From worst to best of what I read. Books bought by other people so that I could review them are marked with an asterisk. If you’d like me to review a book, just furnish me with a copy, whether by gifting it on Comixology, e-mailing me a download code, or PayPaling me the cost and telling me what you’d like me to buy. In all cases, snowspinner at gmail. (And it wouldn’t be a bad idea, as there appears we’ll be on hiatus next week due to a lack of any books I’m buying.)

Spider-Gwen Annual #1

A bunch of largely unremarkable short stories, of which only the Captain America one stood out worth a damn. A couple more were worth a chuckle, but on the whole this is firmly in the “annuals that aren’t actually worth your time” category. 

Black Panther #3

Coates was talking up bits of the Alan Moore Swamp Thing run on Twitter a while back, and the influence is all over this issue. But maddeningly, the book continues to not quite click – three issues in there’s yet to be any sort of triumphal “fuck yeah” moment where the book feels like it pays something off or actually sells the reader on its concepts and approach. I will continue to stubbornly hold out hope with this one, but man, I hope Coates finds his gear here soon.

Darth Vader #22

The Aphra scene at the start is quite fun, but the confrontation with Tulon Voidgazer that makes up the bulk of the book is a fairly light-weight “Vader disposes of the secondary antagonist” sequence. The cliffhanger it sets up is intriguing, but this is something of a blank within the overall run. 

Spider-Man #5

Bendis sticks to relatively conventional Marvel-soap plotting, and does interesting stuff with it, adding nuance to the Ganke/Goldballs relationship and taking the Miles’s Grandmother plot, which had been threatening to careen into self-parody, in an interesting direction by bringing Jessica Jones into the mix through her. The Hammerhead/Black Cat stuff is awkward-feeling, too-quickly raised and disposed of over the last two issues, but without at least one bit of slightly bewilderingly incompetent pacing how would we know it’s really a Bendis comic?

Cinema Purgatorio #3

A bit of a weak issue here, with Code Pru having an off month, Cinema Purgatorio itself being more interesting than effective, and Modded… being quite clever, actually, with a technically adept installment that gives Ignacio Calero a chance to cut loose pleasantly. A More Perfect Union is still crap, but The Vast is actually pretty good this month. Still probably the weakest of the set so far.

Nighthawk #1-2*

An unapologetically political book that proclaims itself to be invested in black culture right up front. It’s not subtle about this, which I appreciate. The relationship between Nighthawk and Tilda Johnson, who’s serving as his Oracle-figure, is reliably solid, and Ramon Villalobos has a solid Frank Quitely-style grotesqueness to his style that works well with the book.…

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I don’t really have a funny caption here, I just thought it was an ironic image to use this week.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister,

Dragons of Meereen: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow, Bran Stark

The Mockingbird, Petyr Baelish

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

The Direwolf, Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

The Shield, Brienne of Tarth

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont

The Dreadfort and Dragonstone are abandoned

The episode is in eleven parts. The first runs five minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The opening image is of Tommen being crowned.

The second runs four minutes and is set in Meereen. The transition is by dialogue, with Jorah informing Daenerys of Joffrey’s death.

The third runs seven minutes and is set in the Eyrie. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys on her balcony to rocks.

The fourth runs three minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger and Lyssa getting married to Cersei and Tywin discussing weddings.

The fifth runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by dialogue, with Arya reciting her list, including Cersei and Tywin.

The sixth runs three minutes and is set in the Eyrie. The transition is by family, from Arya to Sansa Stark.

The seventh runs two minutes and is set in the Crownlands. The transition is by dialogue, with Brienne and Podrick talking about Sansa.

The eighth runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Brienne and Podrick riding to the Hound waking up.

The ninth runs three minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from a wide shot of a river to a pond.

The tenth runs three minutes and is set in the Crownlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Oberyn to a burning rabbit.

The eleventh runs eighteen minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Podrick helping Brienne with her armor to an establishing shot. The final image is of Craster’s Keep landing on a snake and burning.

Analysis

Structurally, it’s largely a mirror of the previous week, only with a more disjointed build-up (prior to the jump to Craster’s it’s on track to be a Season Two-sized part count) and a more ostentatious set piece for the Craster’s sequence. The result is firmly the soft and kind of spongy middle of Season Four, and the sort of episode that trying to find anything to say about highlights why A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones is not quite the most functional project I’ve ever designed. (I reckon this’ll be the last run of it – I don’t see much point in writing second essays about S5 and S6 episodes.)…

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No essay today — instead we bring you a fabulous podcast!  Shana, Daniel, and I discuss the very weird Doctor Who story called The Time Monster, as a part of Shana and Daniel’s ongoing Oi! Spaceman podcast series.  It’s a hoot. 

Well, not like a hooting owl, which can screech terribly when flapping its wings in the glaring sunlight as it struggles to free itself from its crystalline prison. Hey, actually, now that I think about it, feathers aren’t entirely dissimilar to flower petals.  Maybe I make this into some kind of a “jewel in the lotus” motif.  Nah, that would be ostentatious.  Certainly not appropriate for a gem like The Time Monster.

