Comics Reviews Delayed
Apparently Diamond accidentally sent all my shop’s books to New Haven, so I won’t be buying comics til tomorrow.…
Elizabeth Sandifer
About Elizabeth Sandifer
Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:
Faerie Tales (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)
So we imagine ourselves to be, what, the heroes of our own stories? The protagonists of whatever story we think it is that’s being told? Or worse, some sort of god with the privilege of directing the protagonist; a consciousness that’s been put in charge of a body in the world, tasked with saving it, redeeming it, making it so that there was a purpose all along.
The bulk of our task is to find soft places in the world. Places where we pass from the seen Overworld to the hidden Underworld, and plumb the depths of dungeons to excise monsters that lurk beneath the surface of all things. This, at least, is classic Zelda, but A Link to the Past introduces a second sort of soft place in the form of portals to its bespoke gimmick, a shadow world with its own dungeons and monsters.
The portal to faerie is a common enough image; the eccentric space where the border of the world frays. That space when you push through the bushes at the back of your yard, or the room in the basement of the school, or the corner of the store where the Nintendo used to be. The dungeon is one example, certainly – a space that opens up into a vast interior whose dimensions are utterly unsuggested by its mere gateway. But this is a different sort of example – not a cave carved into the world, but the world’s shadow; the Dark World; the second quest. The place that is not here, where we are not ourselves.
As such, we are the only person there. The only one who knows our sins and our triumphs. Only us, our arms stretched outwards, amputated stumps grasping desperately for some means of controlling the world. All of this is predicated, of course, on the idea that some means of controlling the world exists, as opposed to the likely reality that we are in fact just the chaotic after-images of a sufficiently complex algorithm.
It’s a matter of curious existential fact that the childhood of the Legend of Zelda series is, in Zelda canon, a discarded dystopia caused by a failure to beat the 1998 release The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A game I have never beaten because, ultimately, I was pissed off that it’s possible to blow the Skulltula quest before you actually get the quest. I played through that hell in 93 with the bonding plant in Return to Zork, thank you. Which means, I suppose, that this really is my world. The truth of who I am, created by my own later gaming inadequacy.
Certainly it’s a memorable game. A fundamental aspect of my childhood, so essential to my sense of self that it is difficult to quite believe in the possibility of a human consciousness that has not played this game. How can you be truly human if you are not shaped by the precise cultural influences that produced me, after all?
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Saturday Waffling (August 15th, 2015)
I was pleasantly surprised when, along with the expected release of the Janelle Monáe-led The Eephus EP, the end of the week brought a new FKA Twigs EP as well. The Eephus is solid; its main effect is to stress the intriguing talent of Jidenna, whose “Classic Man” is probably the highlight, getting the obligatory remix with Kendrick Lamar verses (not as good a version, but charming in its own right). Monáe’s “Yoga” (also featuring Jidenna) is also great. The remaining tracks are somewhat filler, although Roman GianArthur’s “iKnow” is decent.
Also essential viewing is the entire Wondaland crew’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a live cut about police brutality.
The FKA Twigs release, M3LL155X, is of more consistent quality. Nothing comes close to “Two Weeks” in quality, but that’s the sort of song few artists ever hit the quality of twice in a career, so that’s churlish. The standout track is probably “In Time,” though as I said, they’re all quite good. The above link is a combo music video for the first four tracks, and is disturbing and weird and wonderful.
What’ve you all been listening to?
Or, alternate second topic, Vox Day decided to reply to a couple days old tweet in which I suggested he was a massive sequence of junk DNA by calling me a pedophile and insulting my appearance, which seemed like rather weak game from such an accomplished troll. I mean, it’s not even good libel.
Which led to me tweeting claims like “Vox Day is incapable of maintaining an erection unless there’s a photograph of Francisco Franco visible” and “Vox Day has the Innsmouth Look” with the hashtag #betterlibel.
Please, amuse me with further high quality libel about Vox Day, either here or on twitter.…
The Point is to Change the World (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 5: Before Watchmen: Minutemen)
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Actually, it basically just left off in the middle of More’s lengthy description for the first panel of Watchmen.
