Elizabeth Sandifer

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. …

Continue Reading

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.”…

Continue Reading

If I’d seen Deadpool I bet I could make a really good joke here.

State of Play

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

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

The Ship, Davos Seaworth

The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon and Melisandre

Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell

Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Stag, Gendry

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

Winterfell lies abandoned and in ruins, Riverrun is silent, Harrenhal is vacant, Dragonstone is inexplicably not in the credits.

The episode is in ten parts. The first part runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The opening image is of a rock, with Arya out of focus behind it.

The second runs five minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by image, from the Hound riding to the horses of the Second Sons.

The third runs six minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan to Melisandre landing.

The fourth runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis to the walls of Yunkai.

The fifth runs seven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Dario to Sansa in the mirror.

The sixth runs seven minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, the wedding scene to Gendry.

The seventh runs eleven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Stannis magickally killing Joffrey to Joffrey at a wedding.

The eighth runs four minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion and Sansa to an establishing shot of Daenerys’s camp.

The ninth runs one minute and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from the drapery on Daenerys’s tent to the similarly patterned grate in Tyrion’s chambers.

The tenth runs seven minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion smiling thinly to a landscape shot. The final image is of a Full Web of birds.

Analysis

With “Second Sons,” at last, the fundamental limitations of the emphasis on episode structure over season structure that has dominated for the past few episodes stands revealed. The heart of this episode – everything but the first and last scenes – cycles among three plots selected and unified by the title phrase. Two – Tyrion and Stannis – embody it in its literal sense, while the third contains the actual title drop. This is, by any standard, a motley assortment – you can just about argue that Tyrion’s plot, by dint of focusing on his relationship with Tywin at several turns, at least vaguely related to his status as a second son, but Stannis’s plot essentially doesn’t touch the topic.…

Continue Reading

I got a request on Tumblr to bring back Saturday Waffling, so here it is. First off, and totally unrelated to anything, there’s a Comixology sale on Gillen and McKelvie’s work that means WicDiv collections are going for $5 a pop. If you haven’t read WicDiv yet, I am jealous of the things you get to experience for the first time.  

Let’s see. Vague update on things. The Patreon has undergone the slight deflation that it always does over a few months to where I stopped breaking even on the site expansion again. Not a huge deal – it’s not like we’re bleeding money or things are unsustainable or anything. But it’d be nice to get back to that threshold, so I spruced things up a bit over there, including redoing the milestones to reflect Patreon’s decision to base everything on net income instead of pledged income. And there’s a goal now for Game of Thrones S6 reviews, if you’re into that kind of thing. Anyway, if you can spare a buck a week or whatever, that’s here.

The next Last War in Albion chapter continues to be like pulling teeth. Consider this my wry joke about massive delays as an in hindsight inevitable consequence of going “let’s mirror Watchmen.” Anyway, the opportunity to knock off some one-off pieces to fulfill Patreon requests, which I was lax on for a while anyway, is nice. Hoping to have that going by the 25th.

Further out, I’m currently expecting the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter to be in May, and Last War in Albion Volume 1 to be in July.

As for discussion, I’ve not really touched the Retro Hugos part of my nominating ballot beyond joking that the Puppies should be able to find lots of German sci-fi to their liking from 1940. So what actually is eligible and worth nominating there? …

Continue Reading

Consider this a belated postscript to Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons. (Which, by the way, has no Amazon reviews, so if you hated it you can totally sabotage its sales by giving it a one-star review, just like you can support the site on Patreon and join the backers who voted to bring you this post. I’ve just set up new milestone goals, including Game of Thrones Season Six reviews.) That, after all, is my book about science fiction and fantasy in 2015. And whatever the major awards might say, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the best SF/F book of 2015.

Let’s go one further, in fact, and make it clear that its quality is inseparable from what might banally be called its “commitment to diversity,” and slightly less banally be called its “politics.” For instance, its central fantastic concept, the practice of orogeny, defined in the glossary at the back of the book (it being a fantasy novel and all, and it is a proper fantasy novel of the sort that starts with a map and ends with, well, a glossary) as “the ability to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy to address seismic events.” Or, perhaps more accurately, its central fantastic concept, orogenes, the people with this ability, upon whom the stability of the empire depends, but who are second-class citizens, allowed to live only under the despotic supervision of the Fulcrum, and often murdered in childhood by angry mobs before they even get the chance to be given to the empire.

