Abracadabra! (We just destroyed capitalism)
Comics reviews this evening, but for now, a new episode of Pex Lives in which the boys are joined by author Kit Power to talk about Terror of the Autons. And apparently there’s some Stephen King stuff, although the description gives me no clue what that entails in any way, shape, or form. But evidently it’s a thing. So there you go. Listen here.…
Phil is joined by Noah Berlatsky, author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics to talk about Grant Morrison’s new Wonder Woman graphic novel and the usual motley of off-topic subjects. Download that here.
I think I may have failed to actually mention the title of my own Wonder Woman book in the podcast. It’s A Golden Thread.…
Use of Weapons marks a clear transition in Banks’s career; it is the last of the Culture novels to have been revised from a pre-existing manuscript. It also serves as a temporary endpoint to the Culture series, which Banks put down for six years, penning two of his three non-Culture sci-fi novels in the gap. And it provides a conceptual culmination to the line of thought explored in the three of Banks’s science fiction novels looked at thus far (although by any reasonable standard Walking on Glass and The Bridge are also science fiction novels). It is unsurprising, perhaps, to find that this is the oldest of Banks’s pre-Wasp Factory manuscripts, and the book he first developed the Culture for; a fact that offers an easy narrative whereby Banks wiped out on the overly ambitious premise and structure of this book, spent a couple of books playing with its themes in other contexts, and finally, with a crucial assist from Ken McLeod, reattempted the magnum opus and got it right.
Certainly the book echoes the three previous books discussed in distinct ways. The Wasp Factory is perhaps the subtlest, as it’s easy to miss that it uses the same basic narrative structure as Use of Weapons. Much of this is because Use of Weapons is so ostentatious in its structure, with its two sets of chapters, one of which is numbered backwards so as to scream “we are working our way through a series of flashbacks towards some climactic reveal about the character’s origin” as loudly as possible. But The Wasp Factory uses the same approach of alternating between a forward-moving timeline and a chain of flashback revelations about the past – it just doesn’t separate the flashbacks into their own chapters. (And much like The Wasp Factory, Use of Weapons’s best reading is the second one in which the reader is free to focus on how the novel is constructed around the information revealed at the end.)
The similarities with Consider Phlebas are more straightforward; like Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons has a main character who is a mercenary not of the Culture itself. Unlike Horza, Cherardenine Zakalwe works for the Culture instead of their enemies, but he still has a distinct distance from them, actively declining to settle down within the Culture in favor of continuing to take soldiering jobs for them. In essentially every regard Use of Weapons is the smarter, subtler book here – readers interested in seeing how Banks developed as a writer could scarcely do better than reading these two and looking at two very similar protagonists who end up coming out very differently. But the pattern is largely the same.
You could easily argue that Gurgeh in Player of Games is another example of the pattern – as, indeed, is Frank, in that all of them are very much people who have been carefully shaped and designed for circumstances, even if only Horza and Cherardenine are weapons as such. And it’s true, this is a pronounced theme in the four Banks works discussed on this blog over the past year and change.…
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| Figure 950: Ozymandias rejoices at saving the world. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987) |
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Part of what made Watchmen so successful was that its sense of apocalyptic grandeur was a good fit for the mid-80s. And speaking of apocalyptic grandeur, there seems to be this weird sense that the chapter is progressing towards some sudden and decisive turning point. Wonder what that’s about.
But the most chilling part of Moore’s labyrinth is not the sense of doom that hangs over it. Rather, it is his exploration of what, at first glance, would seem to be an innocuous, even optimistic line of thought. A core element of superhero stories, after all, is that superheroes save people. So how might that apply to the nuclear eschaton looming over Watchmen? To pinch a framing from Grant Morrison, if the bomb is an idea, what better idea could superheroes possibly offer to counter them? But far from offering any sort of hopeful, utopian vision of superheroes averting atomic crisis (that hardly being an original notion, after all), Moore, thinking about this question, came up with a genuinely chilling answer. He did not take the obvious route that he would eventually explore in Miracleman of simply having the superheroes destroy all the nuclear stockpiles by force. Instead he comes up with a far more cracked and strange idea – Ozymandias’s mad scheme to slaughter the population of New York.