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| Figure 849: The ending of Watchmen is foreshadowed by its first panel. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987) |
THE SECOND ITEM OF REMARK IS A 1” DIAMETER SMILEY BADGE, COLORED A VIVID SUNSHINE YELLOW AS IT LAYS THERE IN THE GUTTER SMILING UP AT US AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF LURID BLOOD RED. IT HAS SOMEHOW LODGED IN THE GUTTER SO THAT IT WON’T GO DOWN THE DRAIN, AND SIMPLY REMAINS STUCK THERE, STARING UP AT US WITH ITS JARRINGLY INANE EXPRESSION. A SMALL SPLASH OF CRIMSON STAINS THE FRONT OF THE BADGE. A SINGLE TINY SPATTER ACROSS ONE BLACK CARTOON EYE ON THE FACE OF THE BADGE. THAT’S BASICALLY THE WHOLE OPENING IMAGE, UNLESS YOU WANT TO STICK A CANDY WRAPPER THAT’S ABOUT TO FLOAT DOWN THE DRAIN, IN WHICH CASE WE HAVE A PACKET OF MELTDOWNS, WHICH ARE LIKE TREETS (ENGLISH) OR M&M’S (AMERICAN) ONLY WITH LITTLE BRIGHTLY COLORED ATOMIC SYMBOLS ON THE WRAPPING. ONLY INCLUDE CANDY WRAPPING IF IT DOESN’T DETRACT FROM THE SIMPLICITY OF THE IMAGE WITH THE GUTTER, THE BLOOD AND THE BADGE, THOUGH, BECAUSE THIS IMAGE IS PRETTY IMPORTANT. IT GIVES US THE BLOOD SPATTERED SMILEY-BADGE, WHICH IS A PRETTY WORKABLE SYMBOL OF THE COMEDIAN’S MURDER, WHICH RUNS THROUGH THE ENTIRE SERIES, AND IT ALSO GIVES US A FAINT SUBLIMINAL PREDICTION OF THE ENDING WITH ITS IMAGE OF THE GUTTERS OF NEW YORK AWASH WITH BLOOD. ANYWAY, SEE WHAT YOU THINK AND LEAVE OUT THINGS LIKE THE SWEET WRAPPER IF YOU THINK THEY’RE EVEN SLIGHTLY DISTRACTING. WE’LL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME TO GET ALL OUR CUTE BRAND NAMES IN LATER ON IN THE SERIES. THE ACTUAL TEXT UPON THIS FIRST PAGE IS ALL TAKEN FROM RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL, WHICH WILL BE A MORE-OR-LESS CONTINUING FEATURE OF THE NARRATIVE THROUGHOUT THE SERIES. I MENTION THIS IN CASE YOU THINK IT MIGHT BE NICE TO VISUALLY DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL AND ANY OTHER CAPTION BOXES THAT MIGHT OCCUR BY GIVING IT A SPECIFIC COLOR A SPECIFIC SHAPE OR LETTERING STYLE OR SOMETHING. I SUPPOSE IT’D BE NICE IF WE COULD ACTUALLY GET SOME OF THE CHARACTER OF RORSCHACH HIMSELF BY THE WAY HIS JOURNAL IS WRITTEN, ALTHOUGH I SUPPOSE A SUITABLY WARPED-LOOKING STYLE OF HAND WRITING MIGHT BE OFF-PUTTINGLY DIFFICULT TO READ OR TIME CONSUMING AND DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN. MAYBE YOU COULD SUGGEST A SORT OF SCRUFFINESS WITHOUT GETTING TOO ELABORATE, THOUGH. PERHAPS A MORE RAGGED EDGE OR A FAINT SPATTERING OF MESSY INK BLOTS INT HE BOXES HERE AND THERE AS IF THEY’D BEEN LETTERED BY A PEN WITH A SPLIT NIB OR SOMETHING. ANYWAY. THE OPTIONS ARE THERE, SO JUST DO WHAT YUOU WANT. IN FACT, IF YOU’RE ANXIOUS TO SEE ANYTHING THAT EVEN SMACKS OF VISUAL FLUMMERY THAN PLEASE FEEL FREE TO MAKE RORSCHACH’S BOXES THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSES AND RELY UPON THE TEXT IN THEM TO SET THEM APART FROM OTHER NARRATIVE WITHOUT IMPOSING ANY VISUAL GIMMICKS NEEDLESSLY.
