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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.

9 Comments

  1. Carey
    June 26, 2015 @ 12:42 am

    Moore's influences extend beyond just comics for HaloJones Book 3. The sequence with Toy you mention toward the end of this part is hugely indebted to a sequence from All Quiet on the Western Front, although I don't know whether Moore took it from the film or novel.

    There's an interesting sidebar to any creative endeavour on War from the seventies onward, in that before this point almost anyone involved in the UK would have had direct experience, either in battle or at home, and this would make interesting creative decisions that would possibly be lost on the post war generation, Moore included. The most obvious one comes in the wake of Patrick Macnee's death yesterday where it was revealed that his character Steed in the Avengers never using a gun was his choice based upon his experiences from the Second World War.

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  2. Iain Coleman
    June 26, 2015 @ 1:00 am

    And of course the time dilation effect causing soldiers to return from the battlefield to a transformed society owes, let us say, a considerable debt to "The Forever War".

    Nonetheless, Moore turns these building blocks into an incredibly effective story, and one which I still vividly remember reading for the first time as it came out, when i was 13 years old. In particular, the whole sequence of Halo trying to make it in civvy street, her PTSD (including those powerful panels Phil has included in this post) and her eventual re-enlistment packed a hell of a punch.

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  3. Carey
    June 26, 2015 @ 3:15 am

    I very much agree– I only feel Moore's sampling should be mentioned because it is pertinent to the War.

    Halo Jones is one of the three works from Moore that I can still revisit and enjoy- for some reason many of his other works haven't aged as well for me. Whether that is from over familiarity or simply being affected by the War, I do not know. Oddly enough, I seem to recall the first book of Halo Jones occurred during one of the times in the 80's where I stopped reading 2000ad- I think the first Halo Jones I read was the final part of book 1, and really I only met her properly for book 2 and liked it from the start. So I can't say what pure, I editorially affected Halo Jones had on my early teenaged self, beyond loving Ian Gibson's art in the aforementioned final chapter. But for me, Book 2 got the balance right for her, and book three was a masterpiece that I rate almost as highly as I do V for Vendetta. (My other favourite Moore work is Captain Britain– and I really don't know why that one has staid in my affections when others that I rated so highly at the time such as Marvelman have lessened).

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  4. Carey
    June 26, 2015 @ 3:32 am

    Gah! I really should learn not to try posting on blogger with an iPad, as blogger hates Apple products.

    Please excuse my bad internet etiquette by replying to myself, but I have realised why Moore's early work still appeals to me while much of his other work no longer does so. Due to the constraints of working in ostensibly children's entertainment, Moore is forced to abandon, or at least disguise, sexual violence toward women.

    The closest he gets is Book 2 of Halo Jones and the whole Toby plot. But like many in 2000ad he is forced to use metaphor and robots instead of depicting the obvious. So Toby literally represents men as animals driven by their programming, and chasing a woman to make her his. Similarly, Book 3's depiction of war as something fought by women voids some of the sexual violence tropes found in war films of the 80's.

    Halo Jones, Captain Britain and V for Vendetta are also some of the only stories Moore writes in the 80's where there are more than a couple of women in the cast, which gives a more nuanced view of gender that I find missing in his other works from the time.

    Sexual violence in fiction is something that I find repellant and something used too frequently– it's one of the reasons I don't watch Game of Thrones, and one of the reasons I fell out of love with Moore as a writer.

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  5. Aylwin
    June 26, 2015 @ 4:48 am

    Replying to yourself is bad internet etiquette? Yikes!

    "…and I know that thing you do with your hand is very bad, but…"

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  6. Spoilers Below
    June 26, 2015 @ 8:30 am

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Spoilers Below
    June 26, 2015 @ 8:32 am

    Synchronicity wise, in the wake of dear Patrick Macnee's death, Ian Gibson would later collaborate with Grant Morrison on a neat Avengers comic (published as Steed and Mrs. Peel to avoid Marvel going after them), "The Golden Game". Hardly their best work ever, but a fun little 3-issue comic that reads much like a good episode of the TV program with the usual lack of budget constraints that come from being drawn, rather than filmed, and that managed to get Diana Rigg to guest star during the Linda Thorson period of the show (a series 7, before The New Avengers presumably, and sadly sidelining poor Ms. King for much of the action). The follow up story by Anne Caulfield about Mr. Peel isn't too bad either. Not necessarily comics you'll enjoy as much if you don't already like The Avengers, but a fun time if you do.

    I just wish the trade edition hadn't been misprinted so badly. Some of the inks are shifted, pushing the black outlines a good half centimeter off of the colors. Should have been caught in QC and corrected.

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  8. Tom
    June 27, 2015 @ 10:28 am

    If we're playing spot-the-sample then also worth mentioning Life Sentence, whose collecting ears game is straight out of Michael Herr's book on the Vietnam War, Dispatches.

    An English teacher set my class Dispatches as reading a couple of years after HJ3 came out, and I very excitedly said wow this was in 2000AD. Sadly he had not got the memo that wham, pow, comics aren't just for kids any more, and was super unimpressed by my information.

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  9. Daru
    July 2, 2015 @ 12:03 am

    I recall as an avid reader of 2000AD, Rogue Trooper catching me enough to be interesting for a while, but I even as a kid got bored with it as really it seemed to go nowhere and never really explored any real responses to war.

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