A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.02: Dark Wings, Dark Words
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| “Huh. I don’t want to casually torture her. That’s never happened before.” |
State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
The Lion, Jaime Lanniser
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Harrenhal: The King in the North Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark
Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell
The Direwolf, Bran Stark
Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
The Direwolf, Arya Stark
The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy
Tigers of Harrenhal: Talia Stark
The Stag, Gendry
Bows of the Wall: Ygritte
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Bears of the Wall: Lord Commander Jeor Mormont
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
The Dogs, Sandor Clegane
Winterfell is in ruins and abandoned, Astapor is empty, Dragonstone has been vacated.
The episode is in thirteen parts. The first runs three minutes and is set in the North; the opening image is of Brandon Stark running with a bow in a dream.
The second runs two minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by family, from Bran to Robb Stark.
The third runs one minute and is set in the Dreadfort, though this is not made clear. The transition is by dialogue, from Robb and Catelyn talking about Theon to Theon.
The fourth runs four minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by image, from Theon bound on a cross to Jaime walking in chains with Brienne.
The fifth runs nine minutes and is sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime Lannister to Cersei Lannister and Joffrey Baratheon. The second section is seven minutes long. The transition is by theme, from Cersei and Joffrey talking about love to Shae and Sansa talking about the same.
The sixth part runs five minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Sansa to Robb Stark.
The seventh runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set north of the Wall. The first section is two minutes long. The transition is by dialogue, from Catelyn telling a story of Jon Snow to Jon Snow. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sixskins talking about dead Crows at the Fist of the First Men to the survivors.
The eighth part runs three minutes and is set in the North. The transition is by family, once removed, from Jon Snow to Bran Stark.
The ninth runs four minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Bran to Arya Stark.
The tenth runs eight 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 Arya and company walking to Tyrion entering his chambers. The second section is five minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion Lannister to Joffrey Baratheon.
The eleventh part runs two minutes and is set in the Dreadfort, though this is not made clear.…
It is October 1987. Moore is sitting down to dinner after a Glasgow signing to promote Watchmen. At the table is Grant Morrison, a neophyte comics writer. It is the only meeting between them that Moore recalls, although he had given Morrison advice at a 1983 Glasgow comic mart when Morrison was on the cusp of transitioning from a failed rock star to a successful comics writer. Moore will eventually, to Morrison’s chagrin, describe him as an “aspiring” comics writer at the time of this meeting, one of many swipes he will take at Morrison over the years. They talk about vegetarianism. (“Sometimes you can’t live with the contradictions, Grant,” Morrison recalls him saying.)
It’s summer, 1992. Alan Moore is thirty-eight. Just a few years out from the twin smoldering wreckages of Big Numbers and his first marriage, he takes a call from Jim Valentino at Image Comics. Moore is unimpressed with the Image output, thinking, “I’ve been away for five years, and comics have turned into some bizarre super-steroid-mutant hybrid that I’ve got no familiarity with at all,” but the business model of Image appeals to him, and the failure of Big Numbers along with a relatively fallow period in Moore’s output means he needs the money, and so he throws himself into “teaching myself this new language and trying to understand this new audience.” He ends up creating 1963 with Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch, a colorful pastiche of vintage Marvel comics written in explicit contrast to the post-Watchmen style (largely embodied by Image itself) of violent and cynical comics.
It’s January 7
Digital edition codes will work for the first person to try to use them at 
I’m joined by Chris O’Leary of 
Seth Aaron Hershman revisits 
Monday’s regularly scheduled post will be up at noon EST.
It is January, 1988. Alan Moore is thirty-three, and writing the introduction to the collected edition of Watchmen. His relationship with the publisher is in tatters, a fact he alludes to only vaguely when he notes that it is “the very last work that I expect to be doing upon Watchmen for the foreseeable future.” He looks back to 1984, when the idea originated, and the giddy enthusiasm of it all. And yet there is something he cannot quite locate in this. He notes that at the start “we wanted to do a novel and unusual super-hero comic that allowed us the opportunity to try out a few new storytelling ideas along the way. What we ended up with was substantially more than that.” But he cannot pin down the transition. Instead he describes a growing realization of the story’s complexity and scale, but without a sense that the realization had an end point. Instead, “there was the mounting suspicion (at least on my part) that we might have bitten off more than we could chew, that we might not be able to resolve all these momentous strands of narrative and meaning that seemed to be springing up wherever we looked, that we might be left at the end of the day with a big, messy, steaming bowl of semiotic spaghetti.” But even when the project ended. But even now, in 1988, Moore is lost in the process, saying that it is only now, in writing the introduction, that he realizes “how dazed a state I’d spent that year in, as if I’d been slam dancing with a bunch of rhinos and the concussion was only just starting to clear up,” a claim that oddly undercuts itself; the daze clearly extending beyond the year, simultaneously located “now, twelve months after” he finished the final script and in the past, as indicated by the past tense in the concussion metaphor.
A similar temporal ambivalence exists in the previously discussed description of how his “nostalgia for the [superhero] genre cracked and shattered somewhere along the way and all the sweet old musk inside just leaked out and evaporated,” a statement in which Moore is clearly lying, albeit as much to himself as the reader, the description of the “sweet old musk” evoking precisely what he says he has lost, so that the sentence offers the very experience it exists to reject. Moore casts superheroes away, but in doing so only draws them back in, a tension implicit in the very idea of nostalgia, which is of course an intense feeling for a thing that one is not actually experiencing at the time. He is nostalgic for his nostalgia, relishing in the scent of its memory even as he pushes the genre away, grimly certain in the necessity of all his burnt bridges.…
I’m joined for this by Jon Blum, the other half of the legendary Ormanblum from whence the best Doctor Who novels emerge. We talk Sherlock, then do a nice career-spanning interview that includes the sordid tale of the fourth-best Zygon story ever filmed. It’s good stuff, and 
First off, and unrelated to comics, I guested on this week’s installment of Oi! Spaceman, where I talk Moffat and feminism, Mawdryn Undead, and Vox Day. It was great fun, and