Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

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:

Glassy-Assed Jokers (The Last War in Albion Part 12: Roscoe Moscow, The Underground)

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This is the second 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 stripMaxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form fromAmazon, 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: Alan Moore began his professional comics career in the pages of Sounds under the nom de plume “Curt Vile,” debuting Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock ‘n Roll. 
“Hawdy haw! You glassy-assed jokers are a pushover!” – Alan Moore, Astounding Weird Penises

Much of this is due to the nature of Sounds as a magazine. It is, of course, primarily a music magazine, which means that its comics section was largely an afterthought. It was also, in many ways, the third rate music magazine of the late 1970s. The big two magazines were NME – the New Musical Express, to which Moore made his first professional sale: a drawing of Elvis Costello – and Melody Maker. These magazines were not meaningfully competitors – both were published by IPC, publishers of 2000 A.D., and presented a reasonable dichotomy. Those with traditional and more conservative taste could go to Melody Maker, edited by Ray Coleman, which was still embracing prog rock while getting very excited about Bruce Springsteen. Those favoring a more progressive, avant garde approach had NME, which was openly political and had a bevy of music writers who went on to become the sorts of elder statesmen that The Guardian likes to hire. 
Figure 91: Nicky Crane on the cover of Strength
Through Oi!
So when Jack Hutton and Peter Wilkinson left Melody Maker in 1970 to start their own company, this was the closed system they confronted. The approach they eventually settled on was straightforward: they were the magazine that would embrace brash, new music. Sounds was the first of the three music magazines to embrace punk, and eventually spun off a heavy metal magazine called Kerrang! that, unlike Sounds, continues to be published today. Sounds was originally conceived of as a left-wing magazine, but by the late 1970s had become something of a mishmash – Sounds covered the Oi! subgenre of punk extensively, to the point of, in 1981, releasing a compilation called Strength Through Oi!, a subversion of the slogan “strength through joy,” the cover of which featured gay neo-Nazi Nicky Crane on the cover. Crane was, at the time, serving a prison sentence for having violently attacked more black people than was socially acceptable.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 70 (Primeval, Robin Hood)

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An era of Doctor Who in which nobody is making desperate attempts to copy and compete with it is one to view with suspicion. The logic here is simple: when Doctor Who is hot, there are going to be efforts to do similar things. When it’s not… well, it wasn’t just Doctor Who that was withering in the mid-80s; the entire children-friendly sci-fi/fantasy/horror television market was dead, and adult sci-fi wasn’t doing much better, with Doctor Who being more or less the lone survivor in either category. Whereas in 1976, with the Hinchcliffe era at its imperious best, you had The Tomorrow People, Shadows, Survivors, Space: 1999, Rentaghost, and Children of the Stones all existing in the same general cultural space as Doctor Who. Notably, not all of these were competitors as such. Some were BBC productions that zeroed in on specific audiences, others were ITV “Doctor Who killers,” et cetera. The point is simply that Doctor Who, when it’s at its cultural peaks, is something that exists in a larger context of shows.

So following Doctor Who’s titanically successful launch in 2005, it was basically inevitable that there were going to be imitators. The major first two to market were the BBC’s 2006 version of Robin Hood, which was explicitly designed to fill the Saturday drama slot during some of the weeks Doctor Who wasn’t on the air, and ITV’s 2007 debut Primeval, which features time travel and dinosaurs. Neither show did phenomenally well, though both did respectably, getting a few seasons run and surviving with enough of an afterlife that they’re not recklessly obscure.

In many ways what is most interesting here is the underlying logic. That is, what do people think imitating Doctor Who means, exactly? After all, for all that there have been a lot of similar programs to Doctor Who over the years, only occasionally has anyone made a program that’s explicitly and consciously mimicking it.

Of the two, it is Primeval that feels the most like a straight-up imitation. There are, to be fair, significant differences. In many ways Primeval is closer to Torchwood – a team of people investigating weird things that come through a hole in space-time type thing. (Mostly dinosaurs, as it happens.) But equally, it’s an action-adventure sci-fi show featuring time travel of the sort that only exists because suddenly one of those was the biggest show on television. The producers made noises about how their show was more real-world and grounded, which is an absolutely wonderful thing to declare of a television show about dinosaurs attacking things. But this was a fig leaf fooling exactly nobody, and the points where it cribs the Doctor Who formula are at times amusingly blatant. (Most notably, casting a former pop star in the lead female role)

As a show, Primeval is solidly not bad, which is, of course, the exact worst thing a show can possibly be for the purposes of blogging about it. The staggeringly execrable and the absolutely phenomenal are both fairly easy to write about.…

