Eruditorum Press

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2

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As the Playmates line of Star Trek: The Next Generation action figures expanded, I have to confess I started to get less of them. I know it’s hard to believe and that I have to keep stressing this, but I was actually never a hardcore Star Trek fan, and thus didn’t possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every single character and every single episode. When it came to toys, I was primarily interested in the Enterprise crew and the most recognisable aliens: My fondest memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation are of images and scenes, not specific episodes or stories. So, as Playmates began to expand beyond the main cast of characters I wasn’t as feverish about keeping up with their releases.

It’s the second wave where this began to manifest. That’s not to dismiss the toys from this wave and beyond in the slightest: They’re all of the exact same peerless quality you’d expect from Playmates Star Trek, just to articulate and further highlight where my interest in this franchise really lies. This is the wave where variants, one-shots and reoccurring characters started to become more pronounced (for obvious reasons), and the simple fact is I just wasn’t as interested in that stuff. I still had a fair amount from this wave, but I didn’t have *all* of it. In fact, I still don’t, and I’m not likely to ever finally “complete” my collection as it were. I’m not the kind of collector who has to horde absolutely every release from every line imaginable: I like to have representations of my favourite characters, and I don’t really need more than that. So I’ll review the figures from this line that I have, and only give a passing mention to the ones I don’t.

A few of these ones I’ve already looked at as part of the bridge crew retrospective last season. Even though they weren’t part of the Wave 1 1992 releases, it would frankly have been ridiculous of me *not* to look at Doctor Crusher and Guinan,who in fact didn’t actually get plastic likenesses until 1993. It’s especially dumb that Doctor Crusher wasn’t among the early releases. Normally I would grumble about sexism in the toy industry leading manufacturers to believe that action figures based on girls don’t sell and aren’t popular (which is sadly based on real, material sales figures in spite of what certain activists would have you believe and how much we might want to think), except Deanna Troi was part of the initial wave, and she seems like far less of an action-oriented character, and thus a weaker candidate for an action figure, than Doctor Crusher. Maybe it’s because Deanna’s not a mom. The Bev released as part of Wave 2 is the rather boring, unplayable version with the lab coat moulded to her body and hands that can’t hold anything, but for quite some time she was the only Bev we got.

Speaking of Bev being a mom, Wesley Crusher is (regrettably) another new release from this wave.…

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Forward, to the Past! – Episode II: Cuckballs

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Yes, it’s the second part of the trilogy. This time, I just made some notes and gave them to Irvin Kershner to write-up for me. Of course, he’s dead… which might explain why is take is a little darker than mine.

In Star Wars, we don’t see anyone on Alderaan die. We hear Obi-Wan say that their voices cried out in terror, but we never hear those voices ourselves. The only other acknowledgement of them in the film is Leia’s remark that “we have no time for our sorrows”, but even this is in response to someone saying that they “feared the worst” when they heard about Alderaan… meaning, in effect, that the murder of billions of people made them worried in case a Princess had been killed too. Of course, the context is that they’re worried about Leia because they think she has the Death Star plans, but it’s still a startling formulation. I confess to liking Leia’s pragmatic refusal to prioritise her own feelings. She never does the ‘girly’ thing (which would of course be to break down in tears). Even so, it’s worrying that she is given the task of comforting Luke about Obi-Wan’s death so soon after her entire planet (and presumably most of her family, friends, and colleagues) are all destroyed. Nobody ever offers her any comfort. As noted in the previous episode of this series, Alderaan goes unmourned. It’s a detail, put in to establish the hugeness and devilishness of the threat the Death Star poses. It is fear of the Death Star that will “keep the local systems in line” as Tarkin says (though what ‘local systems’ might mean, I have no idea… ‘local’ to whom, or to what?). Essentially, the destruction of Alderaan is a dramatisation – for plot reasons – of a point of politics.

