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She was just somebody who had to get out. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part 10: Burroughs)

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Figure 876: The revelation of Mr. Mxyzptlk’s villainy is one of several shared plot points between Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Superfolks. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger, from Action Comics #583, 1986)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Among the commonly cited influences on Watchmen is Superfolks, a novel by Robert Mayer that shares several plot beats with it and other superhero stories Moore wrote in the 1980s. Moore has generally resisted this comparison, pointing to other texts that influenced him more.

This gestures towards a larger issue with treating Superfolks as a major antecedent to Watchmen, which is that very little of what Moore allegedly drew from it is actually all that innovative. Indeed, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, in a thorough analysis of Morrison’s claims, found that in almost every case either the similarities were overstated or an earlier antecedent could be found. (The sole exception was the use of Pxyzsyzgy, Mayer’s analogue for Mr. Mxyzptlk, as the ultimate villain behind everything, a plot point shared with the resolution of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.) But in many ways it’s more helpful to take a step backwards and look at what both Superfolks and Moore’s work are attempting, and situating it in a larger context. Ultimately, both of them are engaging with superheroes in a manner familiar from the New Wave of science fiction spearheaded, in the UK, by J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and in the US by a broader group of writers including Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The defining aspect of the New Wave was a turn away from pulp adventure and a focus on plausible extrapolation of science and towards using the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to explore human experience, applying the approaches of literary modernism and postmodernism to the genres. One major approach to this, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, was to rework pulp genres into new forms, asking, in various ways, what the subjective experiences of a character in a pulp adventure story might be like. In many regards, it was inevitable that this would eventually be applied to superheroes; that it took until 1977 for the first one to be released is mainly down to the fact that the companies producing the overwhelming majority of superhero stories, Marvel and DC, were fundamentally conservative in their publishing. But with a concept as historically inevitable as this, a priority dispute is almost beside the point.

Indeed, what’s most revealing about the priority dispute is the degree to which Moore’s influences largely leapfrog Mayer and go back to the larger New Wave tradition. The central idea of Superfolks comes from the New Wave, but its scattershot approach of random pop culture namedropping is just the Mad Magazine sight gag approach translated to text. (Indeed, Superfolks, with its focus on a barely disguised Superman and Captain Marvel, owes no small debt to Kurtzman and Wood’s “Superduperman,” which Moore has always cited as the primary inspiration for Miracleman.)…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 3 – Wave 1 Vehicles and Role Play

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The USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D is one of my favourite designs for anything ever. I have been fascinated by this starship and the way it looks for *literally* almost as long as I can remember to a degree that borders on outright obsession. I cannot fully put into words what the Enterprise means to me because even I’m not sure I fully understand the true depths of that meaning myself. Whenever I look at it I’ll sit entranced its curves, the vibrant colouring of the panels and the deflector dish or the slope of the stardrive section as it flows elegantly into that giant saucer. I don’t even think there’s just one thing about it that makes it so incredibly beautiful; it’s a genuine work of art in the sense everything about it sings together in perfect harmony such that you could stare at it forever.

The Enterprise is the centrepiece of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s iconography for me. It’s the one piece that sums up everything that I found so powerful and captivating about this series’ look and feel. When I would get merchandise for the show, I would often cut apart the various boxes and hold onto them: To me, the artwork and iconography was so beautiful and it so consumed my imagination I wanted to somehow be able to physically *hold* it, as if that would bring me closer to the emotions and atmosphere they conveyed, or that I might perhaps be able to channel that through me and bring some of it into my own being. My room would be littered with various carboard effigies of the Star Trek: The Next Generation logo or Playmates’ own space art that adorned their packaging: Dissociated, scattered signifiers of some ethereal confluence. And there always was that azure tinged Enterprise.

