Elizabeth Sandifer

DC Universe Rebirth #1

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DC Universe Rebirth #1 Review That Isn’t Just a Poop Emoji

This seems almost entirely unnecessary, but of course, that’s still more necessary than this. I’d say “never mind the appallingly stupid incorporation of Watchmen,” but of course, I really can’t do that. Suffice it to say that Johns demonstrates absolutely zero understanding of Watchmen or of Doctor Manhattan, that the characters teased elsewhere to be Watchmen-related look like utterly stupid and banal twists, and that this entire farrago appears motivated out of nothing so much as sheer and utter contempt for the best writer DC has ever or will ever have. On top of that, the issue is a confused muddle of plot teases, most of them fairly incoherent to me as someone who’s dropped most of his DC books over the course of the New 52 experiment that this book not only brings an end to but attempts to loudly reject. I don’t know these people. Two-panel cameos don’t make me care. Johns can stamp his feet all he wants about legacy, but the only legacy this confirms is DC’s long history of screwing over its actual creators and its long-term health in favor of making a quick buck now. Really, 💩  summed it up nicely.

Batgirl #52

It’s probably not possible for me to actually like a DC book this week, and there’s more here than I’m inclined to give it credit for, but it’s still a weak and unsatisfying finish to the Fletcher-Stewart-Tarr era, two issues after the real finish, and without much more to say than “well wasn’t this lovely.” I still love this cast and style. I hope the next Batgirl run is fun like this was. I might even buy an issue of it. 

Cry Havoc #5

Still seems like it could be a great book, but I’m going to have to revisit it after the first arc at this point. Still, it’s doing better than a lot of comics in that sort of position do, in that I more or less understand what’s going on at this point. It’s just that I’ve next to no idea how the pieces quite fit together, and I’m sure there’s a bevy of implications I’ve completely missed. So yes – looking forward to rereading this, but may well switch to trades soon. 

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #8

I am thankfully capable of enjoying Marvel this week through the clever trick of not buying Captain America. (Which one assumes is rather more of a feint/trick than Rebirth anyway.) The dating montage in this is all that the bottom-page captions promised. Past that, a typically entertaining and clever issue of one of Marvel’s most entertaining and clever books. With lots of other good jokes about dating. 

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #7

Yet another super-fun issue of the sort of Marvel book I’m actually enjoying these days. The decision to hold off on revealing Lunella’s Inhuman powers is good, Captain Kree is an endearing twerp of a villain, the art is pretty, and there is regularly a dinosaur.…

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Eruditorum Press is thoroughly ecstatic to announce that we have been joined by Josh Marsfelder, who will be publishing the continuing adventures of his blog Vaka Rangi with us every Wednesday morning, starting in about sixty seconds. Vaka Rangi, his sprawling personal memoir and critical history of the Star Trek franchise. So far he’s made it through the whole of the Original Series and The Next Generation, as well as the first season of Deep Space Nine, along with the entirety of the anime Dirty Pair, because Vaka Rangi is that sort of blog, which is to say an awesome one, and all of that is available in our archives for your reading pleasure, so basically I hope you didn’t have any other work to do this week. 

The obvious point of comparison for Vaka Rangi, and I’m sure Josh won’t mind my pointing it out, is TARDIS Eruditorum, and certainly anyone familiar with my Doctor Who work will find many similarities in Josh’s approach. But where TARDIS Eruditorum‘s default position was that Doctor Who was basically a good thing, Josh’s relationship with Star Trek much more wonderfully fraught, full of frustrated utopias and half-memories of a show that was never quite the one that was on television. It is, for my money, some of the smartest critical writing on television out there right now, puncturing many of the myths surrounding Star Trek and exploring what it could and should have been.