Anyways, you can get the podcast here. Enjoy.…

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It is, of course, crass and ostentatious spectacle less interested in dramatically earning its major beats than it is in making sure they are explosively propulsive. Which is to say that it unapologetically plays to Game of Thrones’s strengths in a way that does not so much minimize its weaknesses as renders them largely irrelevant in the face of the giant fucking wildfire explosion that is the onrushing plot. Everything here is sufficiently thrilling, its implications generally punch-the-air triumphant, that their sheer momentum and the bald confidence with which it’s all carried off makes it work. This is what Game of Thrones’s aesthetic ultimately exists to do. It’s not a subtle pleasure. But, as Cersei would put it, it does feel good.

If there is a problem with it all, it’s that in the ludicrous din of it all moments that should have had real weight get swallowed. The biggest problem, of course, is the way in which the revelation of what actually happened at the Tower of Joy fails utterly to be a significant takeaway from the episode. The decision to save the revelation for this episode, as opposed to putting it in “Oathbreaker” where there would have been room to let Bran gawk at the fact that Jon’s a secret Targaryen, is in several regards baffling. And it highlights the extent to which this episode is overstuffed at the expense of previous ones. What on Earth, for instance, is the purpose of the four minute excursion to Oldtown? Surely Sam, who has spent the season blatantly being a plotline more than Benioff and Weiss actually wanted to deal with, could have been given a scene with actual weight, as opposed to one that exists purely to show the white ravens being sent out. Surely there was room for a third Benjen scene instead of having his second appearance be him leaving again. (Arya’s murder of Walder Frey is an interesting counterexample though. I admit, I didn’t think she’d be in this episode, since “No One” worked just fine as an ending, and the short nature of the scene and her appearance would have made it easy for it to end up as one of the swallowed moments. Instead Maisie Williams single-handedly kicks the scene into one of the best moments of the episode, because she is a fucking boss.)

But what minor quibbles. Let’s be real here. This is stunning, from start to finish. The opening set piece is majestic, due largely to Sapochnik’s direction. The decision to abandon the show’s normal visual storytelling in favor of heavy cross-cutting, further emphasized by a bespoke musical cue (which is subsequently mixed to satisfying effect with “The Rains of Castamere” for Cersei’s coronation) gives it a strange and unsettling quality that allows the realization of what’s going to happen to slowly build over the sequence’s frankly majestic length. The handling of Cersei this season has been one of its real high points – she’s been positioned relatively sympathetically and allowed to mostly be a rational, sensible character.…

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Sorry for the slightly belated update, but this week has been busy. This week in Oi! Spaceman, we put out the next episode of Searching For Fuchal, discussing Series One, Episode 4: “Waiting For God.” The episode is very much about the search for meaning in a vast and uncaring universe, and our podcast attempts to connect Lister’s rejection of his own godhood with his essential goodness, and Rimmer’s finding patterns that aren’t there with the Quagaars with the Cats coming to worship Lister’s laundry list. “Waiting For God” is probably the most on-point to the central message of Red Dwarf we’ve seen yet, and it was actually a joy to revisit for the podcast. Download it here. 

Over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, we welcomed the triumphant (half) return of our old co-host Paul by discussing two sci-fi action films from 1990: Robocop 2 and Predator 2. Highbrow choices, I know. We had a great time chatting about the plundering of public resources by private enterprises, the birth of the neoliberal agenda, and the terribly racist idea of what drug cartels actually did. Also: why Robocop should really be the perfect negotiator. Check it out here.…

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Neoreaction a Basilisk ebooks went out to Kickstarter backers yesterday. The first sentence never seemed so apt. I doubt I’ll find myself writing anything substantial on Brexit before the Capaldi volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, and thus with the benefit of a couple of years’ historicization. It’s obviously never a good thing when this many fascists are this happy, though. I honestly didn’t believe Britain would vote for the side that’s literally got Nazis gunning down its enemies in the streets. But then, as I noted last week, I honestly didn’t believe Britain would be a place where Nazis would gun down a politician in the streets. But of course, there’s always been more to Britain than the bits I love and have written at length about. Equally, that doesn’t mean the Britain I write about isn’t there. It’s always been a Britain of the margins. It’s still a land of madmen – poets and snake-worshippers and yes, of course, with boxes. It’s all still there, and still as important and central to what Britain is as it ever was. And if there’s one thing it’s lurking in the margins, ready to flood back in. 

That doesn’t make it any less of a depressing day, though. And I know I have a lot of readers for whom this was a particular gut punch. So consider this your open thread to vent, make fatalistic jokes, or cobble together fleeting optimism. 