If one wanted to read The Fifth Season as allegory, it would not be hard to decide what orogenes represent. The most blatant clue is in the derogatory term for them: rogga. Its real-world phonetic analogue is self-evident, doubled down on when one of the major characters, Alabaster, the famously mad ten-ring orogene, reclaims the slur in the course of explaining a particularly horrifying degradation: “they only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of s is just another new weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

The link can readily be sharpened. The larger rhetoric by which the orogenes’ treatment is justified is based on the degree to which their powers are dangerous combined with their inherent lack of control. A mixture, in other words, of emphasizing their inherent strength – indeed “physical prowess” would be a justified term based on the ways in which Jemisin focuses on the bodily experience of orogeny – but coupling it with a suggestion that they are inherently predisposed to violence. This is familiar as the logic that explains why a black man acting in a manner that can even plausibly be described as “threatening” needs to be gunned down by cops in a way that a white man does not. And I want to stress, this is not some strained analogy.…

Continue Reading

Guardians of the Galaxy #6

The good part of this thin and uninspiring week is that even the lowest ranked book is pretty good, especially for this largely disappointing All-New All-Different relaunch. A nice two-hander that focuses on the relationship between Peter Quill and Kitty Pryde, it provides Bendis the space for the sort of hyper-talky character work he excels at. It’s artful, but often heavy-handed, not least with Kitty’s tear-stained shout of “it’s a concentration camp.” Although “chag sameach, mother-#$@#$@!” almost makes up for it. Still seriously minded to drop this, but at least I can see why someone else would enjoy this issue.

Ms. Marvel #5

A very silly premise is allowed to get a bit out of hand here, and while numerous parts of it are thoroughly delightful, perhaps most obviously the stunning line “what, Tyesha gets to be a Muslim but my anarch-atheism is a phase?” the whole feels like markedly less than the sum of its parts, and like this story is more an opportunity for everyone to be silly and let their hair down than anything else. I suppose after an apocalyptic Secret Wars arc and a big reintroduction that’s deserved, but equally… meh.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #6

A strong issue long on good character beats, with genuinely fantastic exchanges between Gwen and her father, Gwen and Captain America, and Gwen and Harry Osborne. The last of these is probably the most interesting, providing one of the book’s characteristically clever reworkings of the standard Spider-Man relationships and offering an insight into some of the ways in which Gwen is better at this than Peter. Not exactly thrilled that we’re headed into a crossover next month, but I’ve been curious about Spider-Woman and am at lest game for it. …

Continue Reading

It was a hairy bear. It was a scary bear. Brienne and Jaime beat a hasty retreat from its lair, and described it with adjectives.

State of Play

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

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, the Hand of the King Tywin Lannister

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Burning Hearts of King’s Landing: Melisandre

The Direwolf, Bran Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

Tigers of Riverrun: Talisa Stark

Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon, Gendry

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

The episode is in twelve parts. The first part runs two minutes and is set on the far side of the Wall. The first image is of the open sky.

The second runs four minutes and is set in the Stark camp between Riverrun and the Twins. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Robb Stark.

The third runs two minutes and is set in the woods beneath the Wall. The transition is by family, from Robb Stark to Jon Snow.

The fourth runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Sansa Stark.

The fifth runs seven minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by dialogue, from Joffrey and Tywin talking about Daenerys to her.

The seventh runs four minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys stroking Drogon to Shae looking at her golden chains. The second section is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion saying he would take care of his bastards to Gendry.

The eighth part runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by dialogue, from Mellisandre to Arya talking about her with Thoros and Berric.

The ninth runs three minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by region, remaining in the Riverlands.

The tenth runs five minutes and is set in the Dreadfort. The transition is by family, from Roose Bolton to Ramsey Snow.

The eleventh runs eight minutes and is set in the North along the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Theon about to have his cock cut off to Jon and Ygritte. The second section is 44:30; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Bran Stark.

The twelfth runs eight minutes and is set in the Riverlands south of Harrenhal. The transition is by hard cut, from Osha to horses standing on a hill. The final shot is of Jaime and Brienne walking out of Harrenhal having prevented a bear from completing a Full Web.

Analysis

The phenomenon of Martin writing for Game of Thrones is reliably interesting.…

Continue Reading

One of the most fascinating figures in William Blake’s mythology is Ahania, the Emanation of Urizen. Like all of the Emanations, she provides the feminine aspect of a concept, in this case reason and the intellect. Where Urizen is a tyrannical figure of single vision and Newtons sleep, deriving absolute and universal law from precise and mathematical measurements and using it to ensnare the world in the net of religion, Ahania represents pleasure and curiosity – the carnal urge to discover and understand. Her separation from Urizen is what dooms him to his fall; her eventual reunion with him his redemption and a fundamental part of Eternal salvation.