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| Figure 951: Ozymandias’s television viewing is explicitly presented as using the same nine-panel grid as the comic itself. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #11, 1987) |
It is, famously, an absolutely_p12_(comichost-dcp).jpg)
bonkers plot involving faking an alien invasion with a giant squid monster designed by a committee
of artists and scientists that would be teleported to New York with a
malfunctioning teleporter that
would kill it on arrival, releasing a massive psychic shockwave that would kill everyone. But beneath the basic ridiculousness is a dark and ominous vision in the form of Ozymandias’s animating obsession. There is something fundamentally unsettling about the image of a man who can intuit the pulse of the world deciding to take action to change it. Especially in the context of Watchmen, where Ozymandias’s Burroughs-inspired television watching is naturally allied with the way the world works. And Ozymandias’s plan, ridiculous as it is, hinges on a grim structural joke. The world of Watchmen consists largely of superheroes – Moloch is the only corresponding supervillain to appear, and the discussions of “costumed criminals” in the Under the Hood excerpts make it clear that these are fairly generic criminals who dress up in the same way that Hooded Justice or Captain Metropolis did. There’s no villainous equivalent to the sort of high-tech adventuring of Nite Owl, little yet anyone who displays actual or even quasi-superhuman powers like Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias. Except, of course, for Ozymandias himself, whose plan is a dead ringer for the sorts of elaborate world-spanning schemes of super-villains like Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, or Ra’s al Ghul might come up with.…
Spider-Man #3
A bit of a mess. I saw a Tumblr post complaining about last issue’s “I don’t want to be the black Spider-Man” bit and arguing that Miles should identify as Latinx, not Hispanic, concluding that Bendis shouldn’t be writing these topics because he’s too white, and kind of eyerolled at its “my vision of minority experiences is the only right one” tone. After reading an issue of browbeating Latin American grandmother stereotypes, however, I’m rethinking my eyeroll. Further points off for a desperately pointless Kamala Khan cameo. Seriously, two characters as great as Miles and Kamala and literally fucking nobody can write a good scene between them. Argh.
Digital code: FCMXQ647JZSM
Invincible Iron Man #8
Apparently this road leads to Civil War II. How exciting. That’s not actually true. This is not very exciting. This is Bendis-by-numbers with generic tech ninjas. Were it not for the big “The Road to Civil War II” banner at the top the plot would seem utterly disposable. Deodato continues to have never met a quantity of black he thinks is too much. Thoroughly meh.
Digital code: FCMCRPH2D2VB
Spider-Women Alpha
Picked up because I don’t intend to drop Spider-Gwen due to this crossover, or at least I hoped not to. And I won’t be – this is fun, sets up a nice premise with deftness, and has three solid and distinct leads. I’m particularly really liking this take on Spider-Woman, and would invite people reading her series to let me know if it’s worth checking out in comments. This doesn’t look set to be earth-shattering, but it looks set to be good superhero fun with three characters who aren’t so done as to seemingly only be capable of self-parody. Speaking of which, wickedly good Tony Stark joke here.
Digital code: THMN246PTTNH
Black Panther #1
No surrpise that there’s some roughness here; Coates is still learning to do comics, and ends up using the entire issue to set the stage instead of getting off to a storming start, which feels like a kind of archetypal “brilliant writer unaccustomed to twenty-two page comics format” mistake. But everything you want out of Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black Panther is here – the deep regard for the history of what he’s doing and the probing, demanding mind that insists on making the book a big and dramatic statement about the very idea of an African hero-king. This is going to be one to watch. And I hope things happen next issue. That said, seriously, Marvel? $4.99 for twenty-two story pages? Fuck you.