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Kinda Commentary
At last, because the frankly minor amount of editing this required put me off dealing with it for a month, Jack’s and my commentary on the Peter Davison classic Kinda. Which is nice and apropos for that book I should have out in just a couple weeks.
A zip file with commentary tracks for all four episodes is right here.
Past Commentaries
Comics Reviews (August 12th, 2015)
Years of Future Past #4
Rough going. There’s some novel plot twists, but everyone is such a cardboard cutout here that I have trouble caring. An exemplar of the sort of comic I really need to stop spending $3.99 on.
A-Force #3
Effective superheroics, with little more to be said. Art felt a bit uneven between two different inkers, and the plot is starting to lose me, though I’m not sure if that’s an A-Force problem or a Secret Wars problem. Either way, at best adequate.
Mercury Heat #2
Still not sparking; the underlying concepts are interesting, and get moments of good play, but I suspect this is one where I’ll like the second arc, once the cards are on the table, more than the process of laying them there. Luiza’s hatred for her own skillset is by far the most compelling aspect, but the book is being slow in establishing that in favor of a lot of worldbuilding, which isn’t bad, but isn’t quite amazing either.
Secret Wars #5
On the original release schedule, this sort of exposition slab of an issue, excluding almost all of the cast in favor of a tight focus on Doom and Valeria, would probably have been a bold and interesting more. Under the increasingly glacial pace of Secret Wars, I’m well past just checking my watch and wondering if it’s October yet, not least because the odds seem certain that the All-New All-Different Marvel relaunch will start before Secret Wars #8 ships.
Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #2
Morrison is now one of three writers, so we’re pretty clearly transitioning from stuff he actually did to stuff he at best has notes for. We’re also pretty clearly moving from where his overly elaborate work resetting the myth into a Jack Kirby knockoff is the focus to a retelling of a classic of world mythology. On the whole, then, an improvement.
Doctor Who: Four Doctors #1
An endearingly frothy summer event for Titan’s Doctor Who line. Cornell gets to business quickly and engineers a good cliffhanger, and the Keys of Marinus callback is a nice treat as well, but I’m less than convinced by his Tenth/Twelfth exchanges, which seem to capture neither Doctor particularly well. Still, fun. The “Clara is Slytherin” gag’s particularly nice. Edwards’s art is capable, though marred by occasionally excessive photoreference, which leads to a jarring difference between his everyday Tenth Doctor and the one who appears in a couple of close-ups.
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #15
It feels like this comic has done a few climaxes more than is earned, but as the proper, final issue of Year One (and Ewing’s final bow on the title) it’s a good one that shows how well sketched this set of companions is. I don’t pretend to understand the Source anymore, but this was fun and moving, and really is one of the best runs of Doctor Who comics ever.
Stumptown #7
As is often the case with Stumptown, I suspect it will read better in trade, but this is a lovely and world-grounded PI yarn that hums along entertainingly before sparking with real charm at the end.
All the Birds in the Sky Review
All the Birds in the Sky can be pre-ordered on Amazon here. Doesn’t look like UK pre-orders are available yet, which is sad. The first four chapters are online, starting with chapter one here.
So, with the eligibility period for the 2017 Hugos just four months from opening, I think it’s time to talk about the clear frontrunner for Best Novel, which is Charlie Jane Anders’s All The Birds in the Sky.
