Eruditorum Press

Watery tarts distributing hammers and sickles

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:

An Unused Can of Monster’s Cat Food (The Last War in Albion Part 16: Maxwell the Magic Cat, The Stars My Degradation)

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This is the sixth of seven installments of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest works included not only his underground-inflected Roscoe Moscow, but Maxwell the Magic Cat, his attempt at a newspaper strip featuring a talking animal. What started as a children’s comic (at least in the editor’s mind) steadily drifted into something altogether stranger…
I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl. – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Figure 123: A late Maxwell the Magic Cat strip that plays with the formal
constraints of the comic medium (Alan Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1986) Click
to expand.

Before long any resemblance between Maxwell the Magic Cat and a children’s comic was gone, and eventually the Northants Post conceded the point and moved the strip off the children’s page entirely. It’s not that the strip was ever child-unfriendly as such, though after a few months it becomes hard to imagine any child particularly enjoying the jokes about pairing red wine with fish or Robert Mitchum. By the time Moore got to tins of cat food sitting on death row and the tragic end of Liver Chunks in Oyster Sauce any pretense that the strip was aimed at children was firmly out the window. Instead Moore turned the strip into a general gag-a-week strip that wandered through any number of interests: politics, complex formal play with the structure of the comics medium, bleak existential jokes (a captured mouse asks Maxwell what happens after death, and Maxwell describes cat heaven.The mouse admits that this doesn’t sound that bad, and asks where mice go when they die. “Oh, they go to cat heaven as well.”), and, of course, wonderfully dreadful puns. (Maxwell 4 page 30 for formally complex strip)

Figure 124: Alan Moore’s acerbic commentary on the Falklands War (Alan
Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1982)

By and large, this worked. Moore’s intensely structural approach lends itself well to comedy. This is something that even a cursory examination of interviews with him reveals: he is a terribly funny man. Even when Moore is working with a bit of a shaggy dog punchline he frames it in a precisely worked set of comic beats.

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Outside the Government: Reset

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It’s… still February 13th, 2008. Torchwood has rejiggered its schedule slightly, showing next week’s Torchwood a week early on BBC Three immediately following the BBC Two broadcast. This has an interesting effect, as it moves the first airing of the show away from its main airing. Torchwood is still treated as a BBC Two show. But it now has a “for the fans” transmission a week early. It, in effect, makes Torchwood the opposite of event television.

Which is funny, because Reset is, in practice, an event episode. First and foremost, of course, is its ending, which features the shock death of Owen Harper. Although the contours of this are questionable since, again, once this goes out on BBC Two it’s immediately resolved by “Dead Man Walking” showing on BBC Three. (This seems to have basically worked, in fact – 849k of the 3.8m people who watched Adam tuned into Reset on BBC Three. The next week, one million of Reset’s 3.2m viewers went for Dead Man Walking. The total ratings, however, remained about level, making this a curious experiment.) But the other big event is that this is the first of three Torchwood episodes in which Martha Jones makes a guest appearance.

Bringing Martha Jones back is tricky business, to say the least. She has to be brought back, of course. The world of the new series forces that on you. Because companions never really leave and we get them bound into their home lives, returning them to their home lives isn’t a departure. This isn’t a complaint, though it does force a sort of ludicrous escalation of stakes on companion departure episodes as writers try to find bold new ways of stranding someone so that the Doctor can never see them again. The move towards companions who have lives outside the TARDIS is, on balance, a good thing, in that it allows companions who are more than just plot functions. Even the classic series had basically moved to that by the end, with Ace’s disconnection from her life on Earth becoming a factor of Ace actively wanting to get away fro her life, as opposed to just an incidental and unacknowledged fact.

This really is important. Because plot-wise, the companion’s job is fairly straightforward. They’re supposed to act in a particular way within the narrative. In that regard they’re fairly interchangeable. Most basic plots would work with any companion. Nothing about what Jo Grant does is that noticeably different from what Mel or Rose or even Romana would do in a similar situation. Yes, the flavor of it would change – the dialogue changes, and some of the mechanisms by which characters accomplish things change, but the basic shape they fill in a plot is the same. Which leads to a sort of diminishing returns – all you can do with them is switch the iconography around. A knife-wielding savage! A bossy Australian stewardess! Bonnie Langford!

By giving companions lives outside the TARDIS you get the ability to do different sorts of stories – ones in which who the companions are matters.…

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A Wondrous Book Launch

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The cover art is, as ever, by the fantastic
James Taylor, who talks about his process
over here. 

