pop between realities

It is in some ways difficult to quite articulate why Neil Gaiman is good. Clearly he is. Even if I wasn’t fond of his writing, and I am, I’m not the sort of critic who is going to try to reject the volume of acclaim that Gaiman’s work has gathered. (Heck, I’ve contributed to it.) But despite all of this it’s maddeningly difficult to figure out what it is about him that makes him so substantial and important.

He is not so much the first of the British Invasion comics writers as he is the middle of them. The forefather, Alan Moore, had made the jump to DC some years before. His arrival coincided with Jamie Delano’s and Grant Morrison’s, with a later wave still to come consisting of Peter Milligan, Garth Ennis, and, finally, Warren Ellis and Mark Millar whose British careers didn’t even start until after Gaiman had broken out in the US. In this regard he is, by and large, typical of the style. He’s probably the most successful of them, although Millar’s savvy in making creator-owned comics with the intention of having them turned into films needs some acknowledgment, and Grant Morrison seems perpetually on the brink of some film breakout or another. But much of this comes down to his skill at the business of writing – Gaiman is adept at working different media and at catering to a loyal fanbase. (Indeed, I’d argue that very little of what he’s written since American Gods has been as good as the highlights of his pre-American Gods career, largely because after the success of American Gods he started writing primarily for his built-in audience and not pushing himself)

Much of what constitutes Gaiman’s style is borrowed from Alan Moore, and the comparison does Gaiman few favors. Moore’s work is more complex and enlivening, and almost any time they’ve shared the same genre and approach I’d argue that Gaiman comes off as the poor imitation, turning out a slightly more populist version of the same techniques. But even here the line of argument contorts oddly. Yes, Gaiman comes off as the Alan Moore protege that he, as a matter of empirical fact, is. But on the other hand, some of Gaiman’s early work, most particularly his first collaboration with Dave McKean, Violent Cases, prefigures Moore’s work in the 90s just as much as Swamp Thing prefigures Sandman.

A cynical approach would suggest that Gaiman’s major innovation was his realization that goths and geeks had a significant overlap that nobody was marketing adequately too. Indeed, even a less cynical approach might acknowledge this – it’s something that Doctor Who was sniffing the edges of in the latter days of the Cartmel era – as a significant move. Indeed, there’s a book to be written about the transformation of geek culture in the early 1990s, and though the episodes themselves had too small an audience to be a major part of that, the Cartmel era was certainly in step with it.…

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There are two main ways into cyberpunk, and which one you pick is terribly important to how the genre looks to you. The first option is to go via Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 novel. This is not the first cyberpunk work – the term had been coined a year earlier by Bruce Bethke, and had been around unnamed for a few years previous, including in other works by William Gibson. But it is in many ways the definitive one, where it broke out into the mainstream. A year later we had Max Headroom, which we’ve already talked about.

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There are several angles from which to approach Star Trek: The Next Generation in terms of Doctor Who. Most of them entangle themselves in a sort of anxiety of influence, either picking over the ways in which Star Trek and Doctor Who’s histories are intertwined or stomping their feet adamantly over the ways in which they are fundamentally different. I think the more interesting relationship, staring from a post-2009 vantage point, is one based far more on material conditions of broadcast and production. But let’s deal with what everyone else is interested in first.

As I noted when last we talked about Star Trek, at the time they were both being made in the 1960s the extent of influence the two shows had on each other was “none whatsoever.” Short of elaborate theories, it’s just not possible to posit that anyone involved in one show had even heard of the other, little yet seen enough to be influenced.

Come the 1970s, though, when Star Trek was off the air, it began having considerable influence on Doctor Who. The obvious one is the roundel in the Season Fourteen control room, but the larger influences come in the Pertwee era. Under Letts and Dicks the show never became a Star Trek clone, but it nevertheless existed in what was clearly a post-Trek era of science fiction. Colony in Space, The Mutants, Frontier in Space, and the two Peladon stories all clearly existed in a world that presupposed a human-dominated Galactic government with at least some degree of colonial leanings. Being written in a country that had experience in colonialism instead of longing for it, Pertwee-era flirtations with Star Trek’s themes were always short on the military pageantry and longer on a political messiness, particularly when Malcolm Hulke was involved. Star Trek, in all of its incarnations, is terribly fond of being Master and Commander or Horatio Hornblower in space, whereas Doctor Who, when it’s intersected those tropes, has tended to take a less reverential approach (c.f. The Pirate Planet and The Space Pirates, or Beryl Reid in Earthshock), and, more to the point, has never been prone to collapsing space imperialism and the Hornblower aesthetic into being one thing.

