Eruditorum Press

That is not dead which can eternally hit the snooze button

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:

Saturday Waffling (February 22nd, 2014)

12

Well. This has been a week.

Let’s see.

Jed Blue is Kickstarting the second volume of My Little Po-Mo over here. Jed is good people. You should consider helping him out.

This raises a plausible and interesting question: what’s worth supporting these days? Whether it be Kickstarters, charitable causes, political causes, or whatnot, what are some things you think are worth spending money to support?…

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Outside the Government: The Mad Woman in the Attic

, 14

It’s October 22nd, 2009. Alexandra Burke and Flo Rida are at number one with “Bad Boys,” with Robbie Williams, Black Eyed Peas, and Michael Buble also charting. In news, about all I can actually find over the last week is the balloon boy hoax in Colorado. Oh, and Jenson Button wins the Formula One Drivers’ Champion. All right then.
So, television – another installment of The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is in some ways surprising that The Mad Woman in the Attic is a relatively messy and underwhelming story, not least because it’s by Joseph Lidster, who wrote the best Sarah Jane Adventures story to date with Mark of the Berserker last season. And yet it is, in fact, a mess. It’s not entirely clear what the problem is. It’s certainly possible that it’s just down to some performances that, while not bad as such, are also not quite up to the level they need to be. Neither Souad Faress as the adult Rani nor Eleanor Tomlinson as the alien Eve quite persuade. It’s not that their performances are bad in any specifically memorable way, but they are equally not particularly compelling or nuanced, which is a problem when both roles are required to carry a lot of the underlying emotional weight of the story. It could also be down to a script that, for all its pedigree, feels crowded and like it has one too many ideas, and that this excess has cost any given idea the space to be interesting. 
But the real problem is with the job the story seems to be trying to solve. This is an odd thing to say. After all, the job is one of the basic and reflexive functions of a series like this. The Mad Woman in the Attic exists to be a character focus episode on Rani. Given that she’s not really had one since her debut, which was so focused on getting her to be a business-as-usual part of the story that she barely had time to develop as a character, this makes total sense. Rani needs to be fleshed out. If this season went by without a heavily Rani-focused episode it would be anomalous to the point of opening serious allegations of sexism.
But Rani has, if not a problem as a cast member, at least a problem as a character. She’s there to fill a narrative contrivance in a manner not dissimilar to how Sarah Jane herself is. And just as Sarah Jane proved oddly unsatisfying as the center of an emotional story in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, so does Rani here. Rani was designed to be a plucky adventuress. She was never really given any character traits beyond that. And so a story about her emotional turmoil is unsatisfying because her character was never really meant to have that. Fault Souad Faress all you want, but it’s not clear what she could have done with this script. Old Rani is defined only by her narrative wrongness – by the fact that she’s not the correct version of the character.
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Even Reverse the Flow of Time (The Last War in Albion Part 32: Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Alan Moore’s Time Twisters)

, 10

This is the eighth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten 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.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After an initial period of promise and originality, Moore’s future shocks began to fade into repetitiveness as the limits of the format became increasingly and painfully clear…

“We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass.” -Grant Morrison


Figure 242: “The Wages of Sin” even recycles the final
joke of “They Sweep the Spaceways,” with the major
difference being that Talbot arranged his panels
vertically and Leach horizontally. (c.f. Figure 235)
(From “The Wages of Sin,” written by Alan Moore, art
by Bryan Talbot, in 2000 AD #257, 1982)
But many other stories in the period are flatter at best. “A Second Chance,” a two-pager in which the last man on Earth finds a woman, is utterly devoid of any point. “All of Them Were Empty,” in which a siege on a American truck stop is revealed to be conducted by sentient cars wanting a fill-up, is similarly uninspiring, as is “No Picnic,” in which a man is buried alive on Easter Island to become one of the famed heads. And when Moore did hit gold, it was often by rehashing his own previous work. One of his best stories of 1982, “The Wages of Sin,” is a redo of “They Sweep the Spaceways,” this time focusing on the training that would-be galactic conquerers go through. It’s not that it is a pale imitation of “They Sweep the Spaceways.” In fact, its jokes are a step sharper, and the art by Bryan Talbot is superlative. But it’s still just a refinement of an earlier strip.
For the most part this stretch of Moore’s work is characterized by a heavy reliance on straightforward twist endings. Some of these are reasonably clever – “The Beastly Beliefs of Benjamin Blint”,” for instance, uses the basic twist of the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder,” whereby the eponymous Benjamin Blint tells his therapist about the horrible creature that periodically appears to him. The strip shows several such encounters, between a typically square-jawed man and a suitably horrible looking creature. The final panel reveals that Blint is in fact the monstrous creature, haunted by the “hideous” ordinary human, who Blint finally admits can’t possibly be real, because there just isn’t room in the real world for creatures as stomach-turning and loathsome as that.”
…

