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:

Hardhome

9

State of Play

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

Lions of Mereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandei
Coins of Braavos: No one
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear of Mereen, Jorah Mormont

Dorne is abandoned.

The episode is in eight parts. The first is five minutes long and is set in Mereen. The opening image is an overhead shot of Daenerys’s throne room.

The second is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei Lannister.

The third is five minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by very hard cut, from Cersei screaming to Arya’s impassive face, accented by a sharply dissonant chord.

The fourth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from the unnamed girl in the House of Black and White to Cersei’s cell door.

The fifth is four minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Winterfell. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by theme, from Cersei to Sansa, both prisoners. The second is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Theon talking about Ramsey to Ramsey.

The sixth part is six minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Mereen. The first section is five minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Ramsey to Theon and Daenerys sitting and drinking. The other is one minute long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a rack of weapons.

The seventh part is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Jorah to a spoon.

The last is thirty-one minutes long is in two sections; it is set at and north of the Wall. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by image, from Cersei licking water from a small puddle on the floor to a bowl. The other is twenty-eight minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sam saying that Jon always comes back to Jon. The final image is an establishing shot of Hardhome fallen to the dead.

Review

The telling moment actually comes in the little “Inside Game of Thrones” thing they do at the end of the episode, where Benioff and Weiss pat themselves on the back for how Hardhome isn’t in the books. That’s true, and the episode is built to milk it, with the looming realization that there’s a big action sequence coming played as an almost decadently long moment of dread.

There’s a real structural cleverness to this. It’s the first “big moment” episode we’ve had; a half-episode one, in the tradition of “The Lion and the Rose” or “The Laws of Gods and Men,” as opposed to a “Blackwater” or a “The Watchers on the Wall,” but nevertheless an episode that is primarily about one thing.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 30th, 2015)

13

First of all, the Perdido Street Station post is going to be in June. I foolishly didn’t look at the length of the book before planning my reading for the month, and am only halfway through. Will go back to reading after I schedule this though.

Hoping to clear time to look at the Hugo Packet a bit, if only to get a broader sense of the Puppies. My interview with Day/Beale isn’t quite nailed down yet, but it’s getting close. (He’s still rereading Wasp Factory, which is the main delay. I, in what was in hindsight the wrong call, reread it prior to Seveneves, putting Perdido Street Station after that.)

But for those who have read the Hugo packet, how are things in it? What are your ballots, if you’re not voting No Award in all categories (or if you’re ranking things below No Award, as I am planning to do with the non-Puppy choices, after perusing the Puppy choices to see if there are any surprises there.

Other than that, I’ve wrapped up the Davison revisions and started in on Colin Baker. Friday’s Last War in Albion is a big one. And there’s my first stab at original fiction in years up for people backing the Patreon at $5 or more. See you tomorrow night for Hardhome.…

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The City’s Burdened, Swollen Heart (The Last War in Albion Part 98: The Unprivileged)

, 8

This is the tenth 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: Several thousand words were spilled upon the subject of Alan Moore’s minor works, culminating with remarks on his two contributions to Fantagraphics’ anthology Honk. The first of these was a piece entitled “Globetrotting for Agoraphobics,” with illustrations from Eddie Campbell.

“Outside the horses walk on cobbles, ringing in the city’s burdened, swollen heart. Cars follow and then more cars; cyclone flow of noise and fume and coloured steel. The factories are born, thrive briefly, turn to husks as the hand lettered signs above the shops give way to corporate logo.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul
Figure 783: Moore’s family as depicted by Peter Bagge.
Moore’s other contribution to Honk is a reprint of a piece earlier published by Knockabout Comics, originally with illustrations by Savage Pencil, although the Honk version was illustrated by Peter Bagge. Entitled “Brasso with Rosie,” the piece is one of the few, and by some margin the earliest openly autobiographical piece that Moore has written. It is, to be sure, an exaggerated and at least partially fictionalized piece – Moore’s claim that an elderly relative of his was once “totally immobilized when a thoughtless spouse decided to hang mirrors upon either side of the tiny, damp-scented room in which he customarily sat, presenting the luckless dotard with an infinite succession of doppelgangers arrayed to either side of him,” leading him to believe that he had “been granted some form of X-ray vision, enabling him to see through the peeling walls and into the identical living rooms of his neighbors,” and that “he remained like this for twenty years” is, for example, surely overstating the case by at least half a decade. But underneath the comedic exaggeration is a sardonic and vivid account of the texture of Moore’s childhood, featuring no shortage of details that Moore would go on to revisit in later works, such as his claim that “while it was true that before I was ten years old I had been hung from a tree by my wrists, whipped with barbed wire and buried alive by my schoolchums, there were also moving and poignant memories that I shall carry with me forever,” an account he would eventually revisit in his magical working The Birth Caul. Indeed, “Brasso with Rosie” discusses birth cauls in the context of his grandmother’s “elaborate and obsessive system of Juju and Counter-Juju,” claiming here that she in fact had an “extensive collection” of them that was discovered after her death, as opposed to, in his later account, simply having his mother’s caul.
…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Marcelo Camargo

, 16

This post exists because my Patreon crossed the $310 mark. It’s currently at $318.50, exactly $6.50 away from another bonus post like this on “Night of the Doctor,” which will otherwise wait until the McGann/Eccleston book to be written. You can pledge to help make that happen here.

To recap, in early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured, and that scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight had leaked. A few days later it became clear that the leak was worse than it had initially appeared as a workprint of Deep Breath also appeared on torrent sites, followed, over the course of the next month and a half, by workprints of Into the Dalek, Robot of Sherwood, Listen, and Time Heist. The files had been prepared for a Brazil-based subtitling company called Drei Marc, and specifically for a gentleman named Marcelo Camargo who, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the leak itself, became the name most associated with it.
 
The first thing to say is both obvious and controversial: it was fine. For all the talk of the leak being “embarrassing” for both Doctor Who and the BBC, there were no meaningful negative consequences. All five leaked episodes performed just fine, both critically and in the ratings. Just like the leak of Rose didn’t hurt anything (and indeed probably helped the series, as the diehard fans hashed out all their arguments over it in advance). Indeed, the truth is that it’s tough to think of any instance where a pre-release leak to torrent sites actually caused any damage. It’s to the point where it’s widely believed that the recent leak of the Supergirl pilot was deliberate on CBS’s part. 
 
No, that’s not the same as saying that leaks can’t hurt shows. Certainly it helps that the five leaked episodes were actually good. It’s hard to hurt good material by letting people see it. Had Capaldi completely bombed in the part such that the buzz around the screener copies was negative it would have been a very different situation. But these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and dodgy musical cues their basic quality was evident.
 
And yes, I suppose at this point I may as well admit that I watched them at the time, especially as Moffat has admitted that he would have watched them. I don’t mean this revelation to indicate some larger ethical principle, to be clear. I just couldn’t resist. My wife and I were nearly a year into a running joke of saying “guess what” with the answer being a very emphatic and happy “Peter Capaldi,” with every syllable emphasized. I was dying to see the new Doctor. So I caved. Lasted a solid week or two after Deep Breath leaked, and avoided the scripts entirely, as what I was interested in was the performance, not the plot, but I caved eventually.
…

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Comics Reviews (May 26th, 2015)

3

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

4

Brought to you by my backers on Patreon.

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)

10

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)

, 30

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)

1

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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