We are absolutely thrilled to have him here, and look forward to bringing you the latter portions of his epic journey to the stars. And stay tuned, because we’ve got another fantastic announcement to roll out in the next couple of weeks. Until then, ladies and gentlemen, Vaka Rangi.…

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A bevy of Neoreaction a Basilisk stuff as we head into the final week of the Kickstarter. First, I’m joined by our very own Jane Campbell for the fourth of our interview podcasts, this one, as you’d expect, really digging into the gnostic and mystical aspects of the book. It’s a hoot, and available for your listening pleasure here.

Second, as the big image indicates, it’s finally time to do our cover reveal. There was really only one choice for what to do with this, between the fact that my title is a riff on Blake’s, and Blake’s title page literally had a giant fucking snake on it. This’ll be the cover for both Color and Conspiracy Zine editions. 

Finally, I figured I’d do the “here’s what you have to look forward to” on the remaining thresholds if we can make them. Which I remain optimistic that we can, but it’ll need some momentum in the final week, so here we go.

$11,000: All Backers Get An Ebook of the Extra Essays

Dead obvious, and probably the best actual stretch of the bunch. Basically, everyone’s pledge immediately becomes more valuable as they get two books, the listed reward and a nice ebook collection of the backing essays, currently consisting of “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate” (at about 4.5k now, and coming along really well), “Theses on Trump” (2.5k now, and getting stranger), the Austrian school essay Jack and I will do, and “Lizard People, Dear Reader.” If we hit the $12k or $14k goals, it’ll include those too. It’ll also include a short essay that will be 100% exclusive to this ebook addressing an error in the book that so far Tom Ewing has been the only person to spot. (There are of course errors spotted by people other than Tom Ewing, but most of those are easily fixed – this one’s actually quite small, but also very hard to work around.) 

$12,000: TERFs Essay

I was a little sad Lizard People beat this in the Twitter poll, partially because I had a firmer idea of this, but partially because I feel like I’m badly overdue for a proper, meaty piece about trans issues. And the larger Neoreaction a Basilisk book really does need something that’s overtly focused on something other than white male issues. And while I really should pick race instead of gender for something big one of these days, this feels like the right essay to go into it. There are some important points from Neoreaction a Basilisk that I can pick up on with this. And there are some larger theoretical issues worth squaring away, whether it be the rhetorical and intellectual function of the “Sister Souljah Moment” or the larger question of what the left’s appallingly bad actors mean for its critiques of the right. Also, I get to riff extendedly on the image of “the transsexual empire,” as Janice Raymond famously called it, which is such a bizarre overreach of a metaphor, and yet one that ultimately has been picked up on by the right in discussions of bathroom bills.…

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It’s no good – you turn it on, and the TV just goes black. Fiddle the cables, fiddle the cartridge, blow on it to your heart’s content. The system’s shot.

You’re just going to have to go back to the NES.…

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Let’s start with the ending, simply because it’s shocking in such an unusual way for Game of Thrones – the death of what is by literally any standard a minor character elevated to a point of unparalleled cruelty. Bran’s warging into Hodor has always been presented as a slightly upsetting thing – using him to kill Locke in Season Four is a particularly striking example. But here it is used, in effect, to order him to his death. And this is in turn presented, in a fucked up invocation of Moffatian time-wime, as the origin story for the character – an order that gave a perfectly innocent young boy a traumatic brain injury. Which we are then forced to linger on at extensive length so that what is basically a pun can be unfolded in all its horror.

A claim that’s been echoing in my head the last few weeks is that the most interesting thing about Game of Thrones is that it’s a liberal apologia for feudalism that thinks it’s doing a materialist critique of history. (Only with tits and dragons.) Which isn’t the whole truth, but is at least something I haven’t managed to figure out how to write about yet. And I mention it only because it’s essential to this ending, which is after all only a season-midpoint – a still lowballed gambit in the structure of escalating set pieces that defines the latter portions of a Game of Thrones season. It is, in other words, our authorized moment of reflection on the cruelty of aristocracy. Bran is literally one of the magic important people, and so Willis has to go to his awful death for him. The cruelty of this is milked, the credits roll, we move on to speculating about next week.

