Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Comics Reviews (August 5th, 2015)

3

From worst to best of what I bought, although I should probably buy fewer comics.

Guardians of Knowhere #2

Bendis’s run on Guardians has been a touch hit and miss for me, and that’s translating poorly to the Secret Warsified Guardians. The crux of the problem here is that this book is about the nature/identity of Yotat, a new character, and his relationship to Knowhere, the Celestial head acting as Battleworld’s moon. The answer appears to be that he’s a Peter Quill alternate, but I couldn’t articulate a reason I’m supposed to care. It’s the sort of sloppy book that includes numerous mentions of a character called Mantis, and even dialogue addressed towards Mantis, but that by the end of I couldn’t tell you who Mantis is. She (I think) appears on a couple of panels but gets no facetime, and is I think killed at the end? Maybe?

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #3

I think I’m just kinda bored and done with Slott on Spider-Man.

Ultimate End #4

Apparently the Ultimate Universe has one issue until it’s over. I assume the premise of this book will be clear by then. This issue does not turn out to include a barely surviving Miles Morales atop a pile of dead heroes. Or, in fact, a pile of dead heroes. Or, in fact, Miles, except in one panel. Although he’s apparently important, for reasons that might be explained along with the premise of this book. There’s even a real chance that it will be a satisfying issue when all is said and done. But this series is a hot mess.

Blackcross #5

Ellis has really been fond of backloading his series recently, establishing the premise late in the books. Charitably, this means they read better in trade, but in this case the premise just feels like Ellis-by-numbers for this particular period in his career – a horror version of what he did in Supreme: Blue Rose without any of the conceptual grandeur that made that book’s half-revealing tone sing. Here’s the big explanation, next issue is the big fight, and the previous four issues were… the big tease? I dunno. Charitably, a minor work in Ellis’s career.

Darth Vader #8

Fun; Aphra has some great bits, Vader’s in an interesting bind, and I’m still buying a Star Wars comic for no reason other than enjoying watching the way the writer’s mind works, which is a silly reason to buy a comic, but then, at the end of the day spending $3.99 for most comics is silly.

The Wicked & The Divine #13

Man, this is a tough one to review, because it’s a well-executed and very on-point comic about real issues, and any criticism of the book thus feels like a criticism of doing good work about those issues. It’s a skilled done-in-one. But… I dunno. Ultimately, I’ve followed the story of online abuse and particularly harassment of women pretty closely for a few years now, and a well-done but ultimately straightforward story about it doesn’t do a ton for me.…

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The Bloody Pantomime In Which You Have Enslaved Yourselves (Lemmings)

15

They move ceaselessly forward. Always forward. They cannot do anything else; their nature is set. At best they may be acted upon by outside influences, but still they are like water. They may be diverted and rerouted, but there is nothing that actually stops the flow. They will walk until they drown.
It is the same with us, really. Time’s riptide pulls us all under, drowning us all beneath the waterline of history. We are perhaps more complex than the green-haired mascots of Psygnosis’s 1991 multiplatform classic, occasionally making what appears very much like a choice. But our choice is just the removal of all the other options; We are set within a system of rules and defined by outside influences. We are not protagonists; not individual avatars of some demiurgic player-souls. We are but part of the flock, buffeted by outside forces.
(And yet the outside forces cannot, strictly speaking, be described as “causal.” The path of history’s flow is defined and knowable, and yet nobody actually follows it with any precision. To use a specific example, we might successfully root the development of the masculine “gamer” identity in the Sega Genesis’s attempt to counter Nintendo’s family marketing with a male-skewing notion of coolness, but it is not as though every Genesis household spawned a Gamergate supporter, or as though there are no misogynistic fuckheads who owned a SNES.)
Perhaps one separates from the crowd. Often this is accomplished by literally elevating him above the rest, designating him with two of the three (or arguably four) permanent traits, namely Climber and Floater, which allow him to scale walls and subsequently parachute down from great heights. This newly minted ubervole will be forever marked as such, appearing under the cursor as “Athlete.” He will strike out and explore the vast landscape, reshaping it to whims that he no doubt imagines are his own. 
But this great reshaping’s only purpose is, in the end, to provide the path that the crowd shall flow through, so that his individuality is subsequently lost in the tide that follows. Indeed, the functions of reshaping –  Builder, Digger, Miner, and Basher – are all temporary roles. When the tasks are completed, whoever performed them simply recedes back to the faceless crowd, reclaiming their identity as “Walker.” The landscape has no author. Nobody made it this way. It simply is. 
More chilling is what is revealed about the the landscape itself when it is altered. Once it has been Dug or Mined or Bashed, or even Blasted, it is simply removed, and the shadows and texture remain fixed around it. For all the intricate play of light and shadows with which it is rendered, it proves flat, an illusion that can be torn through and scraped off. Individual points of landscape may be resistant to destruction or fatal to the touch, but it is all the same substance – a trompe l’oeil painted upon the world. 
This is the state of things: a world designed only so that a mass of people can flow deterministically through it, and a mass of people who exist only to sluice within it.
…