When I finally got the Playmates Enterprise toy it was an absolutely monumental moment in my life. Here finally was my very own spirit totem of this ship of the imagination, in three dimensional plastic instead of cardboard. My constant exposure to various representations of the Enterprise and my obsession with its design meant that I had become an expert on its every detail, but not in the classic Star Trek Nerd sense of memorizing deck blueprints or anything like that: My resources were disjointed publicity stills, toyetic caricatures, half-remembered effects shots and ViewMasters. What I knew best was the Enterprise‘s *soul*, not its body. And even then my intimate familiarity with every detail of the Enterprise‘s vibe allowed me to make some specific observations about this new toy.

First of all, even I could recognise Playmates’ Enterprise was based on the four-foot shooting model, not the six-foot one. This may sound like pedantic nerdery, but it’s actually hugely important to me because there are significant and noticeable visual differences between the six-foot and four-foot models and I think the six-foot model best captures the Enterprise‘s divine essence.…

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Shabcast 10 – Gothic!

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Okay, so the Iron Man thing seemed to go down well.  Thanks to everyone who read, commented, retweeted, etc.  I get the sense that my audience has just more than quadrupled in size, which is nice.

People new to my stuff may be unaware that I produce a regular Shabogan Graffiti podcast (or Shabcast, as I’m smug enough to call it).  (In fact, it’s increasingly irregular, but in the sense of turning up more often that it should rather than less, so that’s not a bad thing… unless you hate it.  But then you don’t have to listen to it, do you.  Nobody’s forcing you.) 

Pex Lives, my new Eruditorum Press colleagues, host the Shabcast for me and you can find my previous episodes archived here.  There are chats about Doctor Who, the Mckellen Macbeth, the Jonathan Miller Alice in Wonderland, the Hugo Awards and the Sad/Rabid Puppies, etc.

And here’s a new one.  This time, I’m joined by the lovely and incredibly erudite Gene Mayes – of various Pex Lives appearances and his own excellent new blog Being and Time Lord – to chat about the Gothic. 

We also focus specifically on the movie A Field in England, Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s masterpiece of English Civil War-era madness, magic and mushrooms.  There be spoilers here, by the way. 

We range pretty freely and get on to all sorts of other stuff including (but far from limited to) alchemy, John Dee, Hammer movies, Gothic novels, Marxism and Anarchism.  It’s a long one (just over 3-hours, so feel free to listen in fits and starts) but I hope worth your time. 

Here‘s Gene’s blog post about A Field in England.…

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The Arc of Alchemy (Part Two)

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(Continued from Part One)
 
Again: Nyssa’s passing through Terminus functions symbolically as a Near Death Experience. She’s brought to the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel by the Garm, a walking dog-like creature whose name derives from the hound that guards the Underworld.
 

Nyssa’s “resurrected” (well, cured) by the light that started the Universe, and which now threatens to end it—she is placed, mythologically, in the light of the Alpha and the Omega, which could only emanate from the Center. And here we should note the importance of Norse mythology, for the Center of the World Tree, the axis mundi, is the place where Past and Future, Above and Below, come together in the Here and Now. The very notion of such a union of opposites is implicit in the word “Terminus,” as the place-name denoted here functions as both the beginning and the end of “the line.“

 

As above, so below—this alchemical principle suggests the repetition of certain structures regardless of scale. The Terminus itself is a labyrinth, as is the ship that brings the Lazars, the ductwork underneath that ship, and indeed the TARDIS itself. A labyrinth is distinct from a maze, the latter being generally multicursal, whereas most labyrinths are traditionally unicursal, symbolizing the path to the Center (the seat of divinity) and back out again. As such, labyrinths are generally traversed twice, going in, then out, making them cyclical in nature.

 

Which brings us to the central conceit of Terminus itself, namely the impossible astronaut that lies at its heart, who supposedly “created” the Universe—but where did this pilot come from? Surely a time traveler came from a Universe, in which case the Universe wasn’t created but rebooted. Which is ultimately a form of Eternal Return. In which case, what happened to the astronaut’s universe? Wasn’t it, too, destroyed, to bring forth the Universe of our own? That seems to be the implication, hence the Doctor’s determination to prevent it from happening again. The eternal return of death and rebirth is indeed the source of suffering, so it seems.