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Outside the Government: Prisoner of the Judoon

, 30

It’s October 15th, 2009. Chipmunk are at number one with “Oopsy Daisy,” with Shakira, the Black Eyed Peas, and two separate Jay-Z tracks also charting. In news, since July, Ireland approved the Lisbon Treaty on the second attempt, the 2016 Olympics were given to Rio di Janeiro, and North Korea freed two American journalists following intervention by former President Bill Clinton. While more around the time of this story, Tim Berners-Lee publicly apologizes for excessive backslashes in urls, a Ugandan MP proposes making certain instances of homosexual activity capital offenses, and Stephen Gately, one of the lead singers of Boyzone, died in Spain. Also, Edgar Allen Poe’s funeral is held.
On television, meanwhile, The Sarah Jane Adventures is back. It is interesting to compare the positions of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures going into their third seasons. Torchwood was a show in visible need of some sort of revamping or, at the very least, of Davies actually being heavily involved in the season instead of largely sitting on the sidelines. The Sarah Jane Adventures, on the other hand, was rapidly perfecting a sort of business-as-usual approach that served it well. So where the mantra of Children of Earth amounted to “everything really does change for once,” the mantra of The Sarah Jane Adventures in its third season amounted to “let’s do it again.”
Prisoner of the Judoon exemplifies that, ticking all the boxes of what one would expect a season premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures to be while still managing to be its own thing. You’ve got the return of a Doctor Who monster, a story built so that everybody gets at least one moment to shine, and a nice high-concept premise to hold it all together. The latter, of course, is that Sarah Jane’s found herself possessed for the first time since The Hand of Fear. Lis Sladen, unsurprisingly, plays it with gleeful relish – Sarah Jane as possessed by the Androvax is all lascivious growl and menace. 
It’s an interestingly calibrated performance – it would have been easy to make the big “Sarah Jane is possessed” story an opportunity to be scary. The last time Sarah Jane was absent from the story was Mark of the Berserker, which used her absence to make the story scarier. Without Sarah Jane to keep things in line, Clyde’s father became an extremely threatening figure capable of doing much more damage than any villain possibly could when Sarah Jane is around. This time, however, Sarah Jane’s absence is, if not comedic, at least a source of fun – an opportunity for Lis Sladen to let her hair down and act out instead of being the buttoned-up, straight-laced figure. The story is a big party in the same way that New Earth was for Billie Piper.
Meanwhile, the rest of the cast gets to shine as well. Luke gets to capably act as a surrogate Sarah Jane and stop the aliens, Rani gets some lovely comedy bits with her parents, and Clyde gets to be practical and a leader figure.
…

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Portrait of a Monday

9

I probably could have found something interesting to bang out here this week. But instead I spent all day signing and packing books for the Kickstarter.

The books to sign. $2500 worth of books (and that’s bought at cost). Fifteen boxes, each with 24-32 books.

A box of Troughons, with the cover in sexy matte finish.

And the main event.

Fun fact – my signature that I use for legal purposes is just three vague scrawls that most people say look like three ws, and so I spent a while figuring out a new signature that looked vaguely like my name for this. These are various attempts where I went “goddammit, that P looks like an R” and “that S looks like an I don’t even fucking know.” Handwriting was not my strong subject in school.

