Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

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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.

7 Comments

  1. Neo Tuxedo
    August 1, 2014 @ 2:56 am

    Actually, the speaker of your epigraph (whom I'm leaving unnamed so as not to spoil anyone who hasn't read A Dream of Flying in either the 80s or the recent reissue) was remembering a resolution that he would never bow to his own mortality, not morality. He'd always followed his own morality, which had never bowed to that of the external world.

    And I know I'm getting ahead of what I assume you'll cover, but in Moore's treatment of "the over-people" as mythic figures, we see the roots, as it were, of Morrison's theological/archetypical approach to them (expressed indirectly in his depiction of the JLA themselves and directly with the Legion of Legions and the Theocracy).

    Reply

  2. Daibhid C
    August 1, 2014 @ 5:02 am

    The nitpickiest of nitpicks, but in 1984, the Justice League's orbital base is just "the Justice League Satellite". "The Watchtower" first gets used by Morrison to refer to their new lunar headquarters in 1997, and the name is subsequently used for later satellite HQs, following the example of the cartoon.

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  3. BerserkRL
    August 1, 2014 @ 8:04 am

    Alan Moore changed everything about Swamp Thing (and many things about American comics in general) with his first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, in which he rewrote the character's origin such that he was no longer a human being turned into a plant monster, but a mass of plant matter that mistook itself as a human being

    Ahem. His second issue, not his first.

    Reply

  4. Eric Gimlin
    August 1, 2014 @ 12:45 pm

    "Although to be fair, almost every DC Comics villain has at some point played second fiddle to a malevolent talking gorilla."

    The fact that the current regime at DC views this as a BAD thing summarizes my problems with much of their current output as well as anything.

    As we will see when we reach the Alan Moore/ Gil Kane collaborations later in the war, Moore is quite clearly a huge fan of Kane. I suspect that has something to do with the choice of Woodrue over, say, Poison Ivy. Although I'm not sure the Pre-crisis Poison Ivy actually had plant powers, rather than just a plant theme. A further clue is in Figure 409: It shows clear hints of Kane's distinctive up-nostril perspective, and I wonder if Moore included that in his script. (For those of you not familiar with it, Kane makes it work despite how it sounds.)

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  5. Unknown
    August 1, 2014 @ 1:39 pm

    It's a petty thing, but I'd have kind of liked that scene where Woodrue meets up with Justice League members to have included Hawkman instead of Green Lantern — just so he'd have been delivering the "Human like you" line to the two characters who aren't human.

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  6. Matthew Blanchette
    August 1, 2014 @ 6:38 pm

    It's possible he wrote this section BEFORE realizing "Loose Ends" was the actual start of Moore's run; lots of people seem to make the same mistake with just going straight to "The Anatomy Lesson"… why not our Dr. Phil, also?

    Reply

  7. Daru
    February 18, 2015 @ 11:23 pm

    "Figure 406: The contrast between the red and green worlds."

    This is the first time I am seeing this. – magical.

    Reply

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