Last War in Albion will run on Saturday this week, in lieu of the usual waffling.

I am pleased to announce that A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman is at long last available from Eruditorum Press. It’s priced at $7.99 for the US ebook edition, with all other editions priced to give me the same royalty. You can buy it now at Amazon (Print, Kindle), Amazon UK (Print, Kindle), and Smashwords, which can provide you with ebook versions for any non-Kindle devices. It’s available in most other Amazon stores, and will be on Nook, iBooks, and Sony stores in a few weeks.

The book is a critical history of Wonder Woman, focusing primarily but not exclusively on her comic book appearances. It starts in 1941, as William Moulton Marston, a pop psychologist, creates a female superhero to advance his idiosyncratic goals about the relationship between men and women, through the days when she was more feminist than Gloria Steinem, and all the way to the present day, where the character is stuck in DC’s woeful New 52 relaunch, looking at every era of Wonder Woman in between.

It’s written to be understandable and interesting to audiences who have never read a Wonder Woman comic before, but has enough detail that even the most die-hard fan will learn a few things. It doesn’t just cover the canonical “major eras” like the Marston era and the Pérez era, but every era from 1941 on is there, in varying levels of detail.

Why, one might ask, a history of Wonder Woman? Because she’s simultaneously one of the most recognized figures in popular culture and one of the least well-understood. She’s a wildly popular character, and yet save for three seasons of television in the 1970s it’s hard to point to her iconic or beloved version. There are not stories like The Dark Knight Returns or The Death of Gwen Stacy that everyone points to as the iconic Wonder Woman story. There’s no movie version.

And yet she’s fascinating. Not just because she was designed as propaganda for Marston’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia, but because she’s spent over seventy years in continual publication by a company that has never seemed to understand the character. Where Batman and Superman feel easy to understand, Wonder Woman is strangely amorphous, resisting an easy definition. This has made her comics often frustrating, but rarely, if ever, boring. And because she is, by her nature, a symbol of feminism and of social justice, the highs and lows of her comics are often fascinating.

Inevitably, a book drifts over two years of being written and produced. When I envisioned the book, of course, it was called Paradise Dungeons, playing off of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island and the oft-remarked upon bondage components of Wonder Woman. But when I finished the book it wasn’t quite that book.…

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Outside the Government: Adam

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It’s February 13th, 2008. Still Basshunter at number one, with the same bunch of folks on the lower charts, along with Lupe Fiasco, David Jordan, and Wet Wet Wet. In news, Mitt Romney drops out of the GOP primaries, the Writers Guild of America strike resolves, and Obama keeps winning stuff, leading to a desperate shakeup in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which continues to be blatantly unable to win a majority of delegates. The military government of Myanmar agrees to a referendum on a new constitution that will begin devolving power from it, Anonymous bursts onto the scene of political protest with a series of actions against Scientology, and the US decides that maybe waterboarding isn’t nice and should be banned.

While on television, Torchwood’s second season plods miserably on. So much so that at this point I have to admit defeat. There are not 2000 words to be said about every episode of Torchwood this season. Where the first season was at least interesting, really regardless of its quality, this season is simply banal. And Adam serves as my breaking point. It is an episode that is spectacular in its complete lack of anything interesting. More than any other Torchwood episode to date, this one seems designed to mimic a specific episode of American television. Adam is a direct remake of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Superstar,” to the point of using the trick of redoing the opening credits to include the fake character who forms the premise of the episode. 
There are, of course, huge differences. “Superstar” was about Jonathan, who was steadily built up over multiple seasons from a recurring background character to a significant character in his own right, until finally getting an episode in which he, for mysterious and unknown reasons, becomes not just a mainstay of the Scooby Gang, but one who has supposedly been there for ages. Jonathan is a problem in the episode and his rise to power is undone, but he remains a more or less sympathetic character and, though he remains problematic and is never quite a good guy, he’s also always carefully kept from being an outright villain.
Adam, on the other hand, is about a malevolent character. He rapes Tosh and revels in his cruelty to Ianto. He’s firmly a monster of the week; he’s killed off at the end of the episode, and he’s never to be spoken of again. Indeed, given that the entire episode is wiped from the minds of all of the main characters, future use of the character is pretty much salted earth. He’s not even going to be referenced again, little yet actually brought back. There’s, right off the bat, a very different sort of approach in play here.
But the broad strokes are all here. Adam, like Superstar, is an episode designed to let all of the main cast play slightly different versions of their characters. So we have Owen and Tosh’s roles in their relationship flipped, with Owen becoming the shy one and Tosh becoming the confident and sexually active one.
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Book Review: Adventures with the Wife in Space

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Adventures With the Wife in Space is, as we’ve already talked about, an absolutely wonderful blog. But reading it over the years, one also often gets the nagging sense that it’s been a troubled blog, and troubled largely because of Neil Perryman’s ambivalence regarding the project.