There is also the extreme nature of the overreaction. You destroy an entire planet – presumably one with industry and wealth of some kind – in order to punish one dissident and demonstrate your new capacity for technological destruction. It’s impossible for me to not think of two things: the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ (essentially, Nixon’s idea that he could scare communist leaders out of confronting US power by convincing them he was bonkers enough to use nukes). I don’t think there was enough awareness, in the seventies, of the case for the nukes being dropped at the end of WWII more as a salutary demonstration of American power. I’m sure the claims were about but I doubt they had sufficient currency to be part of popular consciousness. As for Nixon, I suspect he’s part of a political context which makes its way into the first film… though I plan to talk about the Empire, and what relation it has to US politics of the 60s and 70s, in the third part of this series.

The point I want to bring out here is one I alluded to last time: in The Force Awakens, we see people on the planets about to be destroyed.…

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Comics Reviews (January 20th, 2016)

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From worst to best of what I bought. Digital codes will work at this link, but only for the first person to use them.

Silver Surfer #1

It’s not that this is a bad comic by any means, and the Fourth Doctor cameo is a hoot, but I have to admit, it’s hard to find much exciting about this particular “pick up exactly where we left off with no real changes” post-Secret Wars relaunch, and I kind of wonder if the Slott/Allred era of this title has said all that it has to say. This one in particular suffers from a hyper-compressed storytelling style that dispatches interesting ideas almost as soon as it comes up with them, which is fine and in keeping with the mad excess here, but it’s crossing into overwhelming such that I think the book really needs to slow down and give some breathing room for characterization instead of high concept. Tellingly, even when it does a low-key domestic scene there’s not much in the way of character depth; just a different sort of high concept joking. 

Digital code: THM3VRHI09XR

New Avengers #5

Ewing manages to make what should by all rights be a completely overstuffed issue work, which is impressive, but it’s also covering for the fact that this is a pretty standard array of parts that, at the moment at least, aren’t being assembled with any particular creativity. Ewing’s sense of character and humor keep it from feeling as tired as it easily could, but they don’t elevate this into anything particularly inspiring either, and Sandoval’s art eschews subtlety at every turn. Very much a “keep on keeping on” sort of issue.

Digital code: THMUAXU8ZW94

Batgirl #47

Not bad. I quite like the Spoiler/Bluebird cameo (they should really get their own book, but of course that ain’t gonna happen under the DC of 2016). Eleonora Carlini and Moritat step in for Babs Tarr and acquit themselves well, even managing a smooth hand-off within the issue, But the story lets it down a bit, underselling the sense of Batgirl losing her mind such that her anxiety over it seems misplaced and unearned, leading into a final page that is either unsatisfyingly cryptic or unsatisfyingly confident about the reader’s ability to identify a given DC villain on sight. Decent, but unspectacular. 

Ms. Marvel #3

Top-notch stuff, resolving the first arc and finally giving Mike a moment in the sun. She is, as you’d hope, charming and fun and full of heart, at once a character who makes you fist-pump with joy when she gets it right and smile at her anxieties and foibles. “Look out evildoers. Time to science” is sheer delight. Basically, she’s the best thing since Etta Candy. I also love “the key to his heart” being an unexpected answer instead of the obvious. And it still has evil gentrification to boot. As ever, we’re lucky to have this book. 

Digital code: THMFWYD6NTK2

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #6

I’ll have more on this soon, as I owe Patreon backers a bonus post on it, and so I’m not going to say much more than that there really isn’t a year of comics where this wouldn’t be a contender for best issue of the year.…

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Flight Simulator: Williams Star Trek: The Next Generation Pinball

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If you have time to kill, you could make an entertaining diversion over debating whether or not pinball tables can be considered video games or not. Traditionally, they’ve always existed on the margins of the industry: You won’t see any big video game publications talking about them, but you will likely see fans of a certain kind of video game, namely retro hobbyists, displaying a passion for pinball tables very similar to the one they have for their favourite video games.