And yet it is constructed at such meticulous length – the “everything is going very badly now” structure of “Hardholme” accelerated into a ten-minute scene, with a neatly timed progression of deaths that starts at “fucking hell another wolf” and ends at climactic revelation. It is allowed to have the full weight of what Game of Thrones does well, including its most tits and dragons instincts. They’re determined enough to earn that final scene that they dispose of “the origin of the White Walkers” in a daft little two minute scene early on just to set it up. (The “Inside the Episode” featurette has them speaking in awed tones about learning the twist from Martin, going out of its way to spoil the books in doing so.) In much the same way that the show was deliberate in starting slow, it is deliberate in letting the full perversity of this moment play out. And the result is genuinely interesting. We’re getting to the point in Game of Thrones where it has to finally start resolving its moral ambiguities, or at least where its statements on them begin to feel definitive. This scene – in all its cruelties and resonances, is a compelling one. If I had to award Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) for 2016 today, “The Door” would probably be my pick, largely on the back of that scene.…

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First off, two Patreon-related bits of news. First, N.K. Jemisin, author of the best SF/F novel of 2015, has just started a Patreon. She’s offering excerpts from forthcoming works, exclusive short stories, and more cool content. Awesome stuff, and totally worth it. Plus it’d be fun to see her hit her $2000 a month goal in the first twenty-four hours. She’s on track, and personally, I think the $60 it would cost to back her at $5 a month is a better use of your fandom dollars than a MidAmericacon II membership. Your mileage may vary, or your financial circumstances allow for both. 

Second, my own Patreon has dipped slightly below the Game of Thrones reviews threshold. I’m not going to discontinue them immediately, but this is a magical ritual to pay my rent.

In other news, the magical ritual to pay for my move, aka Neoreaction a Basilisk, continues to do amazingly well on Kickstarter. We’re into the high-end goals now, and it looks like it’s going to be really close on whether this makes it over $14k and gets to what I sort of consider the “complete” book. We’re only about $350 away from “Lizard People, Dear Reader,” which is a number we could in theory hit today. The goals after that are all pretty fun, so I’m optimistic the pace can keep up. But please, if you enjoy the work I do (and we do) here, even if you can’t afford to back it or aren’t quite $5 worth of interested, spread the word. What helps drive sales at this point in a campaign is when new people hear about the book. So link them to an excerpt, to a podcast, to the Kickstarter. And if you’re on the fence about it, I’ve added a new $1 tier whereby you can just download the review copy I posted as a backers only update. If you like it, maybe consider upgrading from that if you can. If you don’t, I appreciate your not cancelling the pledge. 

We’ve got the final two Neoreaction a Basilisk podcasts this week, with our very own Jane Campbell (who should be back on Tuesdays soon) and a guest I’ve long wanted to get on the site, Alex Reed of Seeming. Also, be sure to stop by on Wednesday morning for Major Site News. (It’s good news! Awesome news even!)…

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Since this seems like the sort of post that might get a bit of attention, I figure I should toss a link to my Kickstarter at the top, and politely ask you to at least click through and look at it to see if it’s something you’re interested in backing.

I’ve mostly stayed out of Hugos stuff for the last couple weeks, having a book to promote and all. And because it didn’t seem necessary. The situation was straightforward and as expected last year – one more year of Puppies and then normal business would be restored. Except that over the last couple of weeks several analyses have thrown some cold water on the hope that the E Pluribus Hugo nomination reform expected to pass at MidAmericon II this year will be quite the fix that many of us hoped for, with reports suggesting that it will at best allow the overwhelming majority of fans to have 1-2 slots per category that are not dictated by a tiny minority of racist dunderheads. A considerable number of new proposals to deal with this have thus been circulated, most of them preposterously baroque, clearly ineffectual, or both. This is strange, as the problem is not actually particularly hard to solve if you want to. Just ban slates.