It’s both an interesting and brave decision, therefore, that the book of the blog goes so far away from the blog’s apparent wheelhouse. For all of us in fandom it seemed obvious that the real point of The Wife in Space was the reviews. It was Doctor Who as reviewed by a not-we – a normal person. Sue was our great reasonably sane hope; the person who would tell us what bits of the classic series we could actually be proud of and what bits were as rubbish as we feared.

Because this is a thing. Tat Wood, in About Time 7, accuses the new series of suffering from anorakaphobia. This seems a bit of a leap for a show that includes easter eggs about The Sensorites on more than one occasion, but it does get at something real, which is that ever since the new series fandom has had a sense of non-trivial anxiety about the classic series. On the one hand, Doctor Who was suddenly popular. This was fantastic. Suddenly we weren’t freaks for liking it any more. But there was a clear divide between the new series and the classic series. The popularity of the new series didn’t magically make it remotely normal to like The Claws of Axos.

Beyond that, fandom had learned its lesson. Doctor Who fandom, especially in the UK, was characterized by loving snark. Or, sometimes, unloving snark. Being a Doctor Who fan meant knowing “not the mind probe,” or the bubble wrap in The Ark in Space, or the bits in The Monster of Peladon where it was obviously Terry Walsh and not Jon Pertwee, or all the Billy fluffs. This didn’t mean hating the series. But it meant loving it in spite of itself, with a slightly embarrassed look. And nothing about the popularity of the new series erased that problem.

This is baked into the entire premise of Wife in Space: the fact that watching the classic series is slightly embarrassing. Hell, I’ve had the problem with my wife, who does identify as a Doctor Who fan and was genuinely interested in having me show her bits of the classic series. My reaction was roughly, “what, reading my blog isn’t enough? You want to see them? Why?” Not because I didn’t love them so much as because it is vaguely incomprehensible why anyone else would. (Then again, my wife also adores our blind cat who routinely sneezes explosively and sprays snot all over our house. And, for that matter, me. Even The Web Planet is easy to love in comparison.)

But there was a problem with all of this, and it’s one that quickly becomes clear when reading the book version of Adventures of the Wife in Space: Sue is not even a little bit normal.…

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Outside the Government: Meat

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It’s February 6th, 2008. Basshunter remains at number one, with Adele, Nickelback, Kelly Rowland, Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Hot Chip also charting. I put Hot Chip on the list mainly because it’s funny to end that list with “Hot Chip.” In news, several undersea cables are severed, disrupting Internet service through large parts of the world. Barack Obama acquires what is functionally an unassailable delegate lead following “Super Tuesday” such that Hillary Clinton has no meaningful chance of winning the nomination, ensuring a several month long nomination process.

While on television, we have the succinctly titled Meat. Meat is an interesting story in a large part because of its particular pairing of writer and story. Catherine Tregenna made her name in the first season of Torchwood with a pair of quiet character pieces, which happened to be two of the standout episodes of the season to boot. But with Meat she ends up with a more action-based premise – much more dashing around and solving crimes, and much less quiet focus on character. It’s not characterization-free by any measure, but it’s also not the quiet sort of story Tregenna’s previous work suggested.

In some ways this is a mistake, though not really one of Tregenna’s making. As with the previous time the brief included “let’s do the biggest Doctor Who monster ever,” insufficient thought was given to whether they could actually pull it off, leaving the story with a spectacularly unconvincing and rubbish monster as its centerpiece. This obscures the fact that Tregenna’s actual writing of an action/suspense thriller is actually quite solid, and that it’s merely sandbagged by having a lot of the key scenes take place in a giant warehouse dominated by a massive CGI slug that, accordingly, have to be shot from strange angles to cut down on the number of F/X shots, since Torchwood is the cheap show and doesn’t get many of those.

