Seven to Eternity #1

A decent start to this – certainly Remender lacks the numerous irritating lapses in storytelling that mar a lot of Image #1s. This unfolds its premise well and keeps the focus tight so that it’s easy to invest in. There’s not necessarily a lot of interesting ideas to it, and Remender’s “explain the themes” tendency in the backmatter doesn’t do it any favors. But it’s got a nice visual style and is solidly written, and is worth checking out if it’s your thing. (In this case, one part Princess Mononoke, one part Weird West.)

Patsy Walker, AKA Hellat #10

A perfectly solid but mostly unremarkable issue. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that particularly sparks as clever or insightful either. Just sort of there.

Britannia #1

Peter Milligan and Juan Jose Ryp is a plausibly attractive combination, and this weird fiction/Roman mystery story about Pagan Britain and Vestal Virgins is a good match for them. It doesn’t hit any heights of outright genius, but it’s at least Milligan in his “actually deserves the hype” mode, and Rubria, the chief Vestal Virgin, is an entertaining blend of enigma and practicality. I at least vaguely intend to buy the second issue of this, though we’ll see if I remember on the week. 

Karnak #5

The clouds part and another issue of this wanders out. This one involves turning the focus onto Karnak a bit instead of capsule form summaries of specualtive realism, and so ends up far more interesting than the last few. It’s Ellis in fine form doing a tense and mutual interrogation scene with some spectacular visuals from Roland Boschi to boot. The momentum of this has stalled hopelessly and Marvel’s larger problems with the Inhumans aren’t doing it any favors, but Ellis is clearly having fun, and that’s what really matters in life, no?

The Wicked + The Divine: 1831

I’d have this at the top of my list for the decision as to what god Blake was and the gloriously WicDiv variation of one of his most famous quotes alone. But on top of that it’s a brilliant use of the interstitial special as a format, adding thematic depth and new mysteries to the mix by dint of its variations on the series’ usual metaphors. Children, creatures, and monsters are all interesting concepts to have resonating around the series, and aren’t necessarily ones the 2014 setting was going to serve up. Stephanie Hans takes to the art like she owns it, feeling as perfectly suited to Romanticism as McKelvie is to pop. Simply phenomenal.…

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So, yes, we’ve got another Giant Woman podcast on tap for you.  Woo hoo!  But I’m struggling to find good pictures of giant women from pop culture. Too many are simply objectifying; others fall into a warrior aesthetic that really doesn’t capture our take on Steven Universe.  If any of our faithful readers have some clever ideas, drop them in the comments, or contact me and Shana on twitter (@JanieCampbell23 and @inkyosa, respectively), and we’ll adjudicate appropriately.

In the meantime, of my own accord, I present you with a plushie — a side order of fries in some kind of fusion with Hello Kitty.  Because the episodes that we cover in this podcast are Frybo and Cat Fingers.  Also, I’m hoping this image captures some of the charms of late capitalism, not that we’d ever cover such territory in a Steven Universe podcast.  Nope.  Not happening.  Even if we did manage to invoke Jack Graham a half-dozen times in the first half alone.  Just a coincidence, promise.

Finally, a note on content: there’s some stuff in here on body discomfort and alcoholism. Just so you know.

You can get the episode here.…

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So, this meme got itself onto Twitter, and has been retweeted by people who should know better:

Nick Robinson is no longer the BBC News political editor. It’s now Laura Kuenssberg (who is an issue all to herself).

It’s true that Robinson is palpably right-wing and has a long history of involvement with the Tories.  He rose through various senior positions in young Conservative organisations through his younger years.  I can’t find out for sure (without doing more than the cursory google search I just did) if he’s still an actual “paid up” member of the Conservative Party.  He may well be. The BBC allows its journalists to be non-active members of political parties. But if I can’t find out from a cursory google search, I’m sure the person who created this meme didn’t do any better.

He didn’t go to Eton.  He went to Cheadle Hulme.

It’s true that he and Cameron both went to Oxford but they were in different colleges, presumably in different years.  Robinson attended University College; Cameron was at Brasenose.  Robinson is three or four years older.

It is not a “FACT” that the BBC is “controlled” by the Tory government.  That’s ridiculous conspiracyballs, and is an utter strawman of the sophisticated arguments made by the Left about systemic and structural bias.  Yes, the BBC is part of the establishment in the broad sense.  Yes, there are revolving doors.  Yes, the BBC often functions as an organ of state propaganda.  Yes, the BBC tends to be biased towards C/conservative viewpoints.  None of that means it is “controlled” by the Tories.  That’s a vulgar travesty of the reality.