After all, the Hugo Ballot is fifteen categories long. Each category has five nominating slots (possibly four after this year). That’s seventy-five slots on a ballot, all of which can be filled with any novel, short story, podcast, fan writer, or whatever that you want. The odds that two ballots are going to be identical through means other than active coordination are already vanishingly small. The odds that dozens or hundreds are is simply non-existent. If you want to get rid of the disruptive voting practices by which a vindictive psychopath is ruining the Hugo Awards, just get rid of them directly. I mean, the Hugo FAQ already pretty much declares them against the rules by saying “don’t nominate or vote for something you have not read or seen, and don’t vote based on reputation — the Hugos are meant to honor your choices and judgments.” It’s just that there’s not a single mechanism to actually enforce that.

There are, of course, other proposals out there – Kevin Standlee has put three up on File 770. But these all involve significant revamping of the system, introducing things like a third stage of voting (with seemingly no thought as to how this would fit into the timetable) or arbitrarily allowing categories to be extended. These might work. They might also be gamed, however, much like E Pluribus Hugo looks to be gameable. What isn’t gameable – what is indeed inherently ungameable – is simply banning organized campaigns to do anything other than have fans nominate works they read and enjoyed. (And notably, if in fact there have been seekrit leftist attempts to manipulate the Hugos for years, an allegation that literally not a shred of evidence has ever been presented for, this would have the effect of shutting them down too.)…

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Holly and James are back with another installment of City of the Dead, their madcap trip through the film catalog of Amicus Films. This one apparently has both killer cats and pianos, as well as Hollywood robots and an immortal Edgar Allen Poe. So yeah, that’s an impressive pile of topics. I’m suitably in awe.

Listen here.…

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Reviews will possibly be late next week, as I’ll be traveling and may not get to the shop until Thursday. 

Civil War II #0

A tremendous amount of nothing happens (par for the course in zero issues), and more to the point, the nothing that happens doesn’t actually connect directly with the Free Comic Book Day issue of this. But there’s some very heavy-handed thematic stuff at least. Ugh. And Bendis’s track record in crossovers is, to say the least, weak. This looks set to be a disaster, frankly.

Silver Surfer #4

A cute conclusion to the story arc that’s well-earned, entertaining, and drawn with typical brilliance by Michael Allred. That said, it’s not doing anything new with this character or take, hasn’t in a while, and concludes by basically reiterating the status quo of the book instead of suggesting that it has some new ideas. It’s been fun, but this feels like a good time to step away from thist itle.

Spider-Man #4

A two-scene issue, with little relationship between them, which is to say very much a Bendis thing. The first scene, in which Ganke outs Miles to Goldballs, is interesting by the end, and Goldballs is as endearingly dumb a character as he was in the X-Men books, but takes a while to get going. The latter scene, in which Miles monologues a bit too much while dodging missiles, would probably have been better with a different cover that didn’t basically spoil the final-page cliffhanger. Still, it’s got a very classic Spider-Man vibe to it.

Karnak #4

There’s an element of Ellis-by-numbers to this book that can be frustrating – dialogue like “… Why can’t I just kill all the people” or “<vastly annoyed sigh>” is funny, but funny in a way that makes you go “yep, Warren Ellis all right.” Which means that this comic lives or dies by the coolness of its ideas and/or visuals. This one’s visuals – ten pages of nearly dialogue-free fight scene that Roland Boschi does very prettily, but without much that holds the interest. Although the David Bowie cameo is fun. I suspect this will read far better in trade, though.

Scarlet #9

A quiet issue in a lot of ways, albeit one with some good character beats. And those are important for this book – so much of what works about this series is the way in which Scarlet has an entirely coherent and validly heroic worldview that is nevertheless aggressively out of line with conventional morality, and this gets relatively unproblematically presented as “the good guy.” She gets several moments to shine here. All told, this remains a book I’m deeply glad exists, because it’s tackling a story and ideas that I think need to be tackled.

Spider-Woman #7

Man, they’d have to reall fuck up the finish for this not to be the best crossover Marvel’s done in years at this point. I strongly suspect I’ll keep looking at Spider-Woman for at least an issue or two after this wraps.…

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