Digital code: FCMJ0ZVXTAGW
Batgirl #50
With the news that this creative team is off the book with Rebirth, this ends up being something of a viking funeral for their take – an oversized conclusion to an arc that celebrates a particular configuration of DC female Bat characters. It’s big and fun and a solid reminder of why the Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr run has been such a revelation – those big “X vs Y” splashes were particularly great. This has a good team coming onto it for Rebirth, and I’ll probably still buy it, but man, I’m going to miss this era.…
I like muffins.
Jane’s going to be taking a vacation for the next few weeks; a literal one, I’m frantically editing the middle chunk of Last War in Albion Volume 1 so she can work on it on the plane. So starting next week I’m going to gear into book promotion mode for Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter to fund it in May, and running excerpts from the book on Tuesdays. Super Nintendo Project is also coming back in a couple weeks. A nice spring regearing against the alt-right, I suppose. Fun times at Eruditorum Press.
The Last Tournament in Albion has a few hours to run, but the outcome seems pretty clear, so I figure I’ll offer some broad thoughts. First, the apparent winner, From Hell. Jed Blue and I were talking on Twitter about it; he had not been struck by the book when he read it, and wondered about its popularity. And I think that’s actually fair; it took me an age to get into it too. I’d actually already started writing Last War in Albion when I gave it what I consider its first proper read, and really felt like I got the book. But holy shit once I did. The comic basically invented psychochronography. I literally owe my entire literary and critical approach to it, even if that approach largely developed prior to my reading it as such. Which is utterly consistent with the critical approach it lays out, of course. Utterly brilliant. I didn’t know I was rooting for it going in, but I’m thrilled it (probably) won.
V for Vendetta‘s also a great one, of course, and a nice runner-up that I would not have been the slightest bit bothered by winning. It says something that we got an all-Moore final – something that’s probably true about the War as well. It’s a hell of a writer who pens these two works. Not for nothing is V for Vendetta getting two chapters, with another to come in Book Three; its weight in the War is comparable to few. That said, I am surprised that it was such an apparent blowout, especially given how dominant V for Vendetta was in what I had thought a fairly tough division. Phonogram was perhaps an easy quarterfinal opponent as such things go, propelled forward due to recentism, but it’s also a damn fine comic that was nice to see go on a run over genuinely good stuff like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Miracleman. This was, I think, a category hampered by obscurity in many cases, but quality-wise perhaps my favorite.
In proper bracket fashion, the semifinal that should have been a final was Watchmen vs From Hell. A couple people wondered what Watchmen was doing away from the superheroes while Sandman was in with them; the answer is just that the easiest way to define the superheroes division was “is it Marvel or DCU.” The result was a deliciously brutal division – I don’t think anything had as many heartbreaks as it did for me.…
It’s a small club, and more than anything it’s nice to see a quality new contribution. I’m not going to say that the world is lacking in studies of Doctor Who because it’s manifestly not, but the aca-fandom corner of things is, as fields go, not one where it’s hard to keep track of the major players. So welcome to Philip Purser-Hallard, editor of and contributor to The Black Archives, Obverse Press’s new line of short book treatises on individual Doctor Who stories. They launched just last month with four books, on Rose, The Massacre, The Ambassadors of Death, and Dark Water/Death in Heaven, the latter of these by Purser-Hallard himself, and the one Obverse Books sent me a review copy of. (They’ve got four more planned over the rest of 2016, including Andrew Hickey’s take on The Mind Robber and Lance Parkin’s on The Pirate Planet, incidentally; it’s a hell of an exciting line.)
Let me start by saying this is a brilliant idea; a perfectly considered level of granular focus that has loads of room to find new things to say about tired old stories without sacrificing readability or approachability. The obvious analogue is the 33 ⅓ series of short books on music albums, which provide similarly appealing balances of depth, breadth, and the potential for idiosyncrasy. These are the right books at the right time, and it’s genuinely a thrill to have them join the conversation.