On the other hand, there is something to say about the UNIT crew having some Star Trek influences. Certainly there’s something to the fact that Doctor Who introduced a regular set of military characters in the immediate wake of Star Trek airing in its timeslot during the off season. But again, what stands out is the sardonic quality of the influence. Star Trek unfailingly saw Captain Kirk as the pinnacle of American masculinity. The Brigadier, on the other hand, even though he represents a cultural ideal of masculinity just as much as Captain Kirk does, is less straightforwardly viewed as the best the world has to offer, not least because he’s continually shown up by a glam rock space messiah.

So while Star Trek was unquestionably an influence on Doctor Who, the influence was fairly diffuse.…

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In 1989 Doctor Who ended and Steven Moffat’s writing career began. This latter event provides a bookend for Doctor Who’s 25th season, propped up on the other end by The KLF/The JAMs/The Timelords hitting number one with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” all of its explorations of the program’s history suspended arbitrarily between these two events.

1989 is a conceptual oddity for me – a year zero in every sense of the term. It is the first year I have any associations with – the first one in which I was aware of the calendar as a force unto itself. There is no visible reason for this. It was the end of first grade and the beginning of second, and in that regard a transition from something of an idyllic year in my childhood to something rougher and more uncertain. But those are school years – a calendar that my life has always been well attuned to, but a separate one from the calendar. I am aware that 1989 existed, that it is the first year I have any memory of as a year, but it is an empty signifier, carrying weight but no content.

I was too young to grasp the nature of the fall of Communism, although it is in some ways difficult to imagine that I was completely insulated from them. We learn our eschatologies young, and they are always imminent. A shift in the nature of the end of the world such as the winding down of the Cold War would have been noticed, if not understood. But I remember the end of the year, at my grandparents’ house outside of Dallas, realizing that the calendar marked something significant this time.

I was unaware that less than a month earlier Doctor Who had ended. Or, for that matter, that twenty-six years earlier it had begun. Still, my grandparents’ house carries some significance in this regard. Their PBS station was showing Doctor Who late, and my first copies of the Colin Baker and early Sylvester McCoy stories came from them. The first time I ever watched Doctor Who transmitting, on a television screen, was Time and the Rani (oh well) at their house. I read the novelization of Survival there. Their local Blockbuster had videos of stories I’d never seen – it was where I first watched The Web Planet and The Mind Robber. More broadly, on long and somewhat boring summers there I would get books on tape out of their local library, marathoning Douglas Adams books. There’s a beautiful, formal neatness to the association I have between this place and 1989, marred only by the fact that it is a complete reconstruction after the fact.

But that’s my paternal grandparents all over. Living as they did in Texas they were always the side of the family I felt some distance from. It was my mother’s side of the family – largely my grandmother’s, specifically – that I knew. New York Italians. My maternal grandfather was Irish, though his family was an absent presence – he’d had to leave home very young because of the intense poverty he grew up in, and I never got to know any of his relatives well.…

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I always knew there would be an Alan Moore entry around here. I wasn’t completely certain where – it could have gone at the start of the Cartmel era, but it was always probably going to go right here, before the “canonical” Cartmel era begins. No, the hard question was what I was going to pick. I mean, one of these years I’m going to get around to doing the book I want to write on Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Which means I really don’t want to do a general “Alan Moore” post here. Which left me having to choose among The Ballad of Halo Jones (which Cartmel apparently handed to anyone coming on to write for Doctor Who), V for Vendetta (for the anarchism), Swamp Thing, or perhaps Watchmen (for their revampings of past characters). All would be perfectly reasonable choices for the time period. But Halo Jones felt too close to the 2000 AD post I’d already done. V for Vendetta felt too oversignified and not quite relevant enough to Doctor Who. Swamp Thing and Watchmen felt too American.