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Saturday Waffling (August 1st, 2015)

53

So, you may recall a month or two ago when I ran a big, juicy story on how the website Doctor Who Online was ripping off advertisers. And that got me thinking about my own advertising, and about how I’d much rather be offering advertising to other small businesses within the fan/geek community than selling them via Google and hosting loads of crap ads using phrases like “one weird trick” and “professors hate him” unironically.

So I’m pleased to announce that I’ve switched advertising over to Project Wonderful, an advertising network created by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics/Squirrel Girl fame, and working mostly among webcomics and other independent websites. Which means that you, yes you, can now easily advertise on my site.

Ads are bid-based, so they cost, basically, as much as people are willing to pay for it. The ads helpfully self-advertise how much outbidding the current ad would cost you, and if you click on the text beneath the ads they’ll give you nice and easy directions on how to advertise. I get more page views per day than Doctor Who Online, and charge a fraction of the price for ads. So please, if you’ve got something you want to advertise, go ahead and do it. My guess is it’ll only cost you a couple bucks a day.

As for things to discuss, I admit that I’m more than slightly bemused and intrigued by Colin Baker’s somewhat indecorous feud with Doctor Who Magazine over the practice of publishing ranked lists of things (his feelings are described in detail towards the top of his site), not least because I’ve settled on the ranked list as the house style for reviews here. And while I admit my view is roughly “I feel like Colin Baker should be more concerned about the fact that his tenure in Doctor Who asked the audience to accept a domestic abuser as a sympathetic protagonist than about the hurt feelings of whoever comes in last in a fan survey,” it seems an interesting enough thing to discuss. So, anyone feel like stepping up and defending Baker’s position that the least popular members of a set should be spared the indignity of coming in last in fan polls? Or, if you want the broader philosophical topic, bad reviews: what’s the point of them?

We’re back on Monday with the start of the next round of The Super Nintendo Project. See you the.…

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Your purity only hurts the reason you’re doing it. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Three: Corporate Comics)

15

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The intricate fictional history of Watchmen is based closely on the history of DC Comics, and the characters served as analogues (albeit imprecise ones) for the archetypal heroes of DC.

For all that Moore and Gibbons created an elaborate superhero universe based on the principle of taking a more materially realistic view of the impact superheroes would have on the world, going so far as to think through the comics industry of his fictional world, there is a crucial tangible oversight within Watchmen: it almost completely ignores the way in which superheroes are, historically, generally corporate owned franchises. There are occasional nods towards it – the tragicomic fate of Dollar Bill, Ozymandias’s business empire, and the relationship between the first Silk Spectre and her agent all gesture at the commercial dimensions of costumed heroes. But it is a minor theme within the book, despite ultimately serving as a major one outside of it. Moore might fairly have asked himself, after all, how it was that the Charlton characters, created by Steve Ditko, Joe Gill, Pete Morisi, Charles Nicholas, and Pat Boyette, were initially available for his use at a completely different company from either of the two they had originated at, with none of their creators even remotely involved. Had he done so, the ways in which writing Watchmen would eventually turn sour for him might have come as somewhat less of a surprise than they in practice did. 
The truth, however, is that Moore’s alienation from this aspect of superheroes was always fairly fundamental. For all the money that Watchmen made him (and it was considerable), there were always numerous ways in which Moore left money on the table, and not just from himself. He adamantly refused to write a sequel to the book, and the only prequel he ever seriously considered was a series focusing on the Minutemen which, in any event, he never wrote. And when Barbara Randall (now Kesel), his editor on the series, leaked to him plans that had been cooked up at a DC editorial retreat shortly after the book’s completion for a trio of prequel series (one focusing on the Minutemen, one on the Comedian, and one on Rorschach), he acted swiftly to derail the plans. Indeed, this is a position he has never wavered on in the thirty years since the book’s release, declaring, upon the announcement of the Before Watchmen project in 2012, that “if people do want to go out and buy these Watchmen prequels, they would be doing me an enormous favor if they would just stop buying my other books,” and declaring that he had “complete contempt” for anyone who did buy them. Moore was, simply put, not terribly interested in serving as a productive member of the DC Comics stable of creative personnel.
Figure 842: Even when Moore took jobs on
high-profile titles like Batman, he was more inclined
to write stories focusing on semi-obscure villains
like Clayface than to focus on the iconic characters.
…

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Comics Reviews (July 29th, 2015)

2

From worst to best of what I bought.

