Elizabeth Sandifer

Happy to have Last War in Albion back. It’s a hard project, and there are days I really don’t know how believable it is that it will reach a state that can be called “finished,” but my do I love it when things come together in it. 

Last Tournament in Albion also proceeds apace. Here’s the bracket after round one. Some impressive upsets there; I remain gutted that Alan Moore’s A Disease of Language, containing what are probably the two works of his to have most influenced me, got ousted by yet another BBC series with a dodgy sewer monster. And speaking of Neil Gaiman, a stunner as Coraline is ousted in a coin-toss finish by a Kieron Gillen work I might as well have sixteen-seeded, except I threw a Steve Moore novel on that I thought was even more obscure. That’s The New Games Journalism, his manifesto for what games criticism should be. 

Yes, you read that right. Coraline got ousted by aesthetics in video game journalism.

Also intriguing is the Fossil Angels vs Pop Magic! matchup, which ended with a narrow victory for Beard over Bald, and the surprisingly brutality of the first round to Warren Ellis, who was unable to get anything save for Transmetropolitan into the second round. He often did well – 45% for Nextwave against Animal Man, 43% for Gun Machine against Supergods, and 42% for Planetary against The Wicked and the Divine – but came up short save for his 65/35 drubbing of Grant Morrison’s anti-Invisibles, The Filth.

Anyway, second round match-ups have probably begun over on Twitter by now. Both today and tomorrow will have on-topic Moore vs Moorison matches; today pairing Morrison’s 2000 AD superhero strip Zenith against Moore’s Warrior strip Miracleman, tomorrow an all-Superman battle. There’s some really weird ones like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vs Phonogram and Young Avengers vs Swamp Thing. And next week’s got Watchmen vs Promethea and the discovery of whether Kieron Gillen can knock out “The Doctor’s Wife” in a battle of the things it would really be an indictment of The Last War in Albion if won. 

Complain about things in comments. Other than me, I mean.…

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A short and faintly unsatisfying week.

The Ultimates #5

There’s much to like here, most particularly the attempt to make Marvel Time actually have a canonical and in-universe explanation, but there’s an inherent thinness to a twenty-page comic with three splashes, a double splash, and a max panel count of five on any of the other pages, and between that and the inherent anticlimax of the resolution (which amounts to cosmic forces telling the Ultimates that their plan for the last three issues can’t work and sending them home) makes this a frustrating experience despite the entertainment value. As always, though, Rocafort’s art is very pretty and Ewing’s writing crackles nicely.

Digital code: THMNBL47H67W

Cry Havoc #3

It’s increasingly hard to see how the London setting here is going to survive more than another issue or so, but for now the virtuosic time-hopping is working well, with Spurrier enjoying the thematic transitions he can make and the way in which the overall issue’s plot emerges out of his three settings. And the three colorists trick remains brilliant. But we’re very much in the mid-arc doldrums here, with a degree of “OK, hurry up and show us a new trick already.” In other words, a strong example of why Kieron Gillen is right that reviewing individual issues mid-arc is a little bit of a mug’s game.

Klaus #4

Another series with similar problems with the idea of reviewing it at this point, further hampered by the basic weirdness of a Santa Claus series whose last issue is slated for June. But there’s an underlying delightfulness to this that’s nearly impossible not to live. Morrison is perfectly suited to the task of balancing an at times quite hard-edged tale with the fact that it’s an origin story for Santa Claus, and the resulting tone brings a genuine smile on multiple occasions here. Dan Mora’s art is simple but effective; the way in which characters eyes widen and become cartoonish as they grow more sympathetic to Klaus’s cause is as unsubtle as it is well-chosen. This remains a real pleasure of a series.…

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So apparently after the legendary Eruditorum Press Christmas Party Jane and James snuck off to another room and… recorded another podcast. What, where did you think that sentence was going? Anyway, it being spring now it seemed the right time for that to finally drop. You can download it right here.

(EDIT: Major problem with the audio on that file; we’re working on getting a fixed version up. Will update when we have it.)

In other news, the brilliant and utterly deserving of a Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist James Taylor just finished the other half of the painting that became the cover of Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons. As per usual, he talks fascinatingly about his progress over at his blog, and you should totally check that out. …

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“Goddammit, we registered at Pottery Barn, not Williams Sonoma!”

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Wolves of the Wall: Jon Snow, Bran Stark

Wolves of the Twins: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark, Arya Stark

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

Tigers of the Twins: Talia Stark

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Dogs of the Twins: Sandor Clegane

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins, Dragonstone is vacant, King’s Landing is silent.