In some ways, it’s tricky to articulate just why this book feels so fresh and necessary. Its component parts, after all, are aggressively familiar. The “there’s a science side and a magic side and they have a bit of a rivalry” setup is a standard mash-up post-Harry Potter, and the overtly eschatological bent is pretty standard issue as well. There are, one suspects, dozens of really lousy novels with the setup “a witch and a boy genius team up to avert the apocalypse.” The thing is, All the Birds in the Sky is not any of those novels. Instead, it’s the debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders.
Anders has been buzzing about the short story market for a few years now. She won a totally deserved Hugo in 2012 for “Six Months, Three Days,” a novelette whose first sentence serves as a perfectly adequate description: “The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.” And if there’s only one thing you criticize the Sad Puppies movement for, it should probably be that they’re a bunch of fascist shitheads, but if you go for two the fact that they kept “As Good As New” from the 2015 ballot because they preferred to nominate John C. Wright is absolutely the correct second choice. It’s a post-apocalyptic story in which the last survivor (a playwright and pre-med student) finds a genie’s bottle with an ornery ex-theater critic and goes about figuring out how to save the world and get it right this time.
In both cases, the appeal is similar – the stories take hoary old chestnuts of genre fiction and put them into the material reality of the present day. It’s sci-fi/fantasy that’s at once firmly rooted in the history of the genre and both from and about a world where young women’s social lives are organized via a device in their pockets that’s in many regards far more advanced than a Tricorder.
And that’s what’s fresh and vibrant about All the Birds in the Sky. Its standard genre tropes are well-chosen tools for doing a story that’s about growing up, realizing who you are in the world, and then, far more importantly, realizing that the entire narrative of growing up and realizing who you are in the world is complete and utter bullshit and that the world is a terrifying and confusing place comprised entirely of people who are trying desperately to fool each other into thinking they aren’t total fuckups. The magic/science opposition is there to be a binary opposition, with all the useful truth and false dichotomies implied.
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Me Gun Goes Click, Me Gun Goes Bang (Contra III: The Alien Wars)
At its heart, Contra III is a game about guns. This does not particularly distinguish it within the world of video games, nor, for that matter, within the world of America. Nevertheless, it is firmly the sort of game Contra III is. Like Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls and Ghosts, its central mechanic involves offering players a variety of weapons, each with advantages and disadvantages suitable to particular moments in the game. Contra III’s twist on this mechanic is that Jimbo and Sully are insta-killed by any hit and lose their actively equipped weapon (you can have two weapons, one active at any given moment) upon death, which creates an inherent tension between the desire to have a strong weapon equipped for tricky bits and the desire not to lose a strong weapon to a tricky bit.
One way to put this, then, is that aliens are literally coming to take your guns. This is a crass and largely unhelpful reading, admittedly, although the fact that “losing your gun” means being reduced to a mere machine gun is, in this reading, terribly entertaining.
But equally, it’s impossible to quite separate the iconography of Contra III from the militarized paranoia implicit in it. The first two levels are indicative – bombed out cityscapes through which the player must run, eventually dodging fireballs that burst from the asphalt. This is the iconography of urban decay – the city as a collapsing, rotting space, often described in the fundamentally racially coded terms of the jungle, which was, notably, where the Contra series got its start. This, in turn, was a fundamental image of the Reagan era, where it served as an object of fear that justified the conservative project.
But it also served fundamentally as a fantasy. Like any jungle, the collapsed city is a place upon which fantasies of white militarism are projected. Its untamed wildness requires the puissant white man as a steady hand. Which, of course, Contra III is all too happy to provide via the sumptuously Aryan Jimbo, whose manly poses decorate the interstitial moments between levels.
Being a video game for a Nintendo system, however, some amount of this must be displaced. And so the bombed out city is destroyed by Gigeresque aliens, an all-purpose Other conveniently separate from any material entities, and defined entirely by its inhumanity. Enemies in Contra fall into two general categories – either they are overtly robotic, or they are creatures of grotesque flesh. In either case, the emphasis is on the fundamental antipathy towards the very idea of humanity, which makes the aliens a maximally nightmarish force for the manly heroes to assert themselves against.