Sandman Overture: Special Edition #5

The quality of the bonus material in this is really, amazingly, egregiously shit. I think my favorite this time is once again the Neil Gaiman interview, which is five questions long and consists of questions like “What’s on The Sandman’s iPod,” a question that manages to find an impressive variety of ways to be stupid, including “why is the editor of this book referring to the main character as The Sandman,” “why are we still using ‘iPod’ as a cultural signifier in 2015,” and my personal favorite, “why did anyone think this was a good question to ask Neil Gaiman?” The only decent bit is the short Dave McKean essay about his process creating the covers. All in all, especially given the considerable number of months they have to pull these special editions together, this is one of the biggest rip-offs in comics at $4.99.

Daredevil #17

Surprised that this one ranks so low for me, but it completely left me cold. Can’t even particularly articulate a reason, although it doesn’t help that I have no real sense of who half the characters are. The Shroud has been appearing for a while, and I get the broad strokes but… nothing sparks for me about him and his plot. Ikari, I vaguely remember, but he seems to just be Daredevil who can see, which, OK, that’s kinda flat. This storyline was working as a operatic and inevitable Daredevil/Kingpin finale, but this puts the emphasis on the wrong parts of the story.

1602: Witch Hunter Angela #2

I found myself a bit lost in this one. Part of it is marketing; I’d expected something a bit more Neil Gaiman pastiche, and instead it’s very much the Gillen/Bennett Angela book filtered through the 1602 aesthetic, with very little of the underlying Gaiman remaining. Was less amused by the 1602 Guardians than I’d hoped from the cover. All in all, this was a bit of a misfire, though the five-page story-within-a-story was cute.

Fables #150

Actually out last week, but I missed it then and grabbed it this week instead. Turns out releasing your final issue as a trade paperback goes poorly for your regular readers. And is, all in all, a more than slightly ludicrous idea. It’s not fair to call it overdone or undeserved; much as it lost gradual steam over its run, Fables was a landmark series, and earned an unapologetically maximalist conclusion. But equally, after an extended final installment and (not kidding) fifteen epilogues, culminating in a gatefold spread to match the gatefold cover, not a single panel of which was even half as good as Legends in Exile, it’s tough to actually praise either. Like a double album a decade after a musician’s best work: you’re glad it exists, but you wish you hadn’t spent money on it.

Sex Criminals #11

Another solid installment long on hilarity and character bits, although a bit ruthless in terms of picking up after a six month absence; this does not feel like the first issue of a new story arc in the least.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten: Night of the Doctor

, 54

“Man, this is the second-worst episode of Doctor Who I’ve been in.”

Because my Patrons are just so gosh-darned nice.

It was, of course, one of the highlights of the Fiftieth Anniversary. A tremendously sentimental and cool moment for fans, a fantastic way of officially revealing what the Hurt Doctor was, and a lovely gift to Paul McGann, who will pretty much never have the TV Movie be someone’s introduction to his Doctor again. And we have a full set of regenerations now, if you care about that sort of thing. Just about the only thing it isn’t, really, is a satisfying ending to the Eighth Doctor Era.
It tries, and that is a real part of its charm. I mean, one is pretty much sure Moffat included the litany of Big Finish companions as an acknowledgment of the Eighth Doctor Era – you know, that messy, historical thing that actually happened. The one with a giant bone thing in the sky, and he’s traveling with a fish, and there’s that girl from Jonathan Creek. Lego. They’re all made out of fucking Lego. Moffat probably even knew what would actually happen, which was that Big Finish fans immediately declared victory over the EDA fans, while the EDA fans sulkily pointed out that technically all this really disproved was the Vampire Science gap theory if those were the companions that first came to mind. 
But the fact that this even happened; that there were still, in 2013, people whose first reaction to this was to make a new move in a fifteen-year-old fandom spat or to somehow make it about Lawrence Miles, speaks volumes. And not even bad volumes. Honestly, the greatest tragedy for anyone who lived through the Eighth Doctor Era would have been if all the blood and pixels spilt had been in the name of a faith so fragile that it could be broke upon a seven minute YouTube video. We listened to Zagreus. We pretended to take Scream of the Shalka seriously. We even read Mad Dogs and Englishmen in public. Heal that, Sisterhood.
Actually, I think my favorite part was when anti-Moffat fans seized on the retcons this made to the Eighth Doctor era as evidence of Moffat’s malfeasance while openly admitting that they hadn’t read the books or listened to the audios. Not out of any sort of “fake geek” sentiment, but simply because I find the idea of blindly entering the Eighth Doctor era factionalizations just to find another front in the Moffat wars to be the most sublimely perfect execution of the Eighth Doctor Era ever. 
All of which is to say that the symbolic fate EIghth Doctor Era is a sublimely ridiculous thing to hang on an eight minute YouTube video. Even one that is, as this one is, intelligently and slyly constructed. The first half works by taking what is by this point a staple scene of the new series – the seduction of the new companion (and both Davies and Moffat always write it as a seduction) – and then twisting it into something altogether different as the usual “bigger on the inside” line becomes a source of utter horror and revulsion for Cass.
…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.10: Valar Morghulis