Piles and piles of books. The ones in the back are signed and ready to pack. At time of posting, this table and two others are fully covered in books, and I’m about 1/3 done.

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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five

, 18

[previously] On the other hand, the idea that the Doctor would deliberately murder a child to save the day is unthinkable. In fact, the degree to which it is unthinkable is central to Moffat’s soft retcon of the Time War to give the Doctor an out in Day of the Doctor. The way that Moffat renders the Doctor’s double genocide unthinkable is by declaring that Gallifrey was full of children – a thought that is unimaginable in the context of Davies’s vision of the Time War as an event in which the dead are simply brought back from an earlier point in time to fight again and again and the Time Lords became monsters as unthinkable as the Daleks. Moffat alters this by saying that the Time Lords weren’t all monsters, and he does this through unabashed reproductive futurism. Jack, on the other hand, has at this point functionally killed fourteen kids, putting him six shy of Adam Lanza.

And yet for all of that, he is unambiguously framed as the hero. When he is absent from the narrative for the entirety of “Day Two” it is consciously a disruption to the narrative’s function, and when he’s restored in “Day Three” he gets a cheeky and thoroughly gratuitous sequence where his hero coat is restored to him. There’s no way of reading Children of Earth as anything other than a story about Jack Harkness, the hero who saves the day. 
It’s tempting to read this as the frankly overly common trope of the tortured and morally ambiguous antihero – this is, after all, released almost exactly a year after The Dark Knight, when the love of taking heroes to “dark” places was at its highest. But Davies has never shown a particular attachment to the tortured antihero, and much as he pushes Jack into grim territory, he does ultimately end by putting Jack in a position to return to his galavanting, space-faring roots. For all that Jack’s actions and ending are grim, we should think about the next place we see him: a raucous bar full of all manner of colourful CGI characters. “The hero Cardiff deserves” this ain’t.
Which is to say that we are forced to take Jack’s actions as morally serious. This is, to be fair, not actually difficult. At the end of the day, it’s just another trolley problem, and the solution Children of Earth settles on is a perfectly mainstream answer to it. Killing twelve people to save twenty-five million is, if not straightforwardly ethical, at least reasonable and defensible. Killing one to save even more is likewise. The only things that make Jack’s actions especially horrific are aesthetic issues: the fact that the person he’s killing is a kid, and, more than that, his grandson. (Strangely, the fact that he’s also saving children has relatively little impact in practice.) 
And so by embracing this queer ideology in all its awful splendor, Jack liberates himself from the entire world. It’s interesting to note that his final scene is not actually necessarily a scene about how awful he found it to have to kill his own grandson.
…

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Saturday/Sunday General Breakfast Buffet (February 15th, 2014)

51

Hello all. Not sure why this didn’t post this morning. Here it is.

This week has been pretty focused on Last War in Albion, and it looks like I’ll have about half the Skizz/DR and Quinch chapter done by the end of the weekend. Having some good fun with bits of it – summarizing Thatcher’s first term in a thousand words was interesting. Have to firm up exactly what I’m doing next, though. I’m going to switch publishers, because Halo Jones is wholly on the other side of Moore’s US success and so has to come after Swamp Thing.

So it’s probably time to circle back and do Moore’s Marvel UK stuff, which is the last run of stuff that can be written off as uninteresting early career work. But then comes the real decision – do I put V for Vendetta in before or after Swamp Thing?

Marvelman is definitely getting held back. In fact, I’m going to deal with it in parallel to Watchmen. My plan is to spend a long time on Watchmen – roughly as long as everything before Watchmen is going to take. If I do book versions of Last War in Albion (and I’m almost certain to do at least one) then I’ll put the dividing line right before Watchmen, and book two will just be called The Battle of Watchmen or something better if I can think of it, because I don’t actually like that title. So a host of stuff is going to get subsumed into that – all Moore’s non-Swamp Thing DC work, Marvelman, Grant Morrison’s UK career (Zoids and Zenith, as it were), a dash of Neil Gaiman, and Moore’s falling out with DC. As well as the background stuff you’d expect – the history of Charlton, the history of Fawcett, Frank Miller, a bigger history of DC than what the Swamp Thing chapter will give, et cetera.