The episode is in twelve parts. The first part runs seven minutes long and is set at the Twins. The opening images are a series of deeply symbolic shots of Robb Stark’s map.

The second runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Walder Frey to one of the Unsullied.

The third runs two minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan side-eyeing Jorah to Sam and Gilly walking through the snowy woods.

The fourth runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands near the Twins. The transition is by hard cut, from Gilly in awe at the Wall to the Hound and Arya riding.

The fifth runs three minutes and is in two sections; it  is set in the Gift south of the Wall. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by family, from Arya to Bran and Rickon Stark. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by family, from Bran and Rickon Stark to Jon Snow.

The sixth part runs three minutes and is set outside the Twins. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The seventh runs seven minutes and is set in the Gift south of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya to Bran and Rickon Stark.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Ygritte watching Jon ride away to the pyramid of Yunkai.

The ninth runs three minutes and is set in the Twins. The transition is by hard cut, from guards streaming into the square to an establishing shot of the Twins.

The tenth runs three minutes and is set in the Gift south the the Wall. The transition is by family, from Robb and Catelyn to Bran and Rickon Stark.

The eleventh runs one minute and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Osha sneaking off with Rickon to Daenerys’s camp.

The twelfth runs thirteen minutes and is set in the Twins. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to the band playing “The Bear and the Maiden Fair.” It features the deaths of Joyeuse Frey, Grey Wind, Talia Stark, Catelyn Stark, and Robb Stark, killed by various sharp implements, mostly on the orders of Walder Frey. The final image is of Catelyn Stark failing spectacularly to achieve a Full Web.

Analysis

So this is how they decide to split A Storm of Swords: convert the Red Wedding, which takes place in the fifty-first of the book’s eighty chapters, into their ninth episode set piece, killing three credited regulars in a single scene.…

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I’ve only updated the bracket for The Last Tournament in Albion with day one’s matches, as I’m off to bed before Day Two’s morning set actually closes, but I’ll have them in once I get up, probably along with the afternoon. In any case, day three has already kicked off on Twitter with Phonogram vs the Neil Gaiman Miracleman run and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vs Ministry of Space (the latter already looking to be a tight race). And this afternoon we’ll have Journey Into Mystery vs Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and All-Star Superman vs Doom Patrol.

Anyway, go ahead and make your predictions about the ultimate winner or complain about the cruelty of my seeding in comments. …

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The second season of Fargo is a pretentiously well-directed television show that purports to be a crime drama, but is really just a vehicle for two men to urgently discuss the nature of the universe. In this regard it is a familiar thing. It’s also a familiar thing, of course, because it’s a spin-off of the acclaimed Coen Brothers film, previously discussed in these parts by Jack Graham, and more broadly is a show that giddily raids the Coen Brothers back catalogue for imagery and style. The fusion of these two familiar things, however, is gloriously unfamiliar.

Let’s start with the True Detective and Hannibal links, the better to cover up the fact that I’m not a huge Coen Brothers buff and haven’t actually seen the film version of Fargo or the first season (I’m working on it). On one level, it is True Detective that Fargo most fundamentally resembles, with its propensity for lengthy ruminations on the cultural decay and its ostentatious intrusion of the Weird in the form of occasional appearances from UFOs (a nod to the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There; I didn’t say I was a complete n00b). It’s tempting to say that the difference is that Fargo has a sense of humor, but of course, True Detective is often wryly hilarious in its own right (“True crime. That’s the genre, not the title.”), and emphasizing Fargo’s sardonic sense of humor mostly serves to play at some drama/comedy distinction that’s too tinged with value judgment to be useful.

No, the core of the difference, and the one that Fargo seems at times to be evoking True Detective specifically to emphasize, is that Fargo is studiously uninterested in the tragic mythologizing of the Detective as something that can possibly be True. Its two main detectives, Patrick Wilson’s Lou Solverson (a young version of Keith Carradine’s character from the first season) and Ted Danson’s Hank Larsson, are of the mould established by Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, described by Jack as “extraordinarily unextraordinary, she is simply competent at her job, fond of her husband, polite to her colleagues, etc.” They do not solve the case through any extraordinary response to pain and suffering nor through any astonishing powers of insight or deduction. They’re just good men doing their job.

In one sense, of course, this is also how it distinguishes itself from Hannibal; it does not engage in any Miltonian romanticization of murder. It comes close in the form of Bokeem Woodbine’s Kansas City heavy Mike Milligan, who deploys a practicedly folksy conversational style in the pursuit of intimidation and violence, but he’s carefully and deliberately undercut in this regard, most obviously by his ultimate fate as a middle manager in the generic office headquarters of the vast Kansas City criminal empire. But it is more complicated than that. Fargo’s response to True Detective is an outright negation of the premise. Its response to Hannibal – which seems equally self-conscious – is something else.…

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Holly Boson is back with another cracking installment of City of the Dead, this time looking at the 1967 potentially-not-a-classic The Deadly Bees. The official episode description:

In which your hosts meddle with forces they don’t understand.