No, the one I had to pick, in the end, was Marvelman. Or Miracleman, if you must – that was, admittedly, how the tail end of the comic was published due to some rights issues. But really, the heck with those rights issues, especially since they’re all anyone ever talks about – both the renaming from Marvelman to Miracleman and, more substantively, the legal cases that have surrounded the character for twenty years now preventing anyone from  finishing the series.

But that’s not what’s interesting about the series for our purposes. For our purposes it’s more interesting to note that both Alan Moore’s Marvelman run and Doctor Who wrapped up the same month in 1989. That while Moore’s Marvelman run began earlier – he came onto the character in 1982 years – this is, nevertheless, the closest equivalent to Cartmel-era Doctor Who in Alan Moore’s oeuvre. Both are cases of taking a largely discredited sci-fi institution of the past and getting it to work in the 1980s. Marvelman is a bit older – his original run was 1954-63 – but both come out of post-war utopianism of one sort or another.

But more than that, and here I’ll briefly delve into the rights issue I suppose, there’s an obscurity to it. Alan Moore and Doctor Who are both, in 2012, recognized as grand British institutions, albeit strange ones. But the Cartmel era, well-regarded as it is, remains an obscure stretch of Doctor Who in many ways. I’ve not perused detailed figures, but between home releases on VHS and DVD and platforms like Netflix it would not surprise me if something like Curse of Fenric had been seen by more people looking to understand Doctor Who’s past than who saw it on first transmission – something that is tremendously unlikely to be true of the hits of the Pertwee or Tom Baker years, for instance.

Marvelman, meanwhile, is the most obscure of the consensus Alan Moore 1980s masterpieces.…

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There’s a shift between the early and late 1980s that is difficult to articulate, but nevertheless clear. The cultural moment of the late 80s – one that, in practice, extends a few years into the 90s – is clearly a vibrant one. Swaths of really good bands release career high albums in this period, the much-feted British Inavsion of Comics hits high gear, you’ve got the Second Summer of Love, and, for good measure, Doctor Who has a creative renaissance.

Knights of God, which ran in 1987, airing the day before the episodes of Season 24 of Doctor Who, is clearly a part of this era. Which is interesting, as it was held back by two years and actually belongs to 1985, a very different era of television. And yet the delay is in many ways absolutely perfect – a case of something that would have been a few years ahead of its time instead ending up being an iconic example of its time.

Throughout the Baker era one of the running defenses we could fine was that it’s not entirely clear what Doctor Who should have been in the context of television of that period. Starting, well, not quite next story, but definitely the one after, Doctor Who starts to figure this out. And the solution it comes up with is very similar to the one that Knights of God turned out to have come up with two years previously.

Last time we focused on children’s television we noted that there was an awkward gulf confronting Doctor Who between its children’s television tradition and the considerably darker and edgier tradition that serious-minded science fiction was taking. The question left hanging was how to mix the aggressive and dark weirdness of something like Max Headroom with the traditional structure of children’s television.

It’s worth reflecting, though, on what the nature of this tension is. It’s not, obviously, that children’s television can’t be dark. Indeed, for the most part good children’s television is defined by an aggressive darkness. Rather, it’s that in the end children’s television tends to be about making the bewildering understandable, which means that while estrangement might be a tool along the way – indeed, a very important tool – it’s rarely the endpoint.

The troubling bit is that so much of the energy of this cultural moment comes from estrangement. It’s a cultural moment based on new, often more cynical takes on the epics of the past, and on disillusionment and alienation. The ostentatious and gaudy approaches of the earlier 1980s gave way to an angry depression – a situation that only increased come Thatcher’s third election in 1987. So children’s television’s had a real problem at this point, especially children’s television that wanted to deal with science fiction at all.

Enter Knights of God. On the one hand, it’s a searing, angry dystopia positing a fascist futuristic Britain in which the north and Wales have been brutally subjugated by the eponymous Knights of God. It’s not the sort of actively weird  estrangement of, say, Max Headroom, but it’s a vividly unsettling milieu.…

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