We Apologize For the Delay
Last War in Albion will post tomorrow in lieu of Saturday Waffling. Lunch and I had a bit of a disagreement yesterday, and I forgot to get it queued up in the general muddle.…
Elizabeth Sandifer
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Comics Reviews (May 13th, 2015)
From worst to best of what I bought.
Thor #8
The odds that this was going to win me back in the final issue were low, and sure enough, it didn’t. It’s as I complained with #7 – if it’s Solomon, it’s obvious, if it’s not, it’s a cheap diversion. And by building it up as a mystery, Aaron opens space to not like the outcome. Which I don’t. At least, not compared to Solomon. Ros Solomon as Thor would be more interesting than Jane Foster is Thor, but being Thor makes her breast cancer worse, a setup that is mainly notable for making her expiration date and the restoration of Man-Thor inevitable. And I still don’t understand why anyone thought a mystery arc was the way to go. What was this supposed to accomplish? Why is this better than just debuting the concept eight months ago would have been? All in all, a disaster – will probably buy Thors, but can’t see myself returning post-Secret Wars.
Saga #28
Man, I’m cooling hard on this book. It’s good and I see all the very smart stuff it does and… I just don’t remember the characters or plot well enough month to month. Still, this is in with Chew and the other books of the Sunk Cost Fallacy club, and maybe one day I’ll dig up all the floppies and reread it and enjoy it. Or, more likely, I’ll torrent it even though I own it.
Darth Vader #5
That this is third from bottom is a mark of how good a week this is. I’m not entirely convinced of the plot twist, which, for me, runs into the axiomatic problem of a licensed comic like this, namely that it’s introducing better ideas than anything in the source material, but it’s going to have to put all of them back in the box at story’s end. But equally, it’s an interesting and cool plot twist, and I’m perfectly happy to follow it.
Blackcross #3
As with many an Ellis book, this was a slow burn, and it finally gets to where it’s doing interesting things. Still far from my favorite Ellis work, but at least I’m not just buying it out of obligation now.
Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #6
Well this certainly kicked off very nicely. Love the final twist, and yeah, Gillen and Bennett have built Angela into a usable and interesting Marvel character, which is no small feat. Curious where this will go as Gillen recedes into the background and Bennett takes over, but definitely on for the ride.
Ms. Marvel #15
Exactly what this book is for, through and through. Really enjoyed this arc when all was said and done. Look forward to the next.
Secret Wars #2
OK, I’m won over, at least for now. The basic operating principles of Battleworld are clever, and this strikes an ideal balance between “it’s an alternate world” and “it’s the Marvel Universe. Good high concept stuff, and Hickman’s philosophical ramblings work well in this context.…
Any Old Idiot Can Be A Hero (Final Fantasy II)
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Video games came from Toy Works. At least, in the Super Nintendo era they did. It moved around; the Nintendo era was mostly Toys ‘R Us, at least in practical experience, which was down by the mall, and is still there. (That’s also the area where the Funcoland that fueled my late high school/early college retrogaming phase, a second childhood of NES and SNES.) But in the summer of 1990, we moved to Newtown when my mother left the corporate world to return to academia. That was the high summer of my Nintendo days – a gap between when we could occupy the two houses meant that my mother and I spent a month or two living with my maternal grandparents in Mahopac while my father did a road trip to attend a math conference in Wyoming. My mother, appreciating that I was going to be bored to tears living there, went on a NES game buying binge, and I basically spent the summer in my grandparents’ basement playing Nintendo.
Toy Works was in Sand Hill Plaza, in the south of Newtown, which I remember the construction of, and which must have, based on other memories, been in late 1990/early 1991. The store is long since closed, and there’s a store for baby stuff there now. Originally, the video game section was over in this corner of the store, with a demo NES where I got some of my only tastes of games like Punch-Out (my father disapproved of boxing as a sport, so this was never a game I was allowed). The demo unit is what I now know to be a Nintendo M82, although that wasn’t terminology that existed in my vocabulary or worldview of the time. At the time the floor was an industrial carpet in that section only, giving it the same black/red/grey livery of the NES itself.