What forces?

Bees.

I assume there’s at least one Nicholas Cage joke. Find out by downloading here.…

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Before we get to comics reviews, it being the season for big elaborate seeded brackets of things, I’ll be running The Last Tournament in Albion, an attempt to summarize a mostly still-unwritten sprawling epic history of British comic books via a series of Twitter polls. Sixty-four classics from the major players in The Last War in Albion (and a few guest stars), broken into four divisions (British Classics, American Superheroes, Literary Comics, and Non-Comics) and seeded into a series of appropriately brutal head-to-head match-ups. You can see the whole bracket right here.

Voting begins tomorrow, March 17th, on my Twitter. Watch for the hashtag #LastTournamentInAlbion. 

On to a light but high quality week.

James Bond 007 #5

This one’s odd, feeling very segmented and with awkward transitions between the segments. I strongly suspect Ellis of writing for the trade. This series is also starting to be hobbled by Jason Masters not being up to Ellis’s extended silent action sequences. This one has two – a five pager that’s entirely silent and an eight-pager with limited dialogue – and they just don’t have the crackle that happens when Ellis gives one of those to someone like Declan Shalvey or Gerardo Zaffino. Still, it’s a hell of a high bar when the worst comic of the week is an Ellis comic.

International Iron Man #1

Mostly a flashback of the form “Tony Stark and yet another bespoke girlfriend character,” but it’s Bendis and so that’s mostly tolerable, even if he is on autopilot for most of it. But as a first issue this works well, framing the flashback in a very short in media res action sequence that picks up the “Tony Stark’s biological parents” thread from Kieron Gillen’s run. It’s an intriguing way to do things with a secondary Iron Man book. The only weak spot – aside from Bendis’s autopilot – is that Alex Maleev’s action sequences are muddy and difficult to follow.

Digital code: FCM7CIG4KXBV

Injection #8

This is basically just wall-to-wall the best thing ever. Page upon page that just giddily pushes my specific buttons. The double page splash (and ensuing page of snarky dialogue) is the most obvious, but Viv’s several page monologue on Sherlock Holmes, love, and sexuality is also great. As is the turn to AI cults. And the use of narration. Seriously, this issue. Wow. …

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Jane’s taking the week off, so here’s a 3000 word preview from near the middle of Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter in May

And to be clear, the vicious little shit qualities of your garden variety neoreactionary are clearly part of the point, at least for Nick Land. In part 4d of “The Dark Enlightenment” he constructs an extended metaphor around the word “cracker,” in its sense “as a slur targeting poor southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry,” describing them as “grit in the clockwork of progress,” and as Qabbalistic forces of “schism or secession” based on the power of cracks “to widen, deepen, and spread.” His meaning is clear: racist hicks are awesome forces of abstract horror. He tacitly reiterates this in “Phyl-Undhu,” which notes, in a variety of ways, that strong tribal affiliations and hostility to outsiders is likely the soundest survival tactic in most practical eschatons.

He may well be right in this, although one gets the sense that he’s rather glad not to be a part of that American culture; elsewhere in the labyrinthine Part 4 of “The Dark Enlightenment” he remarks fondly about how “there is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned.” Instead, it always seems as though he views the bulk of neoreactionaries as a sort of petri dish in which he can observe the spasming collapse of the technosingularity. Perhaps they are a suitable microcosm. But in this regard, at least, Moldbug has a point. In the “Gentle Introducion,” he praises the 18^th century loyalist Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver, essentially suggesting that reactionaries like him are better than revolutionaries like John Adams because Oliver “is a man you could have a beer with.” And he notes, “you can’t actually have a beer with Peter Oliver, but you can read his book.” The truth is that, despite Land’s evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there’s not a great case for reading their books either.

But if I might be so bold as to suggest, there are other ways of saying “no” at this point in the argument that don’t require hanging out with banal edgelords who get off trying to see how close to saying “Hitler was right” you can actually get without losing the ability to semi-credibly say “but I’m not a Nazi or anything” afterwards. Indeed, when it comes to recasting philosophy as horror it is safe to say that the sort of immediate lurch to the most dramatic form of negation to hand is in most regards the least interesting. The obvious truth of horror philosophy is that there’s an aesthetic; one based on a tightrope balance between the initial “yes” that one is fleeing from and the eventual “yes” that interrupts the series of “nos.”…

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