Nevertheless, Meat is a surprising story, especially coming off the heals of two stories that were terribly predictable and a third that was interesting along a narrow but substantive band. And it’s not interesting just for the decision to shake up the status quo and let Rhys in on the premise of his own show. Though this decision is interesting and worth talking about. These sorts of decisions are always a bit complex; on one level, it leads to the steady dismantling of the series’ original premises, and shows a small amount of desperation. In this regard it resembles major character deaths, not that Torchwood is ever going to do any of those. In any given premise there’s a set number of stories you can do that involve knocking down pillars of the premise. Doctor Who, for instance, could write any of its main characters out of the show, destroy the TARDIS, or reveal where the Doctor came from. All of which it did within the first six seasons before, somewhat sensibly, basically stopping and not doing any more of those save for The Deadly Assassin.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 26th, 2013)

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I am on vacation, which is (I assume) quite lovely. I say “I assume” because I’m queuing this up as part of my commitment to not actually doing any work on my vacation, which is a novel concept that I feel like experimenting with. (Spoiler: I’m going to fail, since I’m checking the proof copy of A Golden Thread and still actually have to write Tuesday’s post because I’m an idiot and forgot)

In the spirit of my not doing any work, I encourage you to come up with interesting conversations all on your own, without any prompt on my part, thus giving me entertaining things to read on my phone while I nervously attempt to deal with the fact that I’m outside and there’s sunlight, which is not the sort of situation I am generally well-suited to.
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Outside the Government: To the Last Man

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It’s January 30th, 2008. Basshunter remains at number one, with the underchart being basically unchanged. Kelly Rowland is added to it. That’s about it. In news, the longest running magazine in Australia, The Bulletin, ceases publication. In the US, Obama handily wins the South Carolina primary, opening a handy lead in delegates over Hillary Clinton. And in the UK, virtually nothing whatsoever happens. (The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions resigns. That’s what you’ve got.)

On television, Torchwood’s second season rumbles merrily on with Helen Raynor’s To the Last Man. It’s an odd thing that Torchwood takes the initial three episodes of its first season as quite so much of a template for its second season. Nevertheless, that is what we have here – an episode focused on reintroducing the team, an episode focused on Gwen bonding with an alien victim, and a ghost story by Helen Raynor. This time the focus of the ghost story is Tosh, not Owen, but nevertheless, the pattern is remarkably consistent.

But where Ghost Machine was an odd and oblique number with a structure that continually twisted out of shape, To the Last Man works with straightforward linearity, moving from its initial premise to its inevitable conclusion with a placid efficiency. This is not, in this case, a bad thing. To the Last Man picks a reasonably potent set of images such that it’s direct path from start to finish is tragic rather than predictable. Save a slight pacing glitch at the end (Tosh having to project into Tommy’s mind feels like using an extra scene to do what should have been done earlier), this marches along towards a satisfyingly doomful end.

Beyond that, it’s flecked with character moments. Tosh would use Tommy as a surrogate for an actual relationship. And Tommy’s bewildered disappointment at the things Tosh doesn’t pursue in her life stings just right. Better yet is Owen’s genuinely concern for Tosh, and the way in which it pays off longer standing character bits. Those who have seen the series know exactly why Owen is the one warning Tosh about the dangers of time-displaced love affairs. Even a somewhat lightweight scene, such as Tommy’s railing against the stupidity of continuing war as we cut to a news broadcast about Iraq is quietly elevated. The cliched bashing of the “war to end all wars” descriptor of World War I, which is usually employed because it’s the most lazily straightforward way to criticize militarism imaginable, is enlivened immeasurably by the tiny detail of Tommy describing World War II as “three weeks later.”

Indeed, Tommy in general is a particularly deft example of the man out of time. The decision not to emphasize Tommy’s anachronistic nature is a sound one. He largely understands the world around him. He takes on an interesting role within the world, able to make meaningful statements about it precisely because he’s seen snapshots of it over the course of nearly a century. 2008 is a peculiarly good time for a World War I story, coming right as the last of the veterans were swallowed up by the past, such that what we have with this story is one of someone whose sense of our history exceeds that of anyone save for Jack himself.…

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I Don’t Have to Have a Cat Die in Order to Produce a Good Work (The Last War in Albion Part 15: Alan Moore’s Pre-Professional Work, Children’s Comics, Maxwell the Magic Cat)

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This is the fifth of seven installments of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. 

