Eruditorum Press

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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 (May 26th, 2015)

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Uncanny Avengers: Ultron Forever #1

Not a week where being at the bottom of the list is a commentary on much beyond how good the list is. Ewing is going for raw silliness here, and the pleasure of this book is unabashedly in using the deep history of Marvel Comics to put together a plot that is at once a riff on Age of Ultron and firmly a celebration of the greater weirdness of Marvel comics. It’s fluffy, and I suspect $15 was a bit high for the entirety of this story, but it’s terribly fun.

The Infinity Gauntlet #1

Interesting, and a comic that introduces some characters you really hope will stick around past the crossover. I liked Duggan’s issue of The Black Vortex more than most of that arc, and was enthused to check him out on a riff on the first big Marvel story I ever read, but this doesn’t quite scratch that itch, and what’s introduced instead – a very nice riff on the idea of child heroes and responsibility – isn’t quite defined enough to grab me. Still, I’m apparently pulling this, and I may well forget to drop it. Worth checking out, but a book that has the misfortune of coming while I’m trying to pare my pulls.

Where Monsters Dwell #1

Garth Ennis being silly. He’s very good at this sort of comedy, but it’s a slender thing, and I kind of suspect I should drop it and add War Stories from Avatar.

Chew #49

A good issue, which is a good sign as we move into the last year of this book. The boil has long since gone off this for me, but I remain vaguely optimistic that it will stick the landing and not make me feel bad for pulling it for the last two years of its run. Quite liked Olive and Tony’s reunion. Olive is by some margin the best thing going in this book.

Old Man Logan #1

A Frank Miller riff, but in a nice, technical sense of playing with his sense of craft rather than his more overbearing aspects. I was kind of expecting the worst out of this book, as I find Sorrentino’s art, though moody, tough to follow, but it kept things going well, with a nice Western noir feel and a surprising level of Secret Wars meatiness. The final image is terribly promising.

Uber #25

A side trip that depends on a better memory of the overall state of play than I have, and thus something of a slender thing for me, but also the sort of worldbuilding whose existence is part of the point of Uber, a comic that’s obviously going to reward a reread when it’s done. Or possibly in two months when it takes a mid-run break prior to a big 2016 relaunch.

Providence #1

This is marketed as the Watchmen of H.P. Lovecraft, but to any Moore connoisseur it’s clearly intended to be the From Hell of Lovecraft, and like From Hell, it opens with a slow burn, with pieces put on the board according to a logic that is as of yet far from clear.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.01: The North Remembers

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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
The Lion, Jaime Lannister 
The Direwolves, Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen,
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
The Direwolf, Arya Stark
The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
Bears of the Wall: Jeor Mormont
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
The episode is in ten parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The opening image is of the Hound fighting another armored man. 
The second runs four minutes and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Cersei talking about the Starks to Bran. 
The third runs four minutes and is set in the Red Waste, east of the Dothraki Sea. The transition is by dialogue, from Bran and Osha talking about dragons to Daenerys and her dragons, and by red comet. 
The fourth runs six minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep, north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Daenerys Targaryen to Jon Snow, and by red comet.
The fifth runs seven minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by red comet. At the episode’s halfway point, Stannis is being crowned the Prince that Was Promised as he is reborn amidst salt and smoke in the creation of Lightbringer.
The sixth runs three minutes and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by image, from the flickering fire behind Melisandre to the fires in the Stark camp, and by dialogue, with both Robb Stark and Jaime Lannister being discussed at Stannis Baratheon’s small council meeting.
The seventh runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime Lannister to Tyrion. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion Lannister to Cersei. 
The eighth part runs five minutes and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Alton Lannister.
The ninth runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Catelyn Stark to Cersei walking into the throne room. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Cersei to prostitutes having sex, and by consequence, from Joffrey ordering the death of Robert Baratheon’s bastards to one being killed in the brothel.
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The Gift

26

State of Play

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

Lions of Meereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of Dorne: Jaime Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Meereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell
The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon and Mellisandre
The Ship, Davos Seaworth
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Stags of King’s Landing: Tommen Baratheon
Kraken of Winterfell: Reek
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Ramsey Bolton
Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth
Chains of Dorne: Bronn
Swords of Meereen: Dario Noharis
With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont.

Braavos is abandoned.

The episode is in twelve parts. The first is three minutes long and is set at the Wall. The opening image is of a horse.

The second is three minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by hard cut, from a reaction shot of Gilly to an establishing shot of the hall outside Sansa’s room.

The third is three minutes long and is set at the Wall. The transition is by image, from Brienne watching for a candle in the window to candles lit around Maester Aemon’s deathbed. It features the death of Aemon Targaryen, who dies of old age.

The fourth is four minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by image, from snow falling over Maester Aemon’s funeral pyre to snow falling on the battlements at Winterfell.

The fifth is four minutes long and is set on the road between Winterfell and the Wall. The transition is by image, of snow falling, and by dialogue, from Ramsey talking about Stannis in the winter to Stannis’s camp in the winter.

The sixth is six minutes long and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis to Gilly tending a fire.

The seventh is five minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Meereen. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Sam and Gilly having sex to slaves being marched. The other is two minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion to Daenerys and Dario in bed.

The eighth part is seven minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to an establishing shot of the Great Sept of Baelor. The second is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Oleanna talking about Margaery to Tommen and Cersei doing the same.

The ninth part is five minutes long and is in two sectionsl it is set in Dorne. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by family, from Cersei and Tommen to Jaime and Myrcella. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by image, from Jaime standing in front of a window to a window in the prison.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 23rd, 2015)

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Let’s see. Got the edits back on the first two seasons of Eruditorum 6. About 3-4000 words from the end of Book One of Last War in Albion. Logopolis books will finally go out Wednesday.

Several unrelated things kicking around that I’d love to find time for, but I’m not quite sure where that time would go right now.

“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” is still very much on my mind right now, and rather making moving on to A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.x a bit of a sour experience. I’d been going to roll out a new feature on the GoT reviews for the back half of the season in which I made next episode predictions, and was left in far too foul a mood after that episode to do it. But anyway, here’s predictions for “The Gift,” based on officially released HBO material and the books.

It looks like we have the Wall, Winterfell, Dorne, King’s Landing, and Meereen up this episode, but no Braavos.

The Wall: Probably where the episode’s title comes from. Jon Snow will commence the rescue mission of the Wildlings at Hardhome. Dissent in the ranks will continue. This looks straightforward.

King’s Landing: The arc here is clearly that Oleanna is going to throw Cersei in the path of the High Sparrow as well, with Lancel providing evidence of her crimes. Whether Oleanna will enact that plan this episode, or merely fail at talking Margery out out of jail is unclear. I’ll bet on her enacting it, though.

Winterfell The presence of snow and the repeated talk of “the snows starting” suggest we are going to do a variation of the plot in which Stannis gets bogged down in a snowstorm. But I think we’ll be in the early stages of that here. As for Sansa, my guess is that she’s going to be a functional prisoner, but that she’s going to get Theon to signal for Brienne. I hope this plot advances pretty far, obviously. It’s perfectly plausible that Ramsey is going to die this episode.

Dorne: Tricky, as Jaime’s presence now prevents most of the obvious plot arcs. I’ve seen speculation of Bronn being poisoned. Could happen. All we know for certain is that Jaime and Myrcella are going to have a chat. It’s entirely possible that’s all there will be; they’ve hardly been putting Dorne at the forefront of the plot, and there’s not necessarily a lot more to do with it either. Really all that’s guaranteed is a big Doran scene in the next four episodes.

Meereen: By far the hardest to predict. It wasn’t clear Daenerys was in it until some publicity photos emerged. All we have to go on is that Daenerys is in it, and a trailer shot of Tyrion (looks like indoors, but in theory could be on a ship). This could be a straight plate-spin. Obviously we’re building to a Tyrion/Jorah/Daenerys/Drogo collision, but as with Winterfell and Dorne, it’s very hard to tell how far we’ll go in this episode.…

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It’s All True (The Last War in Albion Part 97: Nightjar, Sinister Ducks)

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This is the ninth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore was particularly passionate about his handful of collaborations with Bryan Talbot. But his major effort at collaborating with Talbot, a strip to be called Nightjar and be published in Warrior, was never completed.