It’s true that a high proportion of senior BBC executives and newspeople went to public school. but it’s not 78%, certainly not 78% of “BBC staff”, which is a very all-encompassing term. As far as I can see, something like a quarter of BBC executives went to private school.  This is bad and telling enough, given that only about 7% of the UK population has that privilege.  We don’t need to make shit up and make ourselves look childish.  Source.

I can find no source for the claim that Robinson ever said “I hate all poor people”.  (If a source exists, please tell me.)  It seems a tad unlikely; a bit comedy villain.  I mean, what did he do next?  Tie a virginal and virtuous pauper girl to some railway tracks for refusing to sleep with him?  He has behaved disgracefully at times – grabbing and smashing protestors’ placards, for instance – but we can tell the truth about that, and about his bias, without making him out to be a cross between Ebeneezer Scrooge and Baron Hardup.  Unless he did say it, but again… evidence?

Bollocks like this doesn’t help the Left or the Left’s causes.  It just makes us look stupid.  If I were paranoid, I’d say that’s probably what it’s for.

You could argue that I’m just giving it more exposure… but I’m hoping to stop otherwise good people from having a silly moment and retweeting it.…

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So it snuck up on us, but Eruditorum Press celebrated its first anniversary yesterday. Consider this the standard and deeply sincere post where I thank everybody – our original crew of Jack, Jane, Kevin, and James, the newer gang of Josh, Daniel, and Shana, and our Web Doll Anna. I couldn’t ask for a better team of weirdos to help me forensically diagnose the state of late capitalism via idiosyncratic pop culture thinkpieces. And thanks to the readers and commenters who make this such a fantastic community. It’s been an absolute pleasure running this site for the past year. I couldn’t be prouder of everyone, and I hope my stupid natterings don’t unduly lower the class of the joint.

I’ve got revelries, but first I want to do the obligatory cup-shake. The Eruditorum Press Patreon runneth low. I understand this – A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones was unpopular to say the least. I’ve been bad at some Patron obligations like bonus posts. So I’ve restructured the Patreon a bit. Bonus posts are a thing of the past because apparently I suck at them. So here’s the new reward structure. At $1, you get a preview of Monday’s posts as close to a week early as I can manage. At $2 I’ll send you occasional short reviews of movies, books, and albums I listen to and like. Think 2-3 paragraphs a couple times a month on things that catch my fancy. And at $5 you get writers notes behind the scenes commentaries on major pieces. September’s were on “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate.” There’ll be ones on Last War in Albion Volume 1, and “Theses on Trump” in October, as well as on new Last War in Albion chapters. (Which I have one of ready to go along with Volume 1 when it launches, which will be any week now – I just need to find a 2-3 day stretch to work on it basically.)

I’ve also added a goal at $300 per week whereby I’ll review Class episode by episode. 

Right. So now for the fun. We did a big Last War in Albion Twitter Tournament back in March (From Hell won), so as we near election season in America it’s clearly time for a Doctor Who one. So we’re proud to announce the Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll – our bid to codify the taste of whatever faction of Doctor Who fandom we represent. (The alt-frocks?) Anyway, here’s how we’re doing it. You’re going to name your personal top twenty Doctor Who stories. One of them you’ll designate your all-time favorite. That one will get five points. Your other nineteen will get one point. I’ll create a ranked list, with ties broken according to my personal preference because it’s my site. You do not have to offer a full list – as many stories as you like, up to twenty. But you do have to pick a favorite.

“Doctor Who Story” is defined however you like. For the sake of settling likely-to-arise issues when counting votes, there are a couple of Official Clarifications at the end of the post.…

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Deathstroke #2

Man, you’ve really gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to Priest, don’t you? So much of this is clever – his transitions among sections, his pacing of reveals, a fair amount of his character work… but there’s just a fundamental messiness to the structure – his time jumping too often makes it so the issue lacks a clear structure or sense of what it’s actually about. The stuff about Slade’s son getting kidnapped at the start is the biggest offender – a plot thread that doesn’t visibly connect with anything else in the issue and, worse, has an unclear temporal relationship with it. The frustrations here are rapidly overwhelming the pleasure – not sure if I’m going to keep on with this.