By the Super Nintendo, though, the video game section had moved to about over here, although by this time there was plenty of competition in the mall as well, where stores like Software Etc., Electronique Boutique, and Babbages sold both computer games and console games. (Indeed, the historical reality may well be that I got most of my actual games from those stores and not Toy Works, but the Super Nintendo Project is not about historical reality nearly as much as it is about memory.) They’re all Gamestops now, though mostly in the same locations, as is the Funcoland by Toys R’ Us. There’s a Gamestop in Sand Hill Plaza too now, actually. I assume the white and pastel linoleum of Toy Works is still there under that wood floor; it was still there when Simply Baby and Kids moved in, a jarring fossil of my childhood.
This would have been where people bought Final Fantasy II. It wasn’t for me, though, as I never bought this game, although I did rent it. That would have happened in Stop & Shop, two doors down from Toy Works, and still there.
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Kill the Boy
Funded via my Patreon.
State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
The Lion, Tyrion Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Burning Hearts of the Wall: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth
Kraken of Winterfell: Reek
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Swords of Mereen: Dario Noharis
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandrei
Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear, Jorah Mormont
King’s Landing, Dorne, and Braavos are empty.
The episode is in parts. The first is five minutes long and is in sections; it is set in Mereen. The section is seconds long; the opening image is of the lamp flickering by Grey Worm’s bedside. The other is five minutes long; the transition is by image, from Missandrei watching over Grey Worm to Daenerys standing over Ser Barristan’s body.
The second part is nine minutes long and is set on the Wall. The transition is by family, from Daenerys Targaryen to Maester Aemon Targaryen and, subsequently, Jon Snow, and by dialogue, from Daenerys to Maester Aemon and Samwell talking about her.
The third is nineteen minutes long and is in sections; it is set in Winterfell. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is indirectly by family, from Jon Snow to Brienne watching Winterfell and musing about Sansa. The second is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Brienne talking about Sansa to Ramsey and Myranda doing the same. The third is fourteen minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, at last to Sansa herself.
The fourth part is seven minutes long and is set on the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Roose and Ramsey talking about Castle Black to Castle Black.
The fifth is five minutes long and is set in Mereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis’s armies riding south to Grey Worm.
The sixth is eight minutes long and is set in Valyria. The transition is by dialogue, from Daenerys in Mereen to Tyrion and Jorah talking about going to Mereen. The final image is of Jorah staring at his greyscale stricken arm.
Analysis
We are, at last, to the part of the season where Game of Thrones is finally freed up to do things that are interesting as opposed to necessary. A King’s Landing-free episode marks the point where we are finally, in a sense, free of the season’s opening, the first episode having been framed in terms of Cersei. This week the only Lannister is Tyrion, by now firmly enmeshed in Daenerys’s plot.
Without the South or Arya, we get an episode about the North – a thirty-five minute stretch of episode – with Daenerys wrapped around it. This structure also produces the most flagrant “Jon Snow is a Targaryen” acknowledgment yet as Maester Aemon talks about Daenerys being all alone in the world and the camera then pans to Jon entering the scene, which is absolutely hilarious.…
Saturday Waffling (May 9th, 2015)
In case you missed it, The Three Doctors commentary.
The Super Nintendo Project will be running on Tuesdays for the duration of Game of Thrones. Tomorrow’s review will be up as soon as I can get it, but it won’t be quite as fast as the first four I’m afraid. Relatedly, I’ll try to get to the Marcelo Camargo essay in the next couple weeks. Patreon is at $315 a week, $10 away from me writing the McGann/Eccleston book’s essay on “Night of the Doctor as a public blogpost in the next month or two.
Everything proceeds apace. There are too many things right now, and things are slipping through the cracks more than I’d like, but I should get the first set of pages of Volume 6 of TARDIS Eruditorum out to the editor today.
Absolutely gutted by the election results, of course. The polls gave so much false hope, and were so shockingly wrong. The size of the rightwing turn is so depressing; the policies proposed so self-evidently destructive and with such potentially devastating longterm consequences. Please go ahead and vent in comments. Or, if you’re a Tory, gloat, but let’s be honest, everyone’s gonna hate you for it.
…
The Word “Fuck” Typed Eight Thousand Times (The Last War in Albion Part 95: American Flagg)
This is the seventh 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.
Also, I’d like to apologize if I inadvertently persuaded anybody that because the early comics of Alan Moore were so good the UK should just go back to the Thatcher era. That was not the intended thesis statement of The Last War in Albion.
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote a large number of very minor works in his early years, generally in keeping with his primary creative goal of being able to feed his family.