“The world must be warned about those ducks. It’s all true.” -Translucia Baboon, quoted by Neil Gaiman
Figure 776: The opening to Nightjar, unpublished for
twenty years. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Bryan
Talbot c. 1983, published in Yuggoth Cultures #1, 2003)
Nightjar ultimately became a casualty of Moore’s falling out with Dez Skinn, who, for his part, insists that he “was never very keen on Nightjar (hated the name) and Bryan was another slow – or busy – artist, so it would never have happened in Warrior.” Talbot ultimately only completed two and a half pages of the strip, with another page partially completed, but roughly twenty years after Talbot had started the page,  William Christensen at Avatar got in touch and asked if he still had the unfinished pages. Talbot did, and Christensen proceeded to commission Talbot to finish the strip, reprinting it along with the script and Moore’s letter to Talbot about the development of it in the first issue of the anthology Yuggoth Cultures, collecting various Moore obscurities with newly commissioned adaptations of some of his poems and song lyrics.
Figure 777: The seven villainous sorcerers
who killed Mirrigan’s father. (Written by
Alan Moore c. 1983, art by Bryan Talbot,
from “Nightjar” in Yuggoth Cultures #1, 2003)
The resulting strip is a straightforward thing – mainly a slab of exposition that starts with ten-year-old girl watching her father die, a death that Moore, in typically florid captions, describes as “a dirty death, stumbling and falling amidst the yellow grass and rusted pram wheels, eyes rolling, white foam flecked on blackening lips” as a man the audience is told is the Emperor of all the Birds is “murdered by sorcerers.” The strip then cuts eighteen years later as the girl, Mirrigan Demdyke, receives a lecture from her dying grandmother (memorably depicted by Talbot as an old woman with her eyes sewn shut), who explains that her father was not killed fairly under the rules of magic, as he was not killed by a single opponent, but by a cabal of seven sorcerers conspiring against him. Outraged by this travesty, Mirrigan swears that she will kill the seven, who are introduced at patient length by her grandfather, starting with “Hart Wentworth, whose soul is like a monstrous slug, crusted with sapphires, thrashing contentedly in the tarpit of his own vileness” and ending with Sir Eric Blason, the new Emperor of all the Birds, who Moore leaves relatively undescribed in the comic, but notes in the script is “a member of parliament” with “power on a level that drug-addled ninnies like you and I can scarcely conceive.” 
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Comics Reviews (May 20, 2015)

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Guardians of the Galaxy #27

I take it that this is the last issue before it goes on vacation for Secret Wars. In which case it’s a rushed, sloppy, and pointless issue that provides nothing like a satisfying stopping point and demonstrates the abject stupidity of wasting this book in a bad crossover during the lead-in.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #12

Love the opening section, which is another fantastic set of Bowie riffs. The subsequent sections kind of stall for time before eventually resolving into a neat cliffhanger. But very much a filler issue, I fear.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #14

I find that Ewing’s Loki stories tend to start slow for me and then work themselves out later in the plot, so I’m sure this will pick up for me, but I found almost every section dealing with Odin a bit of a drag. Part of this is just that I don’t much like Marvel’s Odin, but it’s also a place where the Secret Warsness of it doesn’t really hold together, as this book seems to be pursuing a different apocalypse than the rest of the Marvel Universe. Loki and Verity are always great though.

Daredevil #15.1

Not sure why an ending book needs a .1 issue, but as filler fluff goes, not bad. Unconvinced of the merit or necessity of the second story, but the first one is a solid Daredevil story. Oh, wait. We just had the TV series. That’s why there’s a .1 issue. In any case, fun.

Ultimate End #1

Interesting. This serves as the first bit of Secret Wars to show us Manhattan, and turns out to be a fairly integral chunk of the plot, at least on first inspection. Certainly there’s more 616 than I expected. And really, it’s nice to have a tie-in mini that would have been perfectly justifiable as an event in its own right.