But once Terminus is de-mythologized, when Nyssa figures out what’s really going on, proper alchemy can be exercised. Nyssa can use her knowledge of alchemy to synthesize Hyrdomel, which keeps the labor force both alive and enslaved until they themselves can control the means of production. It’s an interesting word, “Hydromel.” It’s simply a combination of water (hyrdo) and honey (mel), the “bittersweet taste of life” as one of the Vanir puts it. Honey has its own esoteric connotations, as beehives were long ago likened to the process of death and rebirth, not unlike dung beetles in Egypt. Of greater interest to me, in context with Season Twenty, is that the socket in the Vanir armor where this elixir is placed happens to be adorned with a snake—harkening back to Snakedance.
 

Alchemically, though, this watery substance is what keeps the fire of the Terminus Light at bay, another union of opposites that actually leads to salvation.

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Comics Reviews (September 16th, 2015)

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Some quick site announcements, by which I really just mean “yes, we know there are still some things that are a bit wonky and we have our entire IT team on it, but our entire IT team is better known as ‘Anna,’ so it goes at the speed it goes.” Working on the remaining layout and formatting problems now – those on smaller screen resolutions should be having a much better experience than they were yesterday, and we’ll have it even more improved later tonight. Then we’ve got some backend stuff that nobody but me is going to notice like making it so I get comments sent to me via e-mail, and sometime next week or so we’ll start working on redesigning the comment system.

For now, comic reviews. As always, ranked from worst to best of what I paid money for. And tomorrow, Jane’s back with the second part of her look at Doctor Who Season Twenty.

Guardians of Knowhere #4

It is in some ways difficult not to simply feel angry at this book. Four issues gave nothing that could meaningfully be recognized as a plot. Deodato’s artwork shows all of his worst problems, namely a tendency to prioritize mood over storytelling (I had no shortage of trouble figuring out when characters were being killed or just knocked out here). But more than that… what’s the point of this? I mean, there wasn’t even a self-contained plot or arc to speak of, save for a debate about the ontological validity of Battleworld between Gamora and Angela. It was just four issues of Deodato mood pieces and contrived fight scenes. Utterly horrible miniseries, and emblematic of the way the initial promise of Secret Wars is just being squandered in the most cynical and wallet-draining ways imaginable. 

The Infinity Gauntlet #4

Despite my increasing reservations about Secret Wars, this is continuing to be a real treat. Duggan caught my eye with his tie-in to the dreadful Black Vortex crossover, or whatever the hell that thing was called – I’ve already forgotten – and this is the second thing of his I’ve read, and his skill at writing young characters in emotionally mature drama with lots of spectacular punching is really impressive. This issue’s a bit sloppier than some – I admit I lost the plot of the fight scene for a chunk of it – but the character beats are still enormously strong, and I’m genuinely invested in how it ends, which is way more than you can say for most of Secret Wars.

Sex Criminals #12

Hilarious in the way that only Sex Criminals is, which is to say that within the first seven pages the phrases “translated from some kind of weird cum angel language” and “are you just saying that because I booped your clit” have both appeared. So has the beginning of a really good discussion of the way in which female sexuality is historically treated as a form of monstrosity. So, yes, this is basically perfect and wonderful. …

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Solid Dick

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NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

Boilerplate

 

I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 2 – Wave 1 Aliens

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Any self-respecting toy collector knows you’ve got to have bad guys for your heroes to fight against. And yet this is Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in spite of what certain creative figures might thing, fighting is pretty much the last thing we ought to be considering. And so we see another manifestation of the curious dual role the Playmates line must play: Fun enough for kids to want to play with and bang together, and sophisticated enough to engage adults.

Playmates knew the Enterprise crew had to meet some people while they were out there exