Eruditorum Press

None more Chancellor Goth.

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:

A Red and Angry World (Book Three Part 2: Morrison’s Style, The Coyote Gospel)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s first assignment from DC, the biggest in their career, was to revitalize the all but forgotten character of Animal Man, which they set about doing according to a template originated by Moore on Swamp Thing. But this was not the whole story.

There is a red and angry world… red things happen there. The world eats your wife, eats your friends, eats all the things that make you human. And you become a monster. And the world just keeps on eating.—Alan Moore, Swamp Thing

These Moore riffs existed, after all, in a comic where Animal Man treats superheroing as a job to support his family, musing on ways to increase his profile. Joining the Justice League International is mooted as a plausible option, but he reacts to his wife’s suggestion that the Outsiders might be more his speed with horror, saying that they’re “almost as bad as the Forgotten Heroes. I’m trying to get away from all that nohope stuff.” This is both sly metafictional commentary on the order of precedence within the DC Comics line and a clever vision for what superheroing is. Neither of these have any precedence in Moore, whose “superhero as ordinary person” riff in Miraceman never got bogged down in questions like how Michael Moran paid the rent. And they do have analogues in Morrison, who works with similar ideas in Captain Clyde and Zenith.

Similar examples abound. A scene where Animal Man briefly meets a distracted Superman who compliments the big A on his costume before flying off to rescue a plane, a riff where Animal Man signs an autograph for a kid who’s immediately disappointed he’s not Aquaman, and a repeated tendency to entertain himself by giving Animal Man weird powers from random animals instead of, as Dave Wood typically did, finding some excuse to put him near a tiger or something. Morrison even gets a cliffhanger set piece out of this, with Animal Man getting his arm ripped off in a fight and regrowing it with the power of earthworms. (And being Morrison, they then have Animal Man express a degree of confusion and horror at how weird this is.)

Perhaps more to the point, however, while Morrison uses many of Moore’s techniques and approaches, they use them as tools, not as basic modes of operating. Morrison throws in portentous narration, but they’re not as good at it as Moore, never capturing his poetic lilt, and they clearly recognize it, using it purely for Bwana Beast’s narration instead of as a core structural element of entire issues. Morrison writes Berger the Moore riff they know she’s looking for, but the result is clearly Morrison doing Moore as opposed to a Moore imitation with no further character or elements. It is perhaps most impressive against the backdrop of Veitch’s Swamp Thing and Delano’s Hellblazer, managing both to land closer to a successful Moore imitation than either and to more successfully do its own thing.…

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Olive Peaseblossom: In Suburbia

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Suburbia_Preview

Penn and I are pleased to share our third comic together, following Kraken Went A-Courtin and Hive City Hootenanny. As always artists’ notes along with a frankly better reading experience are available on Penn’s site. Also, be sure to follow Penn’s Twitter, where he’s doing a series of one-panel Olive Peaseblossom comics, including one today that’s a sequel to In Suburbia.

We’ve got one more of these Olive Peaseblossom shorts to do, and then it’s time to roll up our sleeves and start on our ongoing series Britain a Prophecy.

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Goals, Motivations, Fears, Desires (Book Three Part 1: Silver Age Animal Man, Morrison’s First Arc)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, an accidental magical ritual to avert nuclear armageddon. The ramifications of this were considerable. Moore withdrew from the mainstream comics scene both to recover from the exertion and to plot his next moves, while his magic’s unintended consequence transformed the Cold War into the Last War in Albion. This required that Moore have a rival, and so, equally unwittingly, the brash young Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison stepped into the role.

Morphogenic graft reset accomplished. Reassembly from template imminent. Reset personality parameters: subset goals, motivations, fears, desires. Reinsert subject into the continuum. —Grant Morrison et al, 52

The Great Work completed, its tyrant father absent, temporarily ensnared in its thunderous wake, his grand throne vacant, Grant Morrison was free at last to make their devil’s bargain and obtain all that they thought they wanted.