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Book Preview: They Might Be Giants’ Flood

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Today we’ve got the intro to They Might Be Giants’ Flood, the book I wrote with the brilliant S. Alexander Reed for Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series. The book is out November 14th, and is available for pre-order at Amazon and Amazon UK. 
I’ll surely write about the book again closer to release, so I don’t want to do too much beyond just put the intro here and let it speak for itself. I will say that even if you’re not a huge They Might Be Giants fan, I think the book probably has plenty of cool stuff for you. It’s not just about They Might Be Giants, but about a particular historical moment. It’s not just a book about music, but about how 1990 was a turning point for geek culture, and about the nature of what geek culture is, in a way that goes beyond the conventional nerdy references. Indeed, one thing the book is very much about is how “geek” went from meaning twenty-sided dice and fluency in Klingon to meaning something much broader and more inclusive. I think most people who like my stuff will like it too.
But I will add a personal note. In the current publishing climate, the saying is that anything that sells a thousand copies is doing well. The TARDIS Eruditorum books do that. Handily. Unfortunately, they do it through channels that don’t show up when publishers do searches on authors’ past sales.
One of the explicitly stated reasons I didn’t get a traditional press contract for the Wonder Woman book (out towards the end of October, I believe) is exactly this – my sales figures look way smaller than they actually are. And by way smaller, I mean that when traditional publishers check my sales, I have sold two books. Ever.
All of which is an overly long way of saying that this book is kind of a big deal for me. If it does well then when I shop future projects to traditional publishers I look a lot more credible. It opens doors. So if you’re interested, please consider putting in a pre-order. Impressive pre-orders make the publisher put more time into supporting the book. The publisher supporting the book boosts sales. Strong pre-orders are, in current publishing, a huge deal.
But more broadly, and with the knowledge that my readers have been incredibly generous to me this year, and that I have a lot of material coming out in a short period of time, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports my work, however you support it, and whichever bits of it you support. It means a lot knowing that I do work that people enjoy enough to support. More than a few days have been genuinely brightened just by knowing you lot exist.
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Outside the Government 14 (The Infinite Quest)

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The Infinite Quest is almost completely unsuited to the form in which anyone actually encounters it these days. These days it’s reskinned to appear like an episode of Doctor Who that happens to be animated – complete with a cold open and credit sequence. In reality, it’s a thirteen episode serial consisting of short episodes lasting roughly three and a half minutes that were one of several components of the second and final season of Totally Doctor Who.

We’ve covered Totally Doctor Who and its inadequacies at the end of the second season. To recap, it was a show that did a poor job of engaging with Doctor Who, treating its audience like they’re idiots. Given this, The Infinite Quest is actually not that bad. Everyone is clearly putting effort into it – the animation is by the remnants of Cosgrove Hall, who did Scream of the Shalka and the two episodes of The Invasion. David Tennant and Anthony Head both do quite well for dealing with a script that they clearly first saw about twenty minutes before they started recording. Freema Agyeman is rougher, turning in a shockingly poor performance, but to be fair, voice acting is a different skillset from screen acting, and there’s not actually an inherent reason why being good at one means you’re good at the other. (Actually, I’m curious when this was recorded – given the lead time needed for animation, it wouldn’t surprise me if Agyeman did this before she’d substantially gotten to work with the character.)

The problem is that, structurally, it seems messy. Several ideas seem underdeveloped in the extreme. For instance, early on it introduces a world in which interplanetary oil piracy to free needed resources from powerful corporations is common. This is a neat, politically incendiary premise. Indeed, it goes politically further than the series is usually willing to, coming off better than, for instance, the attempt to deal with exploitative labor conditions next season in Planet of the Ood. The problem with it is that it seems to be dealt with and discarded shockingly quickly, taking up only about ten minutes of screen time total.

But this is just an illusion caused by repackaging The Infinite Quest into a quasi-episode of Doctor Who. In reality the oil pirates storyline was explored for three or four weeks, roughly (based on the timing in the episode), from Gridlock through to The Lazarus Project. Far from seeming like an underdeveloped theme, this is actually quite a substantial amount of time spent. And the idea that the entire story should have focused more tightly on one or two ideas is ludicrous. The Infinite Quest was designed to be experienced over the course of three months. It has as many episodes as The Daleks’ Masterplan (counting Mission to the Unknown). Of course it jumps around a lot – spending ten weeks of Doctor Who in one setting with one idea would be unbearably dull.