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister
The Lion, Jaime Lannister
The Direwolf, Caetlynn Stark 
Dragons of Qarth: Daenerys Targaryen
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of Qarth: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
The Direwolf, Robb Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Harrenhal: Arya Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell
The Burning Heart, Stannis Baratheon
The Burning Heart, Mellisandre
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
The episode is in parts. The first runs ten minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the opening image is of Tyrion’s eye. The second section is six minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion to Tywin Lannister. The third section is two minutes long; the transition is by employment, from Littlefinger to Roslyn. 
The second part is five minutes long, and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Roslyn to Jaime and Brienne getting out of a boat. It features the death of three unnamed Stark men, two quick, one not. 
The third is two minutes long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by dialogue, from Brienne saying she serves Lady Catelyn to Lady Catelyn. 
The fourth is four minutes long and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Robb storming out to the fires in the map room. 
The fifth is seven minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by image, from the fire that Stannis looks into to Theon’s fire. 
The sixth is four minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from the courtyard of Winterfell to Tyrion. 
The seventh is one minute long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by theme, from Shae’s vow to Tyrion to Robb and Talisa’s vows. 
The eighth is two minutes long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by hard cut, from Robb and Talisa to Daenerys, Jorah, and The Dothraki Who Isn’t Dead walking towards the House of the Undying.
The ninth is three minutes long and is set in the Riverlands outside Harrenhal. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys within the House of the Undying to an establishing shot of rocks and cliffs. 
The tenth is four minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by family, from Arya to Bran and Rickon Stark. It features the death of Maester Luwin, euthanized by Osha. 
The eleventh is one minute long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by image, from Winterfell burning to Daenerys’s torch. 
The twelfth is two minutes long and is set in King’s Landing.
…

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 7: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

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A satisfying and well-constructed end, although as predicted not my favorite of the series. In terms of what the episode does, it is largely in keeping with what has gone before; its only significant thematic addition is the actual Raven King, who, continuing in the weird fiction theme introduced last episode, is a non-speaking character who simply strolls across the landscape of the story, makes a few alterations for reasons that are entirely his own, and exits. It’s striking and bold, a jarringly small and uncanny role for something that’s been built since the series’s start, but in a way that feels deliberate and earned.
Similarly bracing in scope is the opening scene, in which, in a very real sense, England falls to the magicians. The Parliamentary proceedings do a good job of expressing the scale of transformation sweeping across England in the wake of Strange’s unleashing of English magic, although I wonder if the series as a whole wouldn’t have been improved by finding time (and more importantly money) to show some of the Northern uprisings directly instead of reading about them off of telegrams, just to give the story a sense of scale. There’s something odd about seeing the Battle of Waterloo but not the uprisings that destabilize the entire socio-political structure of England.
There’s also some decisions I quibble about in terms of pacing and structuring the ending, most obviously the sudden reappearance of Lascelles during the denouement proper, which feels like a somewhat awkward solution to the problem of figuring out how to give the character a climactic comeuppance whereby he appears much later in the climax than is actually warranted. As loathsome a toad as Lascelles is – and his murder of Drawlight and confrontation with Childermass are both wonderful scenes – having him drop back into the plot at the moment the attempt to summon the Raven King under the name “nameless slave” goes awry and summons Stephen Black instead feels clumsy. (Harness tries to lampshade this by having him then be casually and cruelly dispatched by the Gentleman, and it helps by making the story at least mindful of Lascelle’s profound irrelevance at this point, but it doesn’t solve the problem.)
But despite occasional missteps, there’s a wealth of masterpiece sequences here. The Strange/Norrell confrontation, with Norrell finally, pathetically begging Strange not to laugh at him is a particular highlight, at once surprising and firmly rooted in the characters. Similarly adept is the final scene, with Childermass delivering a near direct address to camera as he explains that Strange and Norrell have ascended to a mythic status within the material landscape of England, having already been revealed not as magicians but as a spell woven by the Raven King.
It’s worth noting that much of this ending is original to Harness; the broad strokes of Norrell and Strange rescuing Arabella but remaining trapped in the Black Tower are all from the book, but there are major changes. Perhaps the biggest change is the destruction of all magical books in England, including the last remaining copy of Strange’s, so that the rewritten (and unreadable) Vinculus is the only book of magic left.
…