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Moore’s earliest professional work was in a style heavily indebted to the American underground comix scene. But this scene influenced him on more than just a stylistic level – the movement’s fondness for iconoclasm and a locally produced, self-published mode of production appealed to Moore too, and in fact described the environment in which he worked prior to selling Roscoe Moscow to Sounds…

“I don’t have to have a cat die in order to produce a good work.” – Grant Morrison, 2013 interview


Figure 114: Alan Moore, under his Curt Vile pseudonym, did
a set of humorous cartoons for Marvel UK’s 1979 Frantic
Winter Special.
In many ways the most obvious precedent for Roscoe Moscow from this earlier period is the series of eleven comics he did for the Back Street Bugle, an alternative newspaper out of Oxford, entitled St. Pancras Panda. Conceptually, St. Pancras Panda is a straightforward parody of Michael Bond and Peggy Fortnum’s Paddington Bear, although, like Roscoe Moscow, the parody does not bother staying narrowly focused, and the strip is instead an opportunity for Moore to cram in a wealth of gags, allusions, and parodies of institutional power. Stylistically, like Roscoe Moscow, it’s a straightforward imitation of the underground comix scene. More broadly, if Roscoe Moscow is Moore visibly working out the stylistic and storytelling skills that define his later work, St. Pancras Panda is Moore working out the skills he’d need to start Roscoe Moscow. It is, in every regard, a slightly more primitive version of the strip – the art is scratcher, the storytelling is less clear, the jokes are less sharp. But it demonstrates that the underground comix style affected for Roscoe Moscow was not just a one-time thing selected for a specific job. To some extent it may be a matter of basic convenience – Moore is endlessly self-deprecating about his artistic skills, claiming that “I was barely capable of drawing even simple objects in a way by which they might be recognized… I wasn’t really sure how many ribs people had or where the muscles were in the arms and legs.” This is, as is characteristic for Moore, an overstatement, but it is the case that Moore is not a first rate artist.
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Outside the Government: Sleeper

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It’s January 23rd, 2008. Basshunter, accompanied by DJ Mental Theo’s Bazzheadz, tops the charts with “Now You’re Gone.” Adele, Rihanna, Britney Spears, Nickelback, and Kanye West also chart. In news, a plane crashes at Heathrow, injuring thirteen people and delaying two hundred flights. Barack Obama manages to win more delegates in the Nevada caucuses despite actually narrowly losing the numerical vote, another sign of the degree to which his campaign was unnervingly well-organized. On the Republican side, Duncan Hunter drops out, a news event leading most people to realize for the first time that hew as running. Fred Thompson also withdraws, which is about equally interesting. And Heath Ledger dies, which is on the whole rather grimmer.
On television, Torchwood’s second season plods on with Sleeper. Here we get the rare episode of Torchwood that depends largely on its parent show for relevance. Taken on its own, Sleeper is, well, a bit sleepy. Its premise works, broadly speaking, but theres no particular sparkle to it, and it largely appears to be “Gwen cares passionately about someone who’s been caught up in alien malarkey,” a plot structure recognizable from large swaths of the first season. And this time the alien malarkey seems… well… a bit silly, really. Alien sleeper agents ready to wake up and embark on a frighteningly baroque scheme to use our own weapons against us as a means of taking over the planet? Really? Last year we had a sex alien, which, while not actually any mores sensible, is at least, you know, a sex alien. This is just ridiculous.
Except the thing is, Cell 114’s plan is bog standard. Invade the Earth via a baroque plan involving military installations and evil alien pseudo-humans? It’s the plot of Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, Terror of the Zygons, The Android Invasion, Aliens of London/World War Three and probably a few others that I’m leaving off the list. What we have here is a bog standard Doctor Who invasion, in other words, that never quite gets started. And in the time spent waiting for the big alien invasion to actually start – you know, the sort of plot that would usually involved the Doctor showing up – we instead get a human story about the people caught up in the wake of this alien invasion.
In this regard, we have the second consecutive story that has clearly thought through the point of being Torchwood. It’s a story designed to fit into the margins of Doctor Who and give them a human dimension. The basic mechanic of the series is well in place – Doctor Who is about exploring various narrative spaces, while Torchwood is about abutting them with human spaces. Not in the bland horror of Yeti-in-the-loo sense, but in a sense of ordinary lives deformed and deranged by the alien. 
In this regard it’s significant that the event that causes Beth’s life to turn upside down is an act of violence.
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