From my point of view, this is extremely easy to explain. Pinball tables may not be video games per se, but they’re definitely close relatives-Fellow travellers at the very least. There’s a lineage shared by both pinball and a certain strand of the video game industry, which just so happens to be the one that most interests me personally. In fact, I would argue that video games, at their purest, are far closer to pinball than they are to computers and computer games. To put my point in the crudest and most basic terms, although they’re both technically speaking interactive electronic entertainment, computer games were historically always programming exercises intended both to allow coders to flex their logic muscles and test the limits of computer hardware. Video games, by contrast, I feel have always been more of an attempt to design a kind of action-oriented sensory experience. As an illustration, contrast two of the most prototypical computer and video games: Zork and Asteroids: Both came out within a few years of each other, both were called “games” of some kind, but each is profoundly different from the other. One consists of nothing but plain text, is deeply narrative-driven and is meant to be puzzled over in long, marathon sessions, the other consists of vector graphics, has no story whatsoever and is meant to be played in short bursts.

Another difference is the setting these two titles were conceived of as being played in. Zork is surely for the home computer user, and in 1977 “home computer user” signifies a very specific sort of person. Asteroids, on the other hand, was meant to be played in bars and arcades: Extremely public places. Asteroids was also a coin-op cabinet. In other words, it’s a game that can be played by literally anyone who has some loose change in their pocket. This is what brings us back to pinball, because it’s pinball tables, not computer games like Zork, that are the true ancestor for video games as we know them today (or at least as *I* know them). Like Asteroids, pinball is a stand-up, coin-op cabinet game that has no story and relies on visual and auditory sensory feedback to cultivate an experience between the player and the game, and like Asteroids, pinball games used to be found in bars and arcades everywhere and could be played by anyone with a few quarters to spare. And both pinball tables and video games exist in the liminal space between digital electronics and analog mechanics inhabited only by a chosen few.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.02: Dark Wings, Dark Words

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“Huh. I don’t want to casually torture her. That’s never happened before.”

State of Play

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

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

The Lion, Jaime Lanniser

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Harrenhal: The King in the North Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell

The Direwolf, Bran Stark

Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

Tigers of Harrenhal: Talia Stark

The Stag, Gendry

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

Bears of the Wall: Lord Commander Jeor Mormont

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Winterfell is in ruins and abandoned, Astapor is empty, Dragonstone has been vacated.

The episode is in thirteen parts. The first runs three minutes and is set in the North; the opening image is of Brandon Stark running with a bow in a dream.

The second runs two minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by family, from Bran to Robb Stark.

The third runs one minute and is set in the Dreadfort, though this is not made clear. The transition is by dialogue, from Robb and Catelyn talking about Theon to Theon.

The fourth runs four minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by image, from Theon bound on a cross to Jaime walking in chains with Brienne.

The fifth runs nine minutes and is sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime Lannister to Cersei Lannister and Joffrey Baratheon. The second section is seven minutes long. The transition is by theme, from Cersei and Joffrey talking about love to Shae and Sansa talking about the same.

The sixth part runs five minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Sansa to Robb Stark.

The seventh runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set north of the Wall. The first section is two minutes long. The transition is by dialogue, from Catelyn telling a story of Jon Snow to Jon Snow. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sixskins talking about dead Crows at the Fist of the First Men to the survivors.

The eighth part runs three minutes and is set in the North. The transition is by family, once removed, from Jon Snow to Bran Stark.

The ninth runs four minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Bran to Arya Stark.

The tenth runs eight  minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Arya and company walking to Tyrion entering his chambers. The second section is five minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion Lannister to Joffrey Baratheon.

The eleventh part runs two minutes and is set in the Dreadfort, though this is not made clear.…

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Flight Simulator: Star Trek: The Next Generation (Game Boy, NES)

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If you were a casual Star Trek: The Next Generation fan in the 80s and early 90s looking for a video game based on your favourite TV show, your options were severely limited. Star Trek computer and video games were overwhelmingly dominated by the Original Series (much like the franchise in general), and if you wanted a game specifically based on The Next Generation, you pretty much had only two options: There was a trivia game released in 1990 that was just what it sounds like: A bunch of trivia questions based on the show’s early seasons. The year before that there was the rather more intriguing Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Transinium Challenge, a sort of hybrid third-person adventure detective game that put you in the shoes of Commander Riker investigating a series of attacks on a friendly outpost.