This intensely xenophobic setup means that the unreconstructed macho fantasy at the heart of Contra III gets to carry on without undue complication. The resultant ethos is perhaps best captured in the game’s opening, where Jimbo and Sully, following the devastating alien attack, get their sole dialogue in the game, as Jimbo proclaims, “it’s time for revenge,” and Sully concludes, “let’s attack aggressively.”
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Saturday Waffling (August 8th, 2015)
You will recall that the Super Nintendo Project is a magical ritual to destroy Gamergate.
Less than twenty-four hours after the Lemmings post went up, Reaxxion, the neo-reactionary gaming site created by Roosh V (of Return of Kings infamy) created to try to get people to make the leap from Gamergate to literal, actual rapist announced that it would be closing.
You’re welcome.
The Great Leisure continues on Monday with Contra III: The Alien Wars. And then The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past the week after that, which I’ll be writing in the next day or two, and which will go up pretty much as soon as it’s ready for Patreon backers. Who have had the Contra III post since Monday. They live in the future. Or you live in the past. Hopefully the Kinda commentary track I did with Jack Graham will also go up sometime this week, along with an a review of Charlie Jane Anders’s All The Birds in the Sky.
I’m delinquent on last month’s Patreon bonus post, which is going to be about True Detective and Hannibal, I think mainly because I feel the need for at least one, if not both to end before I say anything about them. They’re both intense for me at the moment; True Detective less so, and I think it’s the inferior show at the moment (I’d have said the opposite last year), but I’m still very much enjoying the show. Hannibal borders on just too much for me, especially with the Blakean weirdness kicking up, but in a way I’ve seldom been invested in a show.
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on either show.…
Do you want to feel self-righteous or do you want to win? I like to win. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Four: The Eternity of Alan Moore)
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore cursed the man who would be his successor with the most brutal of curses imaginable for a man of Grant Morrison’s ambition: he gifted him an open throne, and made no effort whatsoever to acknowledge his rival or compete with him.
But this is, in the end, Moore’s nature; the magic trick he’s always been better at than anyone else in the War. He is Eternal. Whatever changes he may bring down upon the world, Moore himself does not change. This may seem a strange claim – he exists in linear time, after all, and there is self-evidently such a thing as a narrative of his career such that one can track an artistic and intellectual evolution between, for instance, V for Vendetta and Providence. But this objection misses the point of the observation. Of course an Eternal entity appears to change when situated in a changing world. But it’s just an illusion; a trick of psychic light. Moore’s entire career has, in practice, been a singular and unwavering action, a masterfully executed con whereby, instead of working a real job, he makes things up. He has never aspired to more. That he, in the process of doing so, became one of the great magi of his age and a primary figure in a history-defining War is something he largely stumbled upon by accident, and it is something he has alternately accepted with grace and good humor and violently and angrily reacted against, depending on the circumstances.
The nature of Moore’s Eternity has precedent, both within his work and without. Indeed, Watchmen itself has such a precedent in the form of Doctor Manhattan, a character who, it is revealed in later chapters, experiences every moment of his life simultaneously. In this regard, Doctor Manhattan approaches his own life through the lens of history, getting to see actions in terms of all their causes and consequences. Such a perspective is obviously denied to Moore, whose vision of his own Eternity eventually coalesced around the less personally ambitious metaphysical view of eternalism, which holds that all moments, past and future, are simultaneously and equally real, with, in Moore’s particular flavor of eternalism, a single human life simply playing on loop. The result is a cosmos that is much like that which Doctor Manhattan experiences, but, crucially, not one that is directly experienced from such an omniscient view.
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| Figure 845: Doctor Manhattan is often withdrawn and unconcerned with human emotion. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #1, 1986) |
And yet Doctor Manhattan’s defining character flaw is one that Moore can fairly be accused of as well. It is not quite that Moore, like Manhattan, is deficient in empathy and ability to understand people. Quite the contrary, one of Moore’s great strengths as a writer has always been his ability to depict rich psychological nuance for his characters. Rather, it is that Moore and Manhattan both have a strangely fatalist lack of belief in their own agency.