Game of Thrones review will be Monday morning again, followed by Brief Treatise in the afternoon. Take care of yourselves and each other.…

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(Content Note: This piece contains descriptions of fictionalized violence against women of a possibly sexual nature and descriptions of bodily objectification through male gaze. It also contains some mention of foot fetishism and uses an extended metaphor around piss play. Consider yourself warned.)

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is generally considered to be the least impressive of his filmography, even by Tarantino himself. It’s a film obviously constructed around a car chase sequence and as the second half of a double bill whose lead-in is a mildly diverting action-horror-comedy; it’s none-too-surprising that few critics were all that kind upon release. I haven’t seen anyone on Eruditorum Press beat up on the Guardian lately, so let’s let Peter Bradshaw stand in for the critical consensus:

…Tarantino has had to pad this film with stuff that would hardly make the DVD’s “deleted scenes” section: long, long, long stretches of bizarrely inconsequential conversation between the babe avengers which are a big comedown from the glorious riffs from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino appears himself in a wooden acting role (a real downer) and awards an unlovely cameo to his friend Eli Roth. But check out that head-on collision.

In defense of the commentariat of 2007, Tarantino has crafted a film that seems like just that kind of mindless fluff on the schedule of a week-by-week major-release movie reviewer. Few great films can be fully understood on a first viewing (unless you’re Pauline Kael I suppose). Then again (if I must take the opportunity to shit on the Guardian), the words “Zoe Bell” appear nowhere in Bradshaw’s review, meaning he entirely missed the greatest pleasures of even the surface level.

Nine years later, we need take no such excuse. Tarantino is a consummate filmmaker, hugely controversial, thoroughly aware of the controversy his films create, and in interviews manages to simultaneously talk incessantly and refuse to reveal anything of importance as to the intended meaning of his work. His persona and body of work are expressly designed to provoke a reaction, and even if Death Proof is the least of his films, it’s worth a second look. What are those interminable dialogue scenes doing, and why isn’t anyone talking about Royales with Cheese?

Looking again at the surface first, the conversations in this film are almost entirely among women. Young women to be precise, traditionally attractive party girls interested in booze, drugs, and hard cock. And in trying not to be judged, either by the other girls or by larger society, by how they like to enjoy that cock. And, over and over again, the omnipresent threat of aggressive men using their size, their social influence, their presence to dominate these young women sexually, to control female flesh for their own purposes.

Butterfly makes out with her nebbish boyfriend, clothes on, and makes him leave with a hard-on, and her friends laugh in disbelief, judging her for not just fucking him. Later, she’ll be pressured by social convention and by an aggressive masculine charmer in Stuntman Mike to perform a lap dance in the middle of a crowded bar.…

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From worst to best of what I bought.

She Wolf #1

Nothing wrong with this comic as such – the art is tremendously striking, the themes are interesting. But there’s also nothing that particularly draws me in or makes me invested. By the end of the first issue I still wasn’t entirely clear on the premise. Will probably read interestingly in trade, but this doesn’t look like a single issue sort of thing to me.

Wonder Woman #1

Elsewhere in the wide world of uninspiring #1s, an issue of Wonder Woman that makes no real effort to sell a new premise or direction for the book. Rucka’s in typically competent mode doing the things he does well, which is to say soldiers and special ops stuff. He’s writing Wonder Woman in much more of a warrior/force of nature mode as opposed to the diplomat of his first run. Which is to say it’s lacking what made his first run interesting, and hasn’t really added anything to replace it. But it’s inoffensive and reasonably solid Wonder Woman, and I’m going to stick around for at least a few issues.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #8

A perfectly pleasant body swap issue that doesn’t really go anywhere, and ends with no real forward momentum into the next issue. Odd and a bit disposable, but still good fun.

The Ultimates #8

A tie-in that’s far better than the series it’s tying into, this is the first take on the big Thanos fight that kills James Rhodes that’s actually been well-done. Good character stuff for Monica and Adam. Needs more Ms. America, of course, but every comic Marvel publishes needs more Ms. America. Art is still gorgeous. All told, a solid issue that makes quite the silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Cry Havoc #6

This is an incredibly intelligent and well-done book, and I look forward to its eventual return (tragically not currently scheduled). I’m going to have to sit down and reread all six issues in one shot, because it’s definitely the sort of book that’s going to reward that, but its themes and approaches are both genuinely brilliant. The trade’s out in August, and I strongly recommend checking it out. 

James Bond #7

Ellis starts a new arc here, and at the outset at least it’s playing to his strengths much more than the first one did. I’m sure he’ll kind of annoy me by throwing in an all-action-sequence issue or abandoning all sense of single issue plotting, because that seems to be what Ellis does on James Bond, but for the moment I’m excited about this book again.

Bitch Planet #8

The most unapologetically social justice oriented book on the stands doubles down on that yet again, and as usual that’s not even the best part. The scene with Makoto realizing what’s happened to his daughter is heartbreaking, while the scenes between Cam and Whitney are full of twists and humor. Both are long on emotional nuance to boot.…

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