This was all very well and good, but from my perspective back then there was just one problem: Both Star Trek: The Next Generation Trivia and The Transinium Challenge were DOS games, and PC games were things far, far above my family’s pay grade and class level. I’m not sure we even *owned* a personal computer in 1989 come to think of it, and once we finally did get one it was a Macintosh, a platform that is famously well known for its excellent pedigree when it comes to PC gaming. My…history with PC gaming is something that continues to this day, and I could fill a book with all the indignities I’ve lived through involving Steam, system requirements, hard drives, graphics cards, hardware standards, trolling modders and planned obsolescence. Suffice to say, DOS may as well have been a strange and unfamiliar ancient runic language as far as I was and am concerned.

Regular readers of the blog will of course know I eventually did get to experience a computerized representation of the Star Trek universe through the wonderful Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, which satiated my need for a Star Trek video game for awhile at least. But as precious as that game has always been to me, it was destined from the beginning to be little more than a temporary solution, because that game was all about the Original Series, and I wasn’t. I needed an actual video game based on the world I knew and loved, and, even had I known they existed back then (which I didn’t), DOS games from four years ago simply weren’t going to cut it. And it would also be really nice if this game would come out for a proper video game console instead of the computer, because that would vastly increase the odds of my getting to play it.

In my opinion, consoles are the natural home of video games. For one thing they have always been, and will always be, significantly cheaper than a high-end PC built for gaming. They’re also designed for one thing and one thing only, playing video games, which means they do that one thing extremely well.…

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Marcos Told Me to Think of Time as a Record Player, with the Stylus Tracing the Present (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Three: Alan Moore)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Yeah, you should probably just go read that one again if you don’t remember.

It is October 1987. Moore is sitting down to dinner after a Glasgow signing to promote Watchmen. At the table is Grant Morrison, a neophyte comics writer. It is the only meeting between them that Moore recalls, although he had given Morrison advice at a 1983 Glasgow comic mart when Morrison was on the cusp of transitioning from a failed rock star to a successful comics writer. Moore will eventually, to Morrison’s chagrin, describe him as an “aspiring” comics writer at the time of this meeting, one of many swipes he will take at Morrison over the years. They talk about vegetarianism. (“Sometimes you can’t live with the contradictions, Grant,” Morrison recalls him saying.)

It’s Christmas 2013. Alan Moore, in the course of an interview, offers the stunning transition, “this, I think, leaves us only with the herpes-like persistence of Grant Morrison” before launching into a four-thousand word account of his history with Morrison and concluding that he would prefer if “admirers of Grant Morrison’s work would please stop reading mine, as I don’t think it fair that my respect and affection for my own readership should be compromised in any way by people that I largely believe to be shallow and undiscriminating.”

It’s summer, 1992. Alan Moore is thirty-eight. Just a few years out from the twin smoldering wreckages of Big Numbers and his first marriage, he takes a call from Jim Valentino at Image Comics. Moore is unimpressed with the Image output, thinking, “I’ve been away for five years, and comics have turned into some bizarre super-steroid-mutant hybrid that I’ve got no familiarity with at all,” but the business model of Image appeals to him, and the failure of Big Numbers along with a relatively fallow period in Moore’s output means he needs the money, and so he throws himself into “teaching myself this new language and trying to understand this new audience.” He ends up creating 1963 with Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch, a colorful pastiche of vintage Marvel comics written in explicit contrast to the post-Watchmen style (largely embodied by Image itself) of violent and cynical comics.

It’s 1996, and Alan Moore is calling Steve Bissette to end their friendship over comments Bissette made in an interview with The Comics Journal, including some suggesting Moore had lost interest in 1963.

It’s 2010, and the last hope that the final installment of the project, an intended crossover between the 1963 characters and the rest of the Image line will ever come out finally sputters out.