That said, as a fellow traveler in the aca-fandom waters who has also written a book for the 33 ⅓ series, there’s not really a way for me to approach a book like this without immediately jumping to either ridiculous talking shop about critical approaches or early efforts to contextualize it in the larger discourse of Doctor Who criticism. I mean, this is the sort of book where my reactions include things like “oh, hey, he quoted Anna’s piece on Missy and trans issues.” (“Was it a good quote? Do I sound like an idiot?” Anna asked when I told her. She does not, unsurprisingly, though Purser-Hallard doesn’t buy her claim that the Master was dysphoric, historically. “Lol, I don’t either,” notes Anna. It also cites Jack for the claim that Revelation of the Daleks has vaguely implied necrophilia, incidentally.) Neither of which is the natural fit for a book series that’s aiming at a general enough audience that it starts with an overview of the episode that includes transmission dates and a fairly detailed plot synopsis. And while I could try to turn all those instincts off and just enthusiastically review it as the interesting and compelling guide that it is, well, what’s the point in that? Especially when Purser-Hallard argues, quite brilliantly, in the book’s epilogue that “one day everything in this book will be wrong (if indeed it isn’t now, which is certainly a possibility). And that is the magic of Doctor Who.”
So let me instead pay Purser-Hallard’s Dark Water/Death in Heaven a much higher compliment than a mere “hey, this is worthwhile, check it out” and say that when the time comes to write the Capaldi stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum, I cannot imagine discussing this story without using it the way I used About Time so often in the classic series, which is to say pushing back against and expanding upon its conclusions.…
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen seemed not born so much as ground like pigment from its time; something that could only possibly have been created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1986, at that point in their career, out of the specific interests they had at the time.
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| Figure 947: Eroticized war in Watchmen. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #7, 1986) |
Moore has often made the joke that Watchmen was the result of a “bad mood” that he was in during the period. This is by and large understating things. In interviews from the time, Moore seems genuinely convinced that the world is going to end, certainly during his children’s lifetime, if not during his, and probably in some sort of nuclear explosion. In one interview, for instance, he notes that “in forty years the rain forests will be gone. If the rain forests are gone, we can’t breathe. Simple as that. There’s nothing that’s more simple than that: no trees, no air. One of my children is eight. She said to me the other day, “I’ll only be forty-eight, won’t I?’ and I said. ‘Yeah’. It’s a pretty depressing thought. What a horrible thing to have to think about. I mean, we brought these children into the world and it might not have that much longer left. Nuclear reactors, for another thing. They can’t be decommissioned because nobody knows how to do it. But they keep building them. We are going to have a Chernobyl every four or five years from now on. And more, because those reactors weren’t built to last for twenty-five years in the first place; and they were built thirty years ago. One of those reactors is going to go up every few years.” Obviously this proved unduly pessimistic, although to be fair Leah’s still only thirty-eight. But nevertheless, it was the world Moore saw in 1986, and with no surprise. It was the peak of the Reagan/Thatcher years, disarmament talks were failing, Chernobyl happened. A wealth of immediate threats to human survival loomed, and the political situation looked actively disinclined to even acknowledge them; indeed, the US government seemed at times to almost eroticize the notion of nuclear war. Apocalypse felt just around the corner.
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| Figure 948: The June, 1947 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, introduciing the Doomsday Clock. |
It is impossible to fully understand the density of Watchmen absent this context. The point is not simply to be a comic that rewards reading and rereading at great length; the point is to be a comic with such density as to generate an inescapable gravity. Through its massively layered resonances and nonstop foreshadowing it conveys a constant sense of inevitability. This is, of course, flagged in one of the book’s most basic structural metaphors, the advancing clock on the back of every issue. This, in turn, alludes to the Doomsday Clock, a periodic feature of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences that declares the Bulletin’s assessment of the current danger of global disaster in the form of a clockface approaching midnight.…
The Last Tournament in Albion continues apace; that’s the bracket after Round 2. Round 3 starts tomorrow.