So the two possible orders are Captain Britain, Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, or Captain Britain, V For Vendetta, Swamp Thing. The latter is more accurate to chronology, but… V for Vendetta. I want to come back to it after Watchmen, to be honest. I’m really interested in that few-year period after Watchmen where Moore sort of wrapped up his previous career, right before he started self-publishing and, shortly thereafter, snake-worshipping. Moore in parallel with the breakout days of Gaiman and Morrison, fleeing the industry right as what he enabled made the careers of a dozen or more of his fellow comics scenesters.

And the two things you have for that are the end of V for Vendetta and the tail end of Marvelman. So I actually want to deal with V for Vendetta in a very limited form early on, because I have to leave myself a second take on it. So I figure initially I’ll treat it as the weird, very British thing it is, and then later treat it as a Major Work of the Great Genius Alan Moore.…

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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four

, 13

[previously] Reproductive futurism invests itself in a future without content. It has to, because the future is defined as the place where we don’t live but where our children do. But Jack, as we said, does live in the future. He’s not just from the future, he is ageless and deathless such that he will, in practice, live to see the entirety of it, outliving the Earth itself. This is why he is a queer figure, in the end.
But in opposition to this is the idea of temporal attachments – that is, the longstanding themes of immortality in which the immortal figure must mourn how everyone they love grows old and dies. This is alluded to at the start of the story, with Jack’s declaration that he doesn’t like being a couple – “couples” being, after all, the basic unit of temporal attachments and reproductive futurism. Ianto’s death, then, consists of forcibly severing Jack’s ties to that rhetoric and allowing him to fully embrace the queer ideology he truly represents. It is worth looking at the specific context of Ianto’s death – coming as it does in the midst of a big, heroic scene in which Ianto and Jack attempt to heroically speak of humanity’s potential and how there’s nothing they won’t do to protect their children. That is, they speak in defense of reproductive futurism, which is spectacularly ineffectual. Ianto dies, thus forcing Jack to a new type of strategy – one that actually works, but that works precisely because it completely rejects reproductive futurism and instead involves murdering his own grandson.
It is worth noting that the particulars of Ianto’s death – a virus – hold specific symbolic weight. One of the things that has most often been important in understanding Davies’s work, particularly when same-sex relationships show up in it, is the difference between homosexuality as a sexual orientation and the specific institution of gay culture. This is what’s ultimately invoked in the memorable monologue way back in Bob and Rose in which Bob declares that “I was born gay, I’ll die gay and I’ll have a gay gravestone” – not, self-evidently, that he therefore was never going to be attracted to a woman, but that his self-identity and image came out of gay culture. (A fact implicit in the idea that a gravestone can be gay.) And Davies often writes about gay culture as much, if not more than he writes about same-sex relationships. Indeed, his inclination in much of his later work is specifically to avoid making same-sex relationships a topic – observe, for instance, how Ianto basically plays a reverse version of the Bob and Rose game, rejecting any identity implicit in his romance with Jack when asked by Rhiannon. Gay culture, to be clear, is in no way coextensive with homosexuality – it does not provide a description fitting all or even most gay men. Nevertheless, it still has significant cultural impact.
All of which is to say that the fact that Jack – an ostentatiously queer character who, especially in 2009 once John Barrowman had become a ubiquitous presence on television such that it was impossible to look at his character in Torchwood and not see in part the high-profile gay man playing him – loses his lover specifically to a deadly virus is impossible not to read in part as a quiet invocation of the role that HIV/AIDS played in gay culture and gay history. 
…

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The Day I Finished It, He Died (The Last War in Albion Part 31: Abelard Snazz, Moore’s Early and Middle Future Shocks)

, 7

This is the seventh of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten 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

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: (Alan Moore’s accidental plagiarism of Norman Spinrad was one of two lifts he’s discussed from his 2000 AD days, the other being the second Abelard Snazz story, Snazz being a genius whose plans inevitably turn out terribly…