It’s January 7th, 1994. Alan Moore is forty, not two months past impulsively declaring himself to be a magician. He is in London, on Shooter’s Hill, visiting Steve Moore. A psilocybin-infused conversation about the Burroughs/Glysin cut-up method as alchemical process gives way abruptly to spiritual vision. The room itself opens and unfolds into some higher space, the chain of conversation – “an idea that turns out to be connected to another, then another, and the discourse makes its labouring progress upward from one concept to the next” until it reaches some divinity that reveals itself in spite of its unknowability.…

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Myriad Universes: Malibu Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Early Days

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In late Summer, 1993, Malibu Comics launched the official Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tie-in series.

I freely admit I’m not a comics scholar so I could be wrong, but this has always struck me as a surprisingly and fascinatingly unorthodox partnership for a franchise as big as Star Trek. Except for the very earliest days of tie-in comics all the way back in the mid-1960s, Star Trek has thus far been very careful to only court the “Big Two” comics publishers, namely DC. And even then, Gold Key was not some random upstart imprint: Cheap as they might have been, they made their name on doing all the comic book tie-ins for all the big franchises of the day: Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, the Disney stuff that wasn’t handled by the European division, and yes, Star Trek. That kind of thing was utterly Gold Key’s wheelhouse. Malibu Comics, by severe contrast, was a small, rather fiercely independent imprint, and one that had cultivated an image of doing more idiosyncratic and experimental projects targeting a more niche audience.

It was Malibu, in fact, that published a lot of the US Manga Corps output, that being a handful of *super* hardcore American manga fans more or less led by Ben Dunn who made it their mission in life to translate and localize some of the more eccentric output of the Japanese comic industry for US audiences, or adapt some of the then-current anime hits to a manga style if adaptations did not already exist. Indeed, the most notable Malibu-published US Manga Corps project of this period was none other than Project A-ko, which we might take a look at next season if we have time, simply for the sheer charming ridiculousness that stems from reading Project A-ko as contemporary of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But the mere existence of US Manga Corps under the banner of Malibu Comics reveals a lot about how truly strange this license really was: This is still before the 90s otaku boom in the United States led by the triple threat of Ranma 1/2, Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon (although that wave was on the verge of cresting in 1993, and indeed Project A-ko would be a part of that in 1994), so anime and manga fans would still have been seen as a pretty niche target demographic.

The only other big license Malibu had at the time was Street Fighter, and while yes, Street Fighter was massively popular in 1993, you have to remember that A. the video game industry was nowhere near the lumbering behemoth with feet of clay it is today so that doesn’t carry quite the weight you might think it would and B. Street Fighter is still a quintessentially Japanese series. So giving Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to Malibu Comics, to sit alongside the video game tie-ins, creator-owned superheroes and friggin’ Project A-ko (sorry, I will never get over how silly amazing that is) is a really unique and brazen lateral move that says something interesting.…

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Shabcast L15TEN

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You have to wait two or three years between Star Wars movies.  And that’s when a trilogy is under way.  At other times you have to wait decades.  Hopefully it won’t be that long before the next bit of my even-more-exciting-than-the-films Forward, to the Past! trilogy of posts appears.  In the meantime, here’s Shabcast 15, AKA Shabcast L15TEN.

This month I’m joined by my online buddy Daniel Harper of the Oi! Spaceman podcast/blog which he co-hosts/writes with his wife Shana Wolstein.  (I know you know.  Phil, James, and I have all been guests on it lately.  I’m just covering all the bases.) 

Dan and I are both Moffat-sceptics (to put it mildly) but in this episode we talk at length about a Moffat episode we both really like, the series 8 classic ‘Listen’.  We make time to snark at the man too, but generally we come to praise Moffat not to bury him.

Download or listen (ho ho – pun intended!) here.

We also talk a little bit about a certain recent news event.  If you can guess which artist has unwittingly donated songs to this month’s edition, you get to download the Shabcast for free.…

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