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Saturday Waffling (July 25, 2015)

11

The Davison/Baker edits are continuing to come along nicely; I’m firmly in the midst of the extra essays, which are mostly going to end up being Colin Baker extra essays, just because I think that makes for a better book really.

The last Brief Treatise for the foreseeable will go up on Monday, and then “Name of the Doctor” on Tuesday. I’ve got the first sentence of my Hannibal/True Detective piece, but it’s not quite cohering yet. I know the broad strokes of what I want to say, but the shape is still proving elusive.

So, Super Nintendo Project for a bit after that. The next stretch of games, namely “those that came out in 1993,” will take us pretty much right up to Doctor Who Season Nine, at which point I’ll switch to that.

Unless the Patreon hits $325 by then. If it does, I’ll run something alongside S9 reviews. Maybe another stretch of Super Nintendo Project. Maybe something else.

Speaking of which, are there any topics that would get you to back the Patreon if you’re not already a backer? With Brief Treatise off the table for a bit, I’ve very much got a slot for a blog project open, as it were. I’m very much open to input on what to do, and if someone throws something intriguing out, I may well follow up on it.…

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Take the techniques that make it a masterwork and use them for changing the world. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Two: The Nine-Panel Grid, History and Superheroes)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen is defined by its intense formalism, and yet no rule within it ever goes entirely unbroken, including its most basic unit of form, the nine-panel grid.
Figure 837: The experimental panel layouts of Swamp Thing are a marked contrast
to the rigidity of Watchmen and its nine-panel grid. (From Saga of the Swamp Thing
#30, 1984)
As a page layout, it is an unusual one, especially for American comics. For one thing, the standard approach in American comics since the emergence of Neal Adams has been to break the strict grid with irregularly shaped panels that allow for dramatic emphasis. On Swamp Thing, for instance, Bissette and Totleben constantly create new layouts that blend trapazoidal panels, panels splayed diagonally across the page, and panels that cut into each other’s space. It’s as basic a technique for Swamp Thing as the nine-panel grid is for Watchmen. Gibbons completely foregoes this, consciously denying himself a tremendous swath of techniques typically used to draw emphasis to specific beats of the story.
Figure 838: Even when not working in a nine-panel
grid, Dave Gibbons’s style is tidy and straightforward.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and Tom
Ziuko, from Superman Annual 1985)
For another, the nine-panel grid means that there are a staggering number of panels per page. The first issue of Watchmen averages 7.5 panels per page. In contrast, Moore and Gibbons’s story for the 1985 Superman Annual, “For The Man Who Has Everything,” averages 5.7 panels, nearly two panels per page fewer. Similarly, in Swamp Thing #52, which came out the same month as Watchmen #1, Moore gives Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala an average of 4.7 panels per page. But in some ways the more revealing fact is that the highest panel count for a page of “For The Man Who Has Everything” is seven, and the highest for Swamp Thing #52 is six. An average page of Watchmen, in other words, has more panels than the most crowded page of most American comics. Of his past work, only V for Vendetta averages anything close to Watchmen’s dizzying panel count, and this can be explained at least in part by the fact that Warrior had a considerably larger page size than US comics. But even in British comics Moore’s panel count generally remained well below Watchmen’s level: Marvelman tended to be somewhere between six and seven panels per page on average, whereas Moore and Gibbons’s most beloved British collaboration, “Chrono-Cops,” averages six. But mere panel count is in many ways misleading. Out of the first issue’s twenty-six pages, nine are true nine-panel grids. More to the point, out of its 196 panels, 177 are 1/9th of a page or smaller. The standard unit of storytelling in Watchmen, in other words, is in effect the comics equivalent of a miniature – a two inch by three inch rectangle.
Figure 839: The one time in “For The Man Who Has Everything”
that Gibbons violates a panel border.
…

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