“I want to see eight thousand words. Printable words. I still remember that essay you wrote when the Beast got elected. I do not want to see the word ‘fuck’ typed eight thousand times again.” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan
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| Figure 722: The first page of Alan Moore’s 1984 Batman text story. |
This vision is not some mere alternate history of a world where there never was a War, where Moore’s Scottish devil had no great master whose career he could illustrate, where a Hampshire journalist never gets a vital lesson in writing comic scripts, and where a boy from Essex and games journalist from Bath don’t have a comics industry waiting to receive the next British genius with open arms. Rather, it is a career that happened alongside the familiar narrative of Moore’s chain of successes from 1979 to 1986 – a career that consists of nothing more or less than the sum total of works that don’t fit into the tale of Moore’s relentless march to success, and even some, like much of his 2000 AD work, that do. Nor is it as though Moore’s American career brought an end to his time taking minor British gigs. Far from it, almost immediately after taking the Swamp Thing job, Moore found himself writing a humorous two-page text piece for the 1984 Superman Annual – not, to be clear, Superman Annual #10, which featured an Eliot Maggin/Curt Swan tale called “The Day the Cheering Stopped,” but a UK Superman annual in the same basic vein as the Dukes of Hazard annual he’d contributed to the year before. Moore’s piece, entitled “Protected Species,” is written in the form of a resignation letter by Graunch Quiglow, who is quitting his job capturing endangered alien species so that they can be kept safe by the Interstellar League of Gentlefolk Concerned About Endangered Wildlife following a disastrous attempt to “rescue” Superman. The next year he contributed another piece, “I Was Superman’s Double,” an extended narration by an unscrupulous cab driver about the day he was drafted in as a substitute Superman after the real one had a nervous breakdown (his passenger, “that Kent Clark guy” from The Daily Planet, is unimpressed), as well as a more serious piece for the 1985 Batman Annual entitled “The Gun.”
The Three Doctors Commentary
Jack Graham and I have struck again, this time with The Three Doctors. Technical difficulties did not stop us, although they did leave some strange noise artifacts on episode one to surprise you if you have the volume too loud, and a somewhat desperate attempt at the start of episode four to remember what we said the first time we tried commenting on it when I forgot to record it.
In any case, a zip file with all four mp3s is right here. Enjoy, and we’ll be back with The Ark in Space before too long I hope.
Previous commentaries:
Comics Reviews (May 6th, 2015)
The Amazing Spider-Man #18
The storyline that fills the gap between Spider-Verse and Secret Wars ends, having accomplished its primary aesthetic goal of taking up three issues.
Convergence: The Question #2
Unsurprisingly, this runs up pretty hard against the fact that it’s two issues and the characters in question are presumably being wiped out of existence soon, although I’m not actually following Convergence and have no actual idea what it’s about. Rucka is still a delight with these characters, and not having him on a DC street level book remains the biggest problem with DC other than being run by Dan Didio.
Uber #24
One of those issues that you describe as “transitional” if you liked it and “filler” if you didn’t. Transitional, then, and with a couple rare moments of humor for Uber. I think the next “everything explodes a lot” issue of this is going to be extraordinary.
Secret Wars #1
An issue that is in some ways rough for the dedicated comics fan who has been following the promotion and lead-up to this series, but is surely necessary for the 200,000 some-odd readers who weren’t following Avengers and New Avengers. The Ultimate/616 punch-up is fun, not least in terms of how it could easily have been eight issues in its own right and is instead energetically spent as a one-off plot. Mostly, I’m glad this rumbles on with a second issue next week, and I hope it finds itself feeling well under way instead of catching up to its solicits.
The Wicked & The Divine #10
Another transitional/filler issue from Gillen this week, though this one is more blatantly the suture between Urdr’s arrival and whatever horrible and upsetting plot twists are waiting in issue #11. (Which has, I suspect, the best cover of 2015.) It works and gets from point A to point B, and has some excellent moments in the process, but this is nevertheless a quiet month for the comic.
Crossed: Badlands #77
This one’s not transitional. Instead the series accelerates gamely. It’s getting increasingly hard to see how the two timelines are going to reintersect, although this is the point in the story where that really doesn’t need to be clear. But they’re both moving with terrible alacrity. My only complaint is that we’ve had three issues so fast, and #78 is apparently waiting for June, which is not great pacing.
Spider-Gwen #4
The third issue of this left me slightly cold, but it really roars back into form here, including an absolutely brilliant Aunt May/Gwen Stacy scene. Everything about this book continues to delight.