Doom Patrol #1 (Not purchsed by me)

Tricky. It’s doing that big, ostentatiously messy Grant Morrison thing, which is an entirely appropriate thing for a Doom Patrol book to be doing. But it’s sometimes hard enough believing that there’s actually a coherent train of thought knitting everything together when it’s Morrison, and seeing these tricks used by someone else is worrisome in the extreme. That said, this book has a hell of a lot of spark, and while I’m far from confident that it’s going anywhere good (in fact I suspect it’s going to be a bit of a trainwreck), I’m kind of inclined to give it another issue or two. I worry that it’s going to end up being all setup and no payoff, though. Certainly there’s nothing like a clear sign that this isn’t just unfocused weirdness yet. But I’m willing to entertain style over substance for a bit.

Black Panther #6

Many of the same problems as Deathstroke, which is perhaps appropriate for a book so openly indebted to Priest’s work, but Coates is at least sticking in one timeframe. All the same, this isn’t really an issue – it’s a series of short scenes that incrementally advance their own plots without giving any real sense of how they interlock and what the whole is doing. Individual scenes make interesting and often compellingly-written points, but they’re just that – individual scenes that don’t feel like part of a larger issue, little yet like part of a larger story that we’re ostensibly on the sixth part of. 

Cinema Purgatorio #5

Code Pru’s brilliant this month, and Modded’s thoroughly hilarious. Cinema Purgatorio itself’s a bit weak – it tips its hand early in the strip and then doesn’t really go anywhere until the last page, at which point it has some clever again. The remaining two strips continue to suck. All in all, this isn’t actually worth its cover price, but what are you going to do, not buy an anthology with Moore, Ennis, and Gillen in it?

Spider-Man #8

Style is famously the stuff you never stop doing wrong, and so in “classic” Bendis style this is two separate and completely unrelated comics awkwardly bolted together at the middle. The first is an absolutely brilliant scene of Miles talking to Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and is a perfect example of why this is a compelling book.…

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It’s easy, with something like this, for the weight of expectations to become crippling. The stakes are such that anything short of it self-evidently joining Watchmen and From Hell on the list of Major Alan Moore Works would seem like something of a failure, and one can almost imagine reviews that sadly say “it’s not one of the top twenty works of the entire history of English literature – merely one of the top fifty.” At this point in Moore’s career the arrival of a would-be major work is as much an occasion for critical knife-sharpening as anything – there’s a grim and awful sense of critics realizing that there aren’t going to be that many more opportunities to declare that the great man has made a real and proper misstep. A preposterously long and ambitious novel named in part for William Blake’s legendarily quasi-coherent last prophetic work really does seem like a prime opportunity for anyone desperate to make the case that Moore’s finally had one spliff too many, and there’s no shortage of those.

I say all of this mainly to stress what it in practice means that Jerusalem has largely gotten positive reviews, including a good writeup in Entertainment Weekly, which endearingly called Moore “an angry old man who writes like an angry young man.” Because not only is Jerusalem self-evidently good, and moreover good in a really calm, untroubled way that’s utterly unconcerned with the question, it’s enjoyable. It demands attention, but it is not a difficult novel. Certainly it is unlike Voice of the Fire, whose deliberately obtuse first chapter went out of its way to winnow the readership down to its most sympathetic core. There is a famously difficult chapter about Lucia Joyce that Moore’s been talking up in interviews, but it’s much of the way through the book and can be skimmed and revisited later in a way that “Hob’s Hog” cannot. It’s in no way an “easy” book, but it’s equally absurd to call it a difficult one. Whatever the book’s literary merit – and I’m about to argue that it’s significant – it’s also just a tremendously well-done piece of writing by one of the great storytellers of our age. I loved reading it. You should clear some time in your schedule and have a go at it.

At the heart of the novel is Northampton. Moore has been deftly mythologizing the place for a while now, but this is clearly the weightiest attempt. Within this mythology, it is the center of the world, which makes sense because its Guildhall has a statue of an angel on it with a sword that actually looks kind of like a snooker cue, and so obviously it’s where the four archangels play their eternal game of snooker that decides the fate of all things within the four-dimensional block universe we inhabit by endlessly cycling through our illusions of consciousness. Plus Alan Moore lives there, or at least Alma Warren, the middle-aged artist producing a career-defining thirty-five work exhibit as an act of magic to try to save the working class neighborhood of the Boroughs and obvious genderswapped authorial insert.…

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