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Adventures Year Two #7
A bit of a comedown after an utterly charming issue, with the potential of Shada mostly being frittered on a Douglas Adams pastiche AI. Not a bad pastiche, mind you, but very much coming in below the excitement level generated by the previous issue. And the end thoroughly loses me; so far as I can tell River and Daak just sort of vanish? Anyway, largely reminded me of the sort of “this is almost great, oh, never mind” feeling that soured me after the first year of this, so probably back to done with it.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #6
The start of a crossover with Howard the Duck. Best part are Chip Zdarsky’s replies to Ryan North’s footnotes. Past that, it’s a standard (and thus delightful) Squirrel Girl issue, and thus delightful, if a bit fragmentary. I’m curious to see how the tone shifts when we move to the Howard the Duck conclusion next month, certainly.
Darth Vader #18
As usual with Gillen’s Vader arcs, I’m finding myself really getting into this as we go on. I’m really enjoying how Gillen plays the austerity of Vader at this point, finding a wealth of very clever ways to work around the problem that his main character has no facial expressions and is pathologically averse to displaying any emotions. This arc has been particularly satisfying in that regard, working as a very methodical political battle with most of the pieces in plain sight, which combines well with Vader’s pecularities. Good stuff.
Saga #35
I know, I’m as surprised as you to see this doing well; I almost threw it back and dropped it, in fact. Still might after #36 in favor of trade-waiting, but in any case, as everything kicks into high gear for the climax this ends up working. The ultimate pay-off it’s building towards seems a bit too obvious – a crushing near-miss rescue of Hazel that will, in typical Brian K. Vaughan fashion, lead to another arc whose plot can be summarized as “several issues of individually focusing on characters as they travel.” But hey, you get what you pay for with Vaughan these days, and this was actually as worth $3 as any comic right now.
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #5
An absolute delight. This is a simple issue with an unfussy plot – Moon Girl breaks Devil Dinosaur out of prison. And yet between its character beats showing Lunella’s anxieties and capabilities and its incredible knack for visuals (Moon Girl walking alongside Devil Dinosaur on giant spring stilts is probably my favorite), it’s an easy pick of the week – an untroubled thrill of a comic.…
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| Fame, it’s not your brain, it’s just the flame That burns your change to keep you insane |
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister
Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow, Bran Stark
Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont
Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth
Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Melisandre
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of the Twins: Arya Stark
The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Bows of the Wall: Ygritte
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Stags of Dragonstone: Gendry
Dogs of the Twins: Sandor Clegane
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins.
The episode is in seventeen parts. The first part runs two minutes and is set at the Twins. The opening image is of Roose Bolton atop the battlements.
The second runs nine minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Arya to Sansa Stark.
The third runs two minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by family, from Sansa to Bran Stark.
The fourth runs two minutes and is set at the Twins. The transition is by dialogue, from Bran talking about the horrors of violating guest right to Walder Frey.
The fifth runs four minutes and is set at the Dreadfort. The transition is by dialogue, from Roose explaining what actually happened at Winterfell to Ramsey pretending to eat Theon’s penis.
The sixth runs three minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Reek whimpering his name to Bran awakening.
The seventh runs three minutes and is set on Pyke. The transition is by hard cut, from Bran to an establishing shot of Pyke.
The eighth runs two minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Yara setting sail to Bran inspecting the Dragonglass.
The ninth runs three minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Bran and company walking out of the Wall to Davos entering the jails.
The tenth runs six minutes and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Davos talking about his son’s death to Shae looking out at the Blackwater, and from Davos and Gendry talking about not being highborn to Varys and Shae doing the same. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Shae and Varys talking about Tyrion to Tyrion.
The eleventh part runs two minutes and is set on the road outside the Twins. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Cersei talking about the horrible things they do to their enemies to the Hound and Arya riding past some Freys joking about Catelyn’s death.
The twelfth runs five minutes and is in two sections; it is set in and around the Wall.…
