness in life. It’s sort of beyond the scope of reviews: if it sounds like the sort of thing that will interest you, it probably will, and otherwise can be skipped.…

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We Confuse Rebellion With A Hairstyle (The Last War in Albion Part 40: D.R. & Quinch, Alan Davis)

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This is the sixth and final part of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords  for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s D.R. & Quinch featured juvenile delinquency and massive amounts of destruction played initially for countercultural and satirical laughs, but eventually played for little more than its own sake. Early installments rail against corrupt authority and the cruelties of war, but the final storyline is a largely toothless (albeit terribly entertaining) satire of Hollywood.

“We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle. Nightmare of the teenage jobscape, suddenly made stupid, weak and clumsy there among the calloused adults.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

The specific style in question dates to MAD #4, from 1953, and from the acclaimed story “Superduperman,” although following the success of that story it became the house style for MAD. Still, “Superduperman” is a known influence for Moore, who has credited it as an influence for both Marvelman and Watchmen, and as such is as good a vehicle to describe the style as any. In many ways “Superduperman” reflects the style of short story that Moore characterized as a “list story” when writing Future Shocks for 2000 AD. Its structure is in effect a frame for going through a bunch of parodied aspects of Superman and, later, Captain Marvel.
Figure 298: Wally Wood’s extremely
detailed art packs in a number of
entertaining sight gags. (Click to
enlarge.)
And so in rapid succession the strip introduces Clark Bent, Lois Pain, and Billy Spafon, who with the magic word SHAZOOM! (Strength, Health, Aptitude, Zeal, Ox, Power of, Ox, Power of Another, and Money) becomes Captain Marbles and proceeds to have an extended fight with Superduperman. The story drips with irony – Superduperman’s chest insignia constantly changes from panel to panel, often serving as various corporate logos or notes that the space is for sale, while Captain Marbles has openly given up being a superhero in favor of making money. All of this is a barely veiled parody of the then-current legal case between National Comics (the then-owners of Superman) and Fawcett Publications, who owned the at the time more popular Captain Marvel. 
Although there is a plot – Superduperman meets and fights Captain Marbles and finally defeats him by tricking him into punching himself in the head, only to find out that Lois Pain still considers him (quite correctly, given his habit of using his X-Ray vision to spy on the women’s room) to be a creep – the plot is, like that of “Sunburn” or “They Sweep the Spaceways,” mainly an excuse to pack in jokes, including elaborate sight gags within Wally Woods’ hyper-detailed art and various suitably awful puns in the vein of Clark Bent.
…

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Transparency Report for 2013

8

Right, this is one of those things I’ve been promising to do before another Kickstarter, and I have the numbers handy, so let’s go ahead and have a look at how the whole writing career went over the last year.

I’m doing this mainly because I do have to shake the cup occasionally and ask for money, and encourage people to buy books to support the project. And I feel like if I’m going to plead with you for money, you have a right to know what my financial situation is.

So, first of all, I am not the primary earner in my household. That would be my wife, who is an oncology nurse at a fairly large hospital. She makes about what you’d expect for that, which is to say, a fraction of what she deserves. We live in Danbury, Connecticut, which is around the 66th percentile in terms of cost of living in the US – a two-bedroom apartment in decent but not great repair runs us $1250 a month, to give you an idea, and that’s pretty much standard market price.

I made $12,409 in royalties in 2013. $3169 of those came from the bundling of books in the Storybundle Doctor Who deal, while the other $9240 came from general sales, for an average of $770 a month. In practice this helpfully supplements my wife’s income in a given month and means that we enjoy the considerable luxury of never having to get too stressed about where rent is coming from in a given month.

There was also the matter of the Kickstarter. I made some errors in calculating shipping costs that resulted in much, much more of the Kickstarter being used to fulfill rewards than I had expected. Between paying for editing and design services on four books in 2013 and rewards shipping, all but about $5000 of the Kickstarter was spoken for. (Design is about $800 a book. Final costs on shipping aren’t quite nailed down because I still have some replacements to ship due to my screwing up and not using sturdy enough packaging, but they were around $6-7k.)

That $5000, along with the Storybundle windfall, essentially went to two things. The first was our honeymoon, which we took in Chicago after eloping. We drove out, stayed in a Pricelined hotel, and put all the money towards eating at nice restaurants. It was an absolutely amazing time, and we would both like to thank everyone for making it something we could do.

The second was my wife’s birthday present for me, a very nice grill that lets me do all sorts of fun cooking things. I was going to include a picture of it, but I ended up writing this at about 3am, so really, not the best lighting for it. Still, I love it dearly, and have made some really lovely dinners on it. (Next up, a grill-roasted duck with potatoes, also grill-roasted.)

To sum up, then, between this job and my wife’s work, we’re able to maintain a pretty nice middle class existence for two.…

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