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Elizabeth Sandifer

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.

13 Comments

  1. Tim B.
    May 26, 2016 @ 6:30 am

    DC Universe Rebirth is certainly a comic. Having managed to stay spoiler-free from the weekend (foolishly I had no interest in finding out the Joker’s real name, turns out I was Wrongy Mcwrongface on that idea…) ‘What the fuck’ was my reaction to the reveal. The story itself had the usual Johns issues with obviousness and the poster at the end seems to be saying that the DC heroes are their own worst enemies.

    Find it galling that the architect of the New 52 relaunch is a hostile action from Dr Manhattan who represents cynicism and the DCU represents optimism, especially given that they use visuals in the epilogue relate to the conversation on Mars that is an explicit rejection of cynical determinism. Nice that Warner Brothers get to pay someone hansomely to work through their daddy issues and trolling the person responsible for their success for the past 30 years.

    Would have been more honest if the smiley badge had ‘ © DC Comics’ on the edge just for that extra fuck you to Moore as a reminder of the material object that was a literal emblem to his split.

    Whilst I’m puzzled to see how this particular car crash works out, this along with the double-shipping trick their playing means I won’t be getting any DC apart from the second half of the Prez series, which I believe is scheduled for November (although I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets quietly shelved)

    Reply

    • Tom B
      May 26, 2016 @ 8:13 pm

      It reads slightly better if you pretend that it’s an “Earth 3” equivalent of Moore’s Watchmen universe and that it’s an evil subpar version of Dr Manhattan who did this. It’s still not a good idea trying to assign the “negativity” to him, though. If they had really wanted to go with hope vs cynical determinism, they’d have been better off tying in with Planetary and the New 52 Earth be an experiment of Randall Dowling’s, possibly the Plenet Fiction that was done in one story. But, they seem to want to avoid Planetary (probably fortunately) while still wanting to plunder Watchmen.

      Reply

      • Tim B.
        May 26, 2016 @ 9:30 pm

        another way of getting it to read better is if you view white Wally West as the obvious surrogate for Johns he is & judiciously add ‘it was a nasty, nasty beardy man from Northampton’s fault’ and the end of his dialogue boxes, particularly on page 13 the chapter 1:Lost.

        Reply

  2. Chris C
    May 26, 2016 @ 8:27 am

    The fact that there are people who read Rebirth #1 and cried tears of joy at certain points embodies everything I hope I will never understand about cape comics.

    Reply

  3. Best essay writing service
    May 26, 2016 @ 10:02 am

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    Reply

    • mr_mond
      May 26, 2016 @ 12:28 pm

      I, too, found the poop emoji to be captivating.

      Reply

    • John Seavey
      May 26, 2016 @ 11:28 pm

      This needs to start appearing at the top of the page along with the other blog slogan. “Mind boggling instructional action”.

      Reply

  4. Jarl
    May 26, 2016 @ 2:45 pm

    Emojis don’t render on my browser. They never have. I wonder what the deal is…

    Reply

    • Jarl
      May 26, 2016 @ 3:02 pm

      Got it fixed, had to download a font to get it working but hey, there it is.

      “Under people skills, she drew a… I think it’s a little poop. With knives sticking out of it.”

      Reply

  5. Daibhid C
    June 2, 2016 @ 2:05 pm

    If you’d told me when the New 52 started “In four years, DC will bring back Wally West and Ted Kord, and you’ll hate it”, I’d have … well, actually I’d have thought that sounded like something they could do, yes.

    Like Tim B., what gets me is the sheer hypocrisy of Geoff freakin’ Johns criticising the New 52 for being cynical and loveless, and then tossing the blame onto someone else’s characters. Well, that and declaring the new Kid Flash isn’t the “real” Wally West before he’s even become Kid Flash.

    Reply

  6. Doctor Memory
    June 7, 2016 @ 12:10 pm

    Being a lover of a good trainwreck, plus having always had a soft spot in my heart for DC’s deliberately reader-hostile style of continuity wanking, I picked up Rebirth #1 via comixology. I mean, it couldn’t be that bad, could it…?

    Uh, holy crap. A poop emoji may have been generous. This Geoff Johns person… he’s is a professional writer? Who committed a terrible crime in his past and is being blackmailed by various executives at Warner Media to do their bidding and is rebelling by doing it in as deliberately off-putting and incompetent a way as possible? I’m reaching here: there has to be some explanation for this other than a colossal failure of judgement at every step of the way: otherwise why in the name of god would you open your “event comic” with a 9-panel allusion to Watchmen and then spend the next three hundred pages (I may have lost track) on “Wally West runs around and yells at people who don’t recognize him that something is wrong”?! It’s like Johns is literally saying “yeah, Moore’s formal innovations were…actually they were dumb, and what Watchmen needed was more shouty cape people.”

    For neither the first time nor I am sure the last, I found myself thinking that the best possible thing that could have happened to DC’s characters would have been for Warner to license them to Marvel as they were planning to back in the 80s.

    Reply

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