On the train down to London to meet with Berger and Giordano, they frantically scribbled ideas. Among them was Animal Man, a profoundly obscure 1960s DC character introduced in Strange Adventures in a strip called “I Was the Man with Animal Powers” by Dave Wood and Carmine Infantino. Strange Adventures was emphatically a book that belonged to an earlier era of DC. It launched in 1950, deep into the post-World War II superhero bust and well before Frederic Wertham’s moral panic transformed the landscape to make them viable again. DC’s superhero publishing line had been whittled down to a bare core of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman titles, with the last exception, the adventures of the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics, a bare few months away from transforming into All-Star Western to join All-American Western, Western Comics, Dale Evans, and Jimmy Wakely, in DC’s western stable. Elsewhere DC published a bevy of funny animal comics, romance comics, a smattering of crime comics, and a couple of Archie knockoffs. But they lacked a science fiction comic in their stable, and launched Strange Adventures. Unsurprisingly, the editor behind the project was Julius Schwartz, who had previously been the literary agent of sci-fi writers such as Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft. It was through these connections, presumably, that he was able to launch the comic with an adaptation of the forthcoming Robert Heinlein film Destination Moon.

By 1965, however, Strange Adventures had become the oddball in DC’s lineup. It and its sister book Mystery in Space were still running as a vestigial remnant of the science fiction line, just as Young Love and Girls’ Romances represented the bare core of the romance line. (Westerns and funny animals had already died off.) And “I Was the Man with Animal Powers” existed within this limbo state. On one level, it was clearly a superhero story; its plot concerns a man, Buddy (later Buddy Baker) who is exposed to a mysterious radiation from a crashing spacecraft, gains the eponymous animal powers, and fights a giant monster. And yet the story resisted such easy classification.…

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The Beigeness, or How to Kill People with Bad Writing: The Scott Alexander Method

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Them things you don’t show, I can see
Them things you don’t say, speak to me
Them things you hide ain’t hiding
No firm ground but we ain’t sliding 
– Kae Tempest, “The Beigeness”

I would like to begin by stressing how deeply miserable I am to be back on this beat. I was happy writing about the occult history of British comics, gods damn you. It didn’t involve horrible abyss gaze. It didn’t involve fashy trolls in my Twitter mentions. It was nice. But fine. Since people seem to love pointing out tht Neoreaction a Basilisk does not actually talk about Scott Siskind, aka Scott Alexander, here’s another goddamn essay. Are you sitting comfortably? Well fuck you.

For anyone not aware, Siskind is the blogger behind Slate Star Codex and whatever the hell he’s calling his Substack these days. He’s a major figure in the LessWrong diaspora—a post-Yudkowsky “rationalist” whose work was just the subject of an extremely anodyne and diffident New York Times profile that his defenders decried as a hit piece because it mentioned the fact that he’s rather more receptive to neo-nazi rhetoric about “the science of race” than one might expect a respected person to be. I was quoted in the article as a source because obviously, a major rationalist blogger who keeps taking neoreactionaries seriously is the sort of thing I’d be aware of after writing Neoreaction a Basilisk. But Siskind was only ever a minor figure in Neoreaction a Basilisk—I describe him in a footnote as someone “who flirts with neoreaction like a horny teenager befuddled by a bra.” 

I am not going to discuss the aforementioned fumbling about the hook clasps of human biodiversity at any great length, mostly because it’s too straightforward to actually occupy that kind of time. This is someone who repeatedly speaks admiringly of Charles Murray, puts Nick Land, Razib Khan, and various other fashy types on his blogroll, and openly advocates eugenics. The Reddit community around his work is the sort of place where posting the fourteen words gets dozens of upvotes and complaining about that gets you banned. Those adamant about defending him will point out—at astonishing length—that he penned an essay called “The Anti-Reactionary FAQ,” but it’s revealing that this consists of a tedious Gish gallop working its way through a host of minor claims, whereas his corresponding essay “Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell” offers a credulous account of the high level claims of neoreaction, a disparity that does not exactly amount to refutation. The claim that he’s troublingly invested in racist bullshit is straightforward and, frankly, uninteresting; anyone trying to dispute it has a disingenuous agenda most likely involving racist bullshit.

Instead I want to talk about (or at least I’m going to talk about) a question I never really addressed in Neoreaction a Basilisk, namely the mechanics of a certain genre of writing that Siskind exemplifies. Let’s discuss one of his best regarded essays, then and look at how it functions.…

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Revolution of the Daleks Review

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This review was brought to you by 106 patrons over at Chrisine’s Patreon. Thank you to everyone who helped my daughter through a long, difficult, and ultimately transformative year. I’m real proud of her.

The nice thing about the festering debacle that was The Timeless Children immediately followed by the *entire rest of 2020* is that it finally lowers your standards enough to appreciate Chibnall. Was this good? Absolutely not. Did I care anymore? Also no. So, you know. Detente. It was, at the very least, not actively, malignantly bad. It was instead just sort of inoffensively there. An entirely adequate piece of Doctor Who. Given that even Davies and Moffat failed to achieve that about half the time on their Christmas specials, this has to be taken as some sort of result.

For the most part, what we have here is Chibnall’s worst instincts being overcome by sheer volume. At the end of the day a double companion departure, two returning villains, and Captain Jack is simply enough stuff that as long as you don’t do something like have the Doctor stand still for half an episode while the villain explains the plot to her you can probably just about make it work. Things explode at a basically reasonable frequency with emotional beats in the middle. One of the many problems with the Chibnall era has been that it’s never been entirely clear who it’s for. This is for hung over people who watched the show in 2008. There’s a reasonable number of those on New Year’s. So, you know. Job done. This is fine, as the kids say.

The problem with banal adequacy is that it’s easier to note the things that went wrong than the virtues. The directing was flat and unimaginative. (What on Earth was that “Yaz and the Doctor face the camera to deliver their final lines” bit? Why did we pan up the Dalek clone farm over a dramatic chord twice?) The emotional beats as ever suggest that Chibnall thinks they’re called that because you’re supposed tol club the viewer over the head with them, having characters simply assert the growth and characterization that Chibnall had forgotten to write for them previously. John Barrowman and Chris North spend much of the episode in a perverse duel to see who can offer the flattest line reading. (North ultimately runs away with it, as Barrowman’s efforts are undermined by his narcissistic desperation to be a fan favorite.) The Doctor apparently can’t be assed to even try escaping from prison for decades because she’s too sad over The Timeless Children. Which, I mean, that’s also kind of how I feel about it, but for fuck’s sake, even Eight tried to escape from prison regularly and he spent most of his era with amnesia about his amnesia.

The most egregious part of it, and the thing I’ll no doubt pick up most on if I ever hate myself enough to do an Eruditorum of this era, is the bizarre squandering of Daleks as cops.…

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The Annual Slightly More Post-Christmas Than Usual Ebook Sale

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Hello and happy “Oh thank God the recycling people are finally coming to get rid of all these boxes” day. Sorry I didn’t get this up sooner, but here is the traditional post-Christmas ebook sale.

Our headline item is Volume 1 of The Last War in Albion for a mere 99 cents. I’ll be starting work on Last War in Albion Volume 3 as soon as this year goes into the rear view mirror, so it’s the perfect time to catch up. Volume 2 remains in blog form in omnibus chapter-long editions that are also extra easy to read. Volume 3 will start work on my Patreon on January 1st. But the massively oversized Volume 1, featuring the early career works of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, is yours for 99 cents.

We’ve also got a sale on all volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum, including a small sale on the only just released Volume 7. Those increase in price as you go through the series as follows:

Volume 1: $0.99
Volume 2: $0.99
Volume 3: $1.99
Volume 4: $1.99
Volume 5: $2.99
Volume 6: $2.99
Volume 7: $3.99

And finally, becuse even though Trump is headed out of office, I have a grim feeling Neoreaction a Basilisk won’t get wildly less relevant any time soon. So it’s on sale for $2.99.

Thanks to everyone for your support through what I think the official term among businesses is “a uniquely challenging year.” I’ve been really humbled by your support and what it allows me to do. Please enjoy the books. …

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Olive Peaseblossom in… Hive City Hootenanny

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Penn and I finished a second comic! Here it is, in all its very silly glory. Clicking to expand images works. If you’d like to read artists notes, they’re up at Penn’s site (where the comic is also frankly in a better for reading version), and I have writers notes up at Patreon.

Think this is it for me this year. I’ll see you all in January for Doctor Who discourse, which I’m sure you’re all terribly excited for. And it shouldn’t be too far into 2021 that Last War in Albion starts up again here.

 

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We Will Reach The Promised Land: Liberal Science Fiction at the Fall of Democracy

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There isn’t any promised land. This is just… it’s a superstition that you have picked up from all the humanity you’ve stuffed inside yourself. – Doctor Who, “Deep Breath”

I’ve been on a weird media kick for the past month. It started with that HBO Max West Wing reunion, which sparked a nostalgia for a show whose impeccable craft of writing is matched only by its absolutely dire sense of politics. That led to rewatching some favorite episodes in the lead-up to the election, a carefully tailored medial junk food to wash out the obvious taste. Then, in the wake of the election, as Donald Trump’s idiot coup meandered onwards, I found myself reading Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land. And around that time Season 4 of The Crown dropped, which Jill and I watch, so obviously I sat down with that, and by the time it had roughly caught up with Earthshock I’d well and truly fallen down a very strange rabbit hole of ritually fetishized liberalism. 

Consider this essay my climb back up.

Let’s start with The West Wing, which has aged more strangely than any other critically acclaimed TV show I can think of. On the one hand, its sparkling dialogue and immaculately precise construction stands up as one of the finest writing lessons out there—one that you can tell Steven Moffat studied intently. On the other… woof. Its most rightly acclaimed stretch of episodes features a plot in which it’s publicly revealed that the President has repeatedly lied to the American people (in his case, concealing the fact that he has multiple sclerosis). The result of this, which can in hindsight safely be called breathtakingly optimistic, is a concrete process of accountability in which transparent investigations take place and there are clear public consequences. These admittedly do not ultimately involve the President losing his reelection campaign (which plays out as a repudiation of a thinly veiled George W. Bush, culminating in a debate in which Martin Sheen’s bookish yet folksy New Hampshire scion Josiah Bartlett roundly humiliates the dunderheaded governor of Florida), but the fact remains that The West Wing portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people matters.

More than that, however, it portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people is something that can be straightforwardly handled by the existing system of structural checks and balances. Where, in fact, this system is a reified and beautiful thing, certainly not blind to whomever is in charge of it, but fundamentally capable of handling the prospect of those empowered within it engaging in egregious misconduct. To put it mildly, this was an extremely strange thing to watch in the leadup to an election that Donald Trump came very close to winning and, at the time of writing, may yet manage to stage a coup to overturn. 

Thinking about it, I realized what the experience most obviously resembled: watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its easy and woefully unexamined confidence in the utopian potential of post-scarcity capitalist imperialism.…

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Book Launch and the Rani

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After quite a lot of delay, Eruditorum Press is proud to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy. Adapted from a blog about Doctor Who I imagine you’ve heard of, this is the revised version of my essays on the final years of the original television show and the first phase of the Wilderness Years, the Virgin New Adventures. Over 600 pages it covers every televised Sylvester McCoy episode and the highlights of the Virgin line. It’s also got a huge bevy of book-exclusive essays, including new ones on Nightshade and The Pit, an essay on Lloyd Rose’s The Algebra of Ice, an essay on the recent Seventh Doctor comics by Andrew Cartmel, and a bunch of essays on arcane points of Doctor Who continuity like “When Was the Time War?” and “Was He Half-Woven on His Mother’s Side?” 

It’s a big, epic book that was very hard to get together, and that I’m very proud of in spite of its troubled gestation. And it’s very much available as a holiday gift for the extreme nerd in your life.

If you backed it on Kickstarter and filled out your survey promptly you already have a copy. If you were slow in filling out your survey, please check Kickstarter for updates.

Here’s some purchase links:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Smashwords (for non-Kindle ereaders)

I hope you enjoy it.

Some other orders of business while I have your attention. Christine’s Patreon has dipped to $286 since the pledge drive earlier this year. I politely remind you that I will only be reviewing Revolution of the Daleks if that goes over $300 again. I would very much like to not review Revolution of the Daleks, but somewhat annoyingly I would prefer my daughter be able to pay her rent even more.

Also, check back tomorrow for an actual essay by me—a standalone piece on liberal science fiction, a term I promise you I am not using how you expect.…

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Olive Peaseblossom in Kraken Went A’Courtin

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Here’s a bit of a swerve for you. My awesome husband Penn Wiggins is a visual artist, and we’ve finally gotten around to collaborating on our first comic. Because I am me, I took Alan Moore’s advice that you should start by doing short stories such as the Tharg’s Future Shocks feature of 2000 AD extremely literally, mashing it up with Penn’s stated desire to draw faeries and sea witches to get, well… this astoundingly goofy piece of fun.

This site isn’t particularly geared for comics, so while you can click on all of the images below to expand them, my recommendation would be to head over to Penn’s site, where he’s actually got it configured to be easily readable. Or you can just download it, in either PDF format or CBZ format.

We’re already at work on our follow-up effort, which is… also extremely silly. 

And swing back on Thursday for a release of a very different sort.…

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