Uncanny X-Men #34

Oh boy. I can’t wait for the next issue. When’s it coming out? Oh. October.

More seriously, good issue. Basically a Dazzler one-shot. There are not enough comics featuring Dazzler. Really impressed with Anka’s art too. Nice, clean storytelling. The denouement of Bendis’s X-Men run has been completely fucked by the release schedule, but it’s also been good stuff.

Trees #9

No concessions to accessibility. None. But it’s hard not to love its sheer lack of compromise. I’m not even sure I have a detailed opinion; lord knows I neither followed nor remember the first arc of Trees well enough to even quite pin down who the characters here are. And yet I enjoyed it, simply because looking at something this smart and well-done is pleasurable. Just as sitting down with it all when it’s done will be.

A-Force #1

Smart, accessible, and it has Miss America Chavez to boot. This is apparently not just a Secret Wars book, although its initial premise is very much grounded in that, and I have to admit, I’m excited for it. Excellent jumping on point, even if you’re not following the crossover.…

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Time’s Dead Flowers (Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Super Castlevania IV)

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The Super Nintendo Project is brought to you by my backers on Patreon.


Today we have a clash between two of the major companies of the NES era, Capcom and Konami, each with the 16-bit iterations of their classic platformer-horror franchises. We have talked fleetingly about the status of the platformer in the 16-bit era, but this seems an important point to expand on. The platformer is not a dead genre by any measure, but it is a genre that at this point exists primarily as a retro one. Its period of greatest cultural dominance was probably the 8-bit era, which, we ought recall, overlaps the 16-bit era by a solid few years. 
Although 3-D versions exist, the iconic version of the platformer is a side-scrolling action game that involves some measure of jumping among, well, platforms. Super Mario Bros. is fairly obviously the platformer with the most influence, and is probably single-handedly responsible for the genre’s reign. And as I suggested in a previous post, the 16-bit era is interesting in terms of platformers because it both contains several absolute zeniths of the form and is the era in which the genre’s terminal decline began and it lost its place as the predominant genre of video game. 
Mechanics are of course central to the platformer, a statement that can be made with more or less equal validity to most genres, but which comes to the fore in the platformer, since there’s relatively little variation in the basic “run, jump, and shoot” mechanics, such that the change tends to come in the particular control mechanisms for each of those tasks, with innovation coming in the form of small refinements to each of them. For instance, both Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts feature single-speed running, in contrast with the acceleration mechanic that defines the Mario series and that Sonic the Hedgehog stretched to its logical conclusion.
It is in jumping and shooting that Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts distinguish themselves, however. The former is not a particularly jumping-focused game. All platformers are at least somewhat jump-centric, but there has never been particular artistry to the Castlevania series when it comes to jumping. Simon’s jump has a defined arc with limited in-air course correction. It’s fairly meat and potatoes, as such things go.
Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, on the other hand, features a jump mechanic based on carefully defined restriction. Once Arthur jumps, there is nothing he can do to alter the course of that jump – he’s on a completely pre-determined trajectory that will end only when he collides with another object. This is the most limited form of jump – the one that Miyamoto abandoned from Donkey Kong when revamping his Italian plumber protagonist “Jumpman” into his more famous iteration. But complicating it is the fact that Arthur has a double jump so that, at any point during his first jump he can jump again. On the one hand, this makes the jump dramatically reworkable – your second jump can be an exact reversal of the first, in fact.
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Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

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I’m not rewatching that right now to write up the State of Play.

In and of itself, as a story element, it was justified. There was never anything that could plausibly keep Sansa safe from it, any more than there was anything that could have saved Ned from Joffrey. Given who Ramsey is, there was no other way for it to be played.

Except, of course, that this is a lie. There were an infinity of ways for that to be played. And they chose to do it this way. They chose specific alterations to the books that made this inevitable, and so it happened.

Yes, those decisions, as we’ve discussed in previous reviews, are a dramatically intelligent way to handle the particular relationship of plot threads that the show had. And it is of course not the end of Sansa’s story. I have little doubt that five weeks from now Sansa will be in a very different place. Honestly, I suspect that in one week Sansa will be in a very different place. With reasonable fealty to the tone of the books and a little help from Brienne they could have Ramsey dead by the end of the next episode.