And yet there’s a complication here. You’ll note that my account of exactly which parts of The Infinite Quest contain the oil pirates plot is speculative.…

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Saturday Waffling (September 28th, 2013)

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I made the Last War in Albion deadline, obviously. I’ve also just about worked through the Wonder Woman copyedits – I just need to rewrite the last chapter to deal with the fact that it was written a year ago and is about the current run of Wonder Woman comics. Which shouldn’t be hard, as the last year of Wonder Woman comics was not particularly different from the year before it. And then it needs one more round of edits and some formatting, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I can get that out in October. Meanwhile, the Flood book comes out in November. That’s very fun – I just flipped through bits of it today, and found myself enjoying it. You can pre-order it on Amazon here. Hartnell Second Ed should be December, and I’m not really sure about Baker 1 – it’s still got a fair chunk of revisions to work through. But my goal is to have all four come out in 2013.

I’ve got an issue with Last War in Albion I’m not quite sure what to do with – the next post deals with R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson at length, and can’t really be done without including some NSFW images. How would people prefer I handle that when it happens (since it’ll be an issue more than just next week, i.e. when I get to Lost Girls or Neonomicon)? A warning at the top of the screen and no NSFW until at least a monitor’s length down? A “clean” version of the post on the front page and a link to an explicit one? NSFW images done as links instead of embedded in the text? Don’t worry about it because you all have workplaces in which massive tableaus of violent demon sex are perfectly acceptable?

Since that’s the most rubbish topic of discussion ever, and since we’re all geeks here… Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. What did we all think?…

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Is This Death? (The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords)

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Oh well.

It’s June 23rd, 2007. “Umbrella” remains at number one for the last portion of Season Three, while Enrique Iglesias, Kelly Rowland and Clarkson, and the White Stripes also chart. In news, heavy rains and flooding continue across the UK, with thirteen people dying in total. A burning car crashes into Glasgow Airport, with, reportedly, one of the people responsible being arrested while on fire. And Tony Blair resigns from Parliament to divide his time between being a special envoy to the Middle East and tending to some lovely hills in the the southeast of England, finally clearing the way for Gordon Brown.

While on television we have Downing Street hijinks of a different sort. The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords is generally seen as the failed Davies-era season finale. This isn’t quite unfair, but the actual grounds on which it fails are, on the whole, narrow. There are in effect two scenes that doom it – both cases where what looked sensible on the page turned ridiculous in practice. The first is when the already strained decision to have David Tennant slathered in latex to look old is replaced with the absolutely appalling Dobby the House Doctor CGI effect, leading to what was previously a quite well done sequence to collapse in a crumpled pile of bathos. The second is the reversal of that scene, in which Flying Magic Jesus Doctor descends upon the Master in a beam of badly misjudged light. Unfortunately, these are two major turning points in the episode, and instead of carrying the dramatic weight they’re meant to do they’re bathetic train wrecks.

But look, neither one fails to communicate the show’s intent – they just do so in a way that is difficult to take seriously because of the intense desire to burst out laughing. The errors stuck out like sore thumbs on broadcast, and this harmed the episodes’ reception, but broadcast was already a while ago. Already the story’s reputation seems to be shifting. So let’s say no more of two misjudged effects shots beyond that Davies is neither the first nor the last person on Doctor Who who has misjudged what the BBC could manage in the way of effects. Everybody believes their bubble wrap, at least.

Let’s start by observing the size of the task. Of all the things Davies tried to revamp within Doctor Who, this is perhaps the hardest. The Cybermen may be the rubbish second rate villains, but for the most part Davies had the good sense to use them that way. They were the villains you went for when the Daleks were the wrong choice but you still needed an “oh no it’s the” villain. But the Master… there’s not even a consensus list of what the best Master stories are. Say what you want about the Cybermen, but at least there’s a general consensus that Tomb of the Cybermen and Earthshock were both really good. (Never mind that I have little patience for either.)…

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A Detective, A Man We Could Trust (The Last War in Albion Part 11: Roscoe Moscow)

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This is the first 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. 
Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation have been posted online, for free, with the permission of Alan Moore by 4 Color Heroes. Maxwell the Magic Cat was reprinted in four volumes by Acme Press in the 1980s. It is out of print, but used copies are available. 
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Seventeen-year-old Grant Morrison made his professional comics debut in the Edinburgh-based Near Myths #2 with a new wave-inspired run of strips including two introducing his Gideon Stargrave character. This venture, along with his realist superhero newspaper strip Captain Clyde faltered, and aside from occasional work on DC Thompson’s sci-fi digest Starblazer, Morrison found himself unable to advance particularly in a comics career. But at the same time, 340 miles away, in Northampton, events were unfolding that would change Morrison’s life, and indeed the entire British comics industry forever… 
“A detective, a man we could trust, even with our children.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods


Figure 83: The first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who
Killed Rock n’ Roll (Alan Moore, 1979, as Curt Vile)

Grant Morrison is not a writer of near-misses and the merely competent. The depth of Morrison’s skill may not be obvious in his earliest material, but his ambition is. The conditions necessary for his ambitions to be realized were simply not yet present in the British comics industry of 1979, nor even of 1981. But everything began to change on March 31st, 1979 when Spotlight Publication’s national music weekly, Sounds published the first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock n’ Roll. Less than five months later, on the 25th of August, 1979 the local Northampton paper the Northants Post began a weekly comic strip entitled Maxwell the Magic Cat. Sounds was paying £35 a week, while the Nohants Post paid £10, making a combined weekly of £45 a week – £2.50 greater than the unemployment benefits Alan Moore had previously been drawing, and officially marking the beginning of his career as a full-time comics writer. 

Figure 84: The cartoonist cryptically
reveals his identity (Alan Moore,
1979, as Curt Vile)
The revolution that this event heralded was, at first, wholly invisible. Roscoe Moscow was published under the name of Curt Vile, an obvious parody of German composer Kurt Weill, best known for his work with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera, while Maxwell the Magic Cat featured the more obscurely punnish pen name Jill de Ray.
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Just One Of My Oldest Enemies (Utopia)

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Seriously? That’s how they drew me in Scream of the Shalka?

It’s June 16th, 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z remain at number one with “Umbrella,” with Calvin Harris, Enrique Iglesias, Timbaland, and Hellogoodbye also charting. In news, the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the government cannot actually detain people indefinitely as enemy combatants. Chinua Achebe wins the Man Brooker prize. Zimbabwe announces that it will take and redivide the land of all remaining white farmers in the country, and Bernie Ahem is reelected as Taoiseach of Ireland.

While on television The Sopranos ends. Oh, and Doctor Who airs Utopia, arguably the first part of its three-part season finale. Or it’s a standalone story before a two-part finale. There are debates to be had. For our purpose, obviously, we’re doing a separate entry on Utopia. But then, we did separate entries on An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC. The threshold for one entry or two is what makes the most sense from an essay-writing perspective. Utopia has a bunch of themes that are present but tangental in The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, and vice versa. So while talking about Utopia on its own requires referring forward more than sometimes, it still makes more essay sense, and really, I care a lot more about that than I do about the “what counts as a story” game. Though we may bring the “what counts as a story” game up later. Just for fun.

Utopia is possibly the bleakest number Davies ever wrote. It is, of course, not about Utopia – a concept we learn does not even exist. Rather it is about that most enduring feature of utopia: the snake in the garden. Or so it seems at first blush. But this is not merely about an individual snake. Yes, in amidst the apparently heartwarming story of indomitable is the Master, who seems at first blush to be the most sympathetic of characters. The Master is, in this rendition, treated as the image of the Bad Seed – the inherently evil figure for whom redemption is simply impossible. And so kind-hearted Professor Yana has, within him, a void. An evil heart that will someday inevitably be released, to the ruin of everyone around him. This is the vision of utopia – its absolute and horrific collapse in the face of the irreducible phenomenon of evil.

What makes this staggeringly pessimistic is its position at the end of the universe. It’s one thing to make bleak statements about how people screw everything up. That borders on the banal. It’s quite another to position this as the ultimate fate of humanity. Utopia sets up a choice between the joyously eternal nature of humanity and the idea of an inevitable moral rot, and ultimately embraces the latter. All of humanity’s dreams and hopes come crashing down, and there is only dark and cold and the cackling madness of the serpent. This final sting in the trap, confirmed in Last of the Time Lords, is horrific in a way Davies has never really managed before, nor will he ever again.…

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Bat Anti-Review Blog

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Credit to Anton B for the title. Only the ones I’ve read in recent memory here, which is to say, ones I covered on the blog. And thus a self-selecting set that avoided the canonically crap ones.