The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl #5
It has a cameo from T-Rex. You know. The star of Ryan North’s other comic. God I love Squirrel Girl.…
In Defense of Sucker Punch
A commissioned essay for Eric Rosenfield.
I will admit that I am not entirely sure how to go about constructing a defense of Sucker Punch. It seems to me a film that is its own defense . It’s intelligent, well-made, and has a clear and savage point to make – one that was important in 2011, and remains important today. Above all else, I recommend sitting down and watching it; the theatrical cut, specifically. (The extended cut has at least one change that is, to my mind, without doubt for the worse.) Certainly almost everyone I’ve pointed to has come away from the film broadly sharing my perspective on it. And yet there is a persistent vein of criticism against the film – one that seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand almost everything about it, and that is inexplicably common among people I wouldn’t normally expect such misreadings from. One of whom paid me rather a lot of money to set him straight.
All the same, defending the movie seems strange to me, simply because its critics seem to me, as I said, mostly to simply not accurately describe the film in the first place. So instead, perhaps, an explanation of Sucker Punch.
The author is of course dead, but it seems useful to start with Zack Snyder’s own comments on Sucker Punch, if only to shore up my claim that this is not some redemptive reading where I slyly read against the text, but blatantly and straightforwardly what the text is. Indeed, Snyder has talked about the way in which the film was misread, saying:
I honestly feel like a great majority of the time people just missed it — they missed the movie entirely. They missed the point of the movie. Like when I talk to people about “Sucker Punch,” they would say this is a hollow romp with these girls dressed like they’re from Frederick’s of Hollywood — and I’m like, really? You just need to watch the movie more carefully. But if zero percent of people said, it’s not a de-constructivist comment on pop culture, then I might go, you know what? I blew it.
He elaborates on this in several interviews, frequently returning to the question of the characters costumes:
Someone asked me, “Why did you dress the girls like that, in those provocative costumes?” And I said, “Well, think about it for a second. I didn’t dress those girls in the costume. The audience dressed those girls.” And when I say the audience, I mean the audience that comes to the movies. Just like the men who visit a brothel, [they] dress the girls when they go to see these shows as however they want to see them.
And, elsewhere:
…It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us.
Will You Even Tell Her if You Decide to Make the Sky Fall (SimCity, Populous, ActRaiser)
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| CREATE AND MANAGE A LIVING CITY |
The history of urban planning is ultimately one of control machines – of efforts to build spaces that will shape the lives and psyches of its inhabitants. Housing developments to sort and contain them, roads to dictate the ways in which they move through space, and lattices of utilities and infrastructure that transmute the abstract relationships of power that govern them into brutal physicality. It is the creative practice to which psychogeography is the criticism.
It is, of course, an illusion that the city is some sort of authored construct. Even moreso than the video game, where our convenient fiction of an auteur figure like “Will Wright” is in reality a mask worn by a team of developers and, in the case of a game like SimCity, a swath of teams responsible for the huge number of ports and versions. The iteration of SimCity that served as a launch title for the Super Nintendo is one of more than a dozen – it was a game that existed on the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Macintosh, the BBC Micro, and others, all taking the smear of psychic landscape attributed to Will Wright and adapting it to new forms, with varying degrees of success.
[In practice, this is one of the rare cases where the console port is a highlight, at least in one sense. Ported by Nintendo EAD, it not only has the charming detail of Bowser in place of the generic lizard monster disaster, and adds an interesting system of special buildings like casinos and libraries that can be built under certain circumstances. Though in the end, little can remove the basic problem that a Super Nintendo controller is an unsatisfying replacement for a mouse when it comes to this sort of game.]
The city, like the video game, is multi-authored, a teeming mass of viewpoints and visions. And this includes not merely the ostensible creators – the programmers and urban planners – but those who are shaped and interpolated by it, and whose interactions with it define it; a city without inhabitants is as barren as a game without players. But citizens and gamers are two very different things. The gamer cannot, in the end, change the game in ways beyond those strictly delineated for him. The citizen, on the other hand, has meaningful resistance as an option.
Ironically, the difference is one of escapability. The gamer can quit the game, whereas nothing the citizen does can ever render them no longer a citizen – even if they move to some other city, they are still a citizen of something that has far more similarities than differences to the original. But because citizenship is inescapable, it in turn cannot fully reject the dissident. Put another way, the city can bulldoze the crime-ridden slums and replace them with a row of gleaming stadiums, but the list of the biggest problems in the city and a non-zero disapproval rate are irreducible elements of its existence.…