“I had actually had plans. We had just sort of opened up very, very preliminary negotiations to find out if Gorey would be interested in illustrating it. And the day I finished it, he died. I mean literally. I finished it and the news was that Edward Gorey died.” -Neil Gaiman, on Coraline

Snazz exists to satirize over-elaborate top-down thinking, but it’s important to note that Snazz is merely a consultant working for the government – a government that never once pipes up to say “wouldn’t just decommissioning the robot cops make more sense,” or “why don’t we reprogram the buggers so they don’t arrest people for wearing ugly ties,” just as, in “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain” Hoolio Moolabar never steps in to say “erm, why don’t we just go get the car instead of betting every penny we have with the doorman.” Snazz, in other words, is not so much a villain as a parodic version of a particular societal tendency that allows people like him to function in the first place. Moore, reflecting on Snazz, rejects the idea that Snazz works because he’s “a symbol of irresponsible science run amok, a sort of boffo Frankenstein,” noting that “anybody who can bring about the downfall of entire civilizations armed only with good intentions can’t be all bad,” and that “he is nowhere near as irredeemably stupid as the people who listen to him.” 
Figure 232: The sublime pinnacle of creative
ecstasy. (From “The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows
Out,” written by Alan Moore, art by Paul Neary,
in 2000 AD #254, 1982)
This tendency is reinforced by the later Snazz stories, which focus less on the preposterous schemes Snazz comes up with and more on the sorts of places Snazz ends up. By the time of the fourth Abelard Snazz story in January of 1982, Moore was putting Snazz in increasingly weird situations. That story, “Halfway to Paradise,” has Snazz acting as an image consultant to a variety of gods [including a lisping Thoth whose name, it is thus implied, might actually be pronounced the same as “sauce”], and the next story, two months later, features him building giant robot tennis players for a bunch of parodic Californians under the title “The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows Out.”
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three

, 46

[previously] It is here, then, we have to turn to Jack’s sexuality. One of the most enduring discussions about Jack is the way in which his sexuality evolves over the course of the series, as he goes from a pansexual action hero to, steadily, an almost exclusively gay male figure – indeed, Barrowman, in at least one interview, describes the character as a gay man. This transition is understandably significant to a large number of people, and there’s a really nasty strand of bisexual erasure that quietly goes on as Jack becomes increasingly normative and less prone to stories like his bizarre story in Boom Town involving fifteen naked people and a monster with tusks. But this ignores the degree to which Jack is more broadly a queer figure – that is, a figure who in some fashion rejects heteronormative reproductive futurism. That his queerness steadily converges on being a gay man is perhaps revealing as to exactly what sort of queer figure he is, but in many ways what is most important about Jack is the fact that he represents an ideology other than, to quote another Davies script, “grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it.” 
But this challenge does not come exclusively from Jack’s sexuality. It also, as we can see by looking at it in terms of reproductive futurism, comes from Jack’s immortality. Jack is queer because his life rejects the entire structure of the world in which those things happen. Jack is a character for whom hedonism has no consequence, and who does not face the prospect of death, and so has no reason to fetishize an imagined future given that he’ll be stuck living in the actual one. So much so that when he does engage in reproductive futurism and has a child, that relationship is impossibly strained.
This, of course, brings us around to Alice. Alice is not what you would call a well-developed character. She suffers from a smattering of difficulties – the “oh look, a key event in Jack’s past we’ve never mentioned before but that is crucial to the plot” twist is one that essentially never works well, and it must be noted that Children of Earth relies upon it twice, neither time with particular success. The first at least provides a necessary plot hook – even though the actual revelation of what Jack was up to in 1965 is a bit muted (with Ianto and Gwen basically going “well that was rather crap of you” and moving on), it’s necessary to provide the killer opening episode hook of nuking the Hub. But the second, the existence of Alice, feels downright contrived. Alice has very little to do in most episodes – she manages to spend about three episodes getting kidnapped, although her “whack the soldier with a cutting board and steal his gun” scene is magnificent. She has few traits other than “she is Jack’s daughter and doesn’t get on with him.”
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