Timewyrm: Genesys: Everybody involved should be ashamed for putting out a book in which the Doctor, in all seriousness, tells Ace not to be so upset over being sexually assaulted. (I am in no way exaggerating this scene for dramatic effect, to be clear. This actually happened.) If this were a bizarre and dissonant note in an otherwise well-written book, it would still be enough to virtually disqualify the book from praise. But on top of that, the book sucks too. 1/10

Timewyrm: Exodus: Those who say this is the greatest New Adventure are simply wrong, and very probably lack souls. However, it is a stunning novel in which Dicks applies his ruthlessly and gloriously functional prose style to a truly disturbing story that captures the horror of the Nazis. Not of what the Nazis did, but of the Nazis themselves. It’s a strange artifact from the point before Paul Cornell showed the Virgin books what they wanted to be. But it’s a marvelous one. 10/10

Timewyrm: Apocalypse: I will never understand the sheer loathing for this book, which runs through perfectly traditional Doctor Who, only with one or two genuinely novel and laudatory conceptual leaps towards adulthood. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s nothing particularly grating either. 5/10

Timewyrm: Revelation: There are a handful of stories that changed Doctor Who – stories that single-handedly draw a line where you can say “everything before this was one way, and everything after was another.” And more to the point, that did so just by being so brilliant that nobody did things the old way again. Power of the Daleks, The Ark in Space, Remembrance of the Daleks… and this. The story that created emotional, character-based Doctor Who. So many great moments and lines and images in this, both Ace and the Doctor are portrayed better than they ever have been. If you’ve never read this, you don’t understand the history of Doctor Who. Astonishing. 10/10

Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible: It’s understandable why everyone fell into the trap of thinking people would care about dark secrets in Gallifrey’s ancient past on their own merits. Equally, however, it was a trap. Several iterations of Gallifrey past, where these secrets are just revelations about a particular version of Gallifrey that was popular in the early 90s, it’s tough to care, and the book lacks enough oomph elsewhere to justify the fuss. On the other hand, you can still see how and why people convinced themselves that this was a good idea, and you can just about get swept up in the mystery and strangeness. If you really, really try. 4/10

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead: There is a line of thought that Cartmel didn’t want to be writing Doctor Who, and so just wrote generic cyberpunk novels featuring cameos by the Doctor.…

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The Image Of An Angel (Blink)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a bit of crown
moulding. 

It’s June 9th, 2007. Rihanna (and Jay-Z) are at number one with “Umbrella,” while Beyonce and Shakira, Maroon 5, Timbaland, Akon, and Twang also chart. In news, Scooter Libby is sentenced to thirty months in prison, although the sentence will be commuted by President Bush, and immigration reform fails in the US Senate due to failing to pass a cloture vote.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Blink. As we’ve already discussed, Blink is not the reason that Steven Moffat is now showrunner of Doctor Who. Just writing good episodes is insufficient, or else Paul Cornell, who in 2007 had almost as many and as brilliant Doctor Who episodes under his belt as Moffat did, would have been a sincere contender. And he wasn’t, not because he’s not one of the most brilliant and influential Doctor Who writers ever (Moffat’s been open about how much his take on Doctor Who owes to Cornell), but because he’s not a television showrunner and entrusting him a brand as big of Doctor Who would be absurdly risky. Moffat was the heir apparent because he was the only safe choice.

This is distinct from why he was the popular choice, though, which did mostly have to do with the fact that he wrote very, very good episodes of Doctor Who. And Blink was very good – good enough that the period in which Human Nature/Family of Blood was the obvious Hugo contender for Doctor Who lasted about a week. Its general reputation is as the holy grail of Doctor Who episodes. And fair play, as everything about it is, in fact, absolutely brilliant. It belongs on lists of the best Doctor Who episodes ever, its reputation is wholly deserved, and it’s one of those rare pieces that are so good that the hype of their reputation doesn’t actually diminish their impact. Jekyll may be why Moffat got the job, but Blink is the story that defined expectations of the job. And so it is worth looking at in that context – as the fantasy of what the Moffat era could achieve if (as was always impossible) he could hit these heights with rock-solid reliability.

First, of course, are the Weeping Angels. With two more stories featuring them, I’ll minimize my comments here, since later stories embrace the alchemical/mystical themes involving them more readily. For now let’s look at them as what they are within the context of Blink, which is a terribly clever monster. All monsters, of course, are systems of rules. This is why the Daleks, with their absolute and single-minded fixity, are the ur-monsters of Doctor Who – because they represent a single and absolute rule. But it’s true of any monster – they’re defined by the narrative role that they can never move past. The Silurians are defined by presenting a reasonable moral case for their own villainy. The Cybermen by their unrelenting nature. When the new series has revamped monsters, it’s often as much about revamping their rules as anything; the Sontarans are now eternally conquering warriors, the Ice Warriors are caught in the subtle distinction between honor and morality.…

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