Jonathan Blow’s second game, the would-be masterpiece The Witness, attempts to be an extended hymn to Ahania. Its purpose, as Blow stresses in interview after interview, is to explore the experience of learning and discovery. His mechanism for this – indeed the defining mechanism of the game – is a maze puzzle. The basic form is simple: trace a line from a starting node (a big circle) along a path to an ending node (a small rounded nub at the end of a line). The variations are numerous, with the game ultimately having several hundred iterations of this puzzle type of varying difficulties, arranged on panels across a sizeable island to explore.

There is genuine elegance to how this unfolds. Observe the progress of the opening area. You begin at the dark end of a tunnel, an illuminated door ahead and above you. You walk up to it, and find the literal simplest form of the game’s puzzle, and the game gives you one of its handful of actual instructions as it suggests pushing X to attempt the puzzle.

You trace the line, the door opens, and you get a second door.

Which opens into this courtyard.

And when you go to investigate that panel up ahead, it’s a souped up version of the first two doors (shown here at the moment of solution).

Solving it causes the wire coming out of it to ostentatiously illuminate, and you can trace it to a couple other panels of growing complexity, and finally to gate with this panel to the right of it.

A bit of poking at it reveals that you can’t complete the maze through the black bars (what a surprise), but if you trace the other wires you can find panels that will lift the bars, allowing you to complete that maze and open the gate.

Obviously the game gets harder. Indeed, it will in the very next area, which we’ll look at in a moment. But it’s worth explicitly highlighting the step-by-step education given here. Indeed, of particular note is the second puzzle – the little L-shaped path that comes between “trace a line” and “here’s a maze with dead ends.” The truth is that essentially no player actually requires both it and the initial straight line puzzle as preparation for the mazes. As an education in how the game works – which is obviously what this is, being an initial area of a game and all – it’s going ostentatiously slowly.…

Continue Reading

And so begins the last month of the long and terrible WicDiv hiatus.

The Discipline #1

I wanted to like this. I mean, that’s implicit in the fact that I picked up the first issue. Peter Milligan is famously hit and miss, but when he’s on he’s good enough that I have second thoughts about not making him a main character in Last War in Albion. And then there are things like this. 2016 is the right time for a weird fiction erotic thriller comic with a female lead. It’s an on-point, interesting idea for a book. The problem is that Milligan’s lead, while short of a cliche, is visibly taped together from stock characters and stereotypes, seeming to wander around buffeted more by the needs o the plot than by any sort of coherent internal psyche. Right book, wrong writer. Oh well.

Batgirl #49

An artist’s jam of an issue that holds together better than those usually do. There’s a sense in which this feels like it’s building to an end, which would be a pity, as this really is a solid take on the character. All of which said, I’m just not managing to invest in the Fugue as a villain, and this somewhat by-numbers “psychic rescue” issue doesn’t really change that. 

Darth Vader #17

This book’s monumental commitment to the slow burn continues, although at least there’s some actual heat being generated at this point. Gillen is managing to foreground Vader’s interiority without actually going inside it, which is compelling; this is the first time in possibly all the Star Wars I’ve ever consumed where I’ve felt like the angry and impulsive character of the prequel trilogy and the majestic villain of the main trilogy were actually the same person, which is quite a feat. I’m sure once the heat on this arc gets intense enough it’ll move up nicely in the weekly rankings. For now, a solid effort. 

Digital code: FCM5RNYY1KB4

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Adventures Year Two #6

Snagged on a whim because “River Song and Abslom Daak” was too tempting a combo to reject. Not entirely sure why John Hurt is on the cover, but other than that this was a charmingly overstuffed banquet of continuity culminating in a reveal I saw coming a few pages off and thought “no, they can’t possibly actually be going to do something this gloriously wanky.” They did. I punched the air. Might well go back to this; certainly will be getting Part Two. Still a pity about the art. 

Invincible Iron Man #7

Bendis’s typical style of decompression pays off nicely in an issue that’s mostly a funny and character-heavy dialogue between Tony and Mary Jane. Deodato’s art ends up providing a strange and perverse contrast, as he’s stuck trying to make preposterously talky pages fit his style. The results are the best pages I’ve seen him do in recent memory. The book loses focus on the back half as the need to do plot takes over, but this is still probably the best issue of this eternally frustrating book to date.…

Continue Reading