In that regard, at least, I disagree with a lot of the instant reaction I’m seeing. I don’t think this undoes Sansa’s growth. I don’t think it undermines her as a character. I expect her to react and react strongly next episode.

Nevertheless, Benioff and Weiss decided to leave their audience on that note for a week. They decided that image was where to end, and what to make people linger on. Inasmuch as Game of Thrones is a ten week long event, the brutal rape of Sansa Stark is 10% of it.

And if you want to argue that it’s not rape, fuck off. We’re not even doing that.

It seems perversely necessary at this point to say that it was a very tasteful rape of Sansa Stark. I mean, especially for HBO. So, you know, it’s just close-ups of the traumatized faces of Sophie Turner and Alfie Allen. And hey, they kill it. Great work, guys. Everyone did great, really. It’s a fantastically upsetting scene. Benioff and Weiss must have been so happy when the edit came in.

And hey, that’s the Mad Men finale counterprogrammed. Way to seize control of the headlines. A real fucking coup, that one. Congratulations, Benioff and Weiss. So very clever of you. You figured out how to rape Sansa Stark perfectly. It’s a triumph of… whatever the fuck it is.

At last, the justification for Theon’s Season Three plot? The perfect scene for the Buzzfeed era of media criticism, ready-made for every clickbaity slide-show of the most horrific moments in television? A horribly successful attempt to outdo the Red Wedding for the most shocking cliffhanger of the season? A petulant response to the outcry over Jaime raping Cersei last season – “shut up SJWs, this is what a rape scene looks like”?…

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Talons of the Old World (The Last War in Albion Part 96: Writing for Comics)

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This is the eighth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore’s early minor and marginal works in the American market were largely in small indie publications, in reflection of his ideological preferences. 

“There’s not much left of tomorrow. The wind from tomorrow is scouring her away. The talons of the old world are reaching up out of the dirt for her ankles. She can barely remember what hope and peace felt like. She dreams of those infinite childhood Augusts when she didn’t know anything and nothing was coming, and wakes up with cold in her bones.” – Warren Ellis, Injection

Figure 729: Captain Airship One electrocutes
Winston Jr. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Chris Brasted and SMS Quill, from Captain
Airstrip One in Mad Dog #10, 1985)
But it was in the British scene that Moore took this ideological preference to its logical extreme, contributing several works to publications that came out of the fan scene as opposed to from professional publishers. Of course, just like the American comics industry, the line between these two categories was in many ways porous, a fact illustrated by Moore’s year spent doing fanzine reviews and write-ups of conventions for Marvel UK, primarily in The Daredevils. And indeed, one of his fanzine contributions, a five page comic for the magazine Mad Dog entitled “Captain Airstrip One,” rather neatly bridges the gap between Moore’s talking about fanzines and participating them. The comic expands upon the eponymous Captain Airstrip One, who is Moore and Davis’s creations for Marvel UK, the alternate-universe Captain Britain of a world based on George Orwell’s 1984. The strip is a humor strip largely structured like what Moore called his “list” stories for 2000 AD – a fairly linear exploration of the humor implicit in the idea of an Orwellian superhero – for instance, having him crash through a window to help deal with little Winston Jr.’s propensity for smut-think by electrocuting him to death. But for all its disposability – the strip is firmly an amateur production – it adds a useful point to the larger tapestry of Moore’s Captain Britain work, affirming his inherent suspicion of the basic idea of a Captain Britain by demonstrating directly that the archetype need not be considered in the least bit heroic.
Figure 730: Moore’s contribution to Moonstone.
(From Fantasy Advertiser #77, 1983)
Elsewhere, Moore contributed the script for the final installment of Moonstone, an ongoing superhero sci-fi story in the fanzine Fantasy Advertiser, to which he also contributed a lengthy four-part essay entitled “Writing for Comics,” an essay worth looking at in some detail simply because of the level of direct insight it provides into Moore’s general approach to comics at what can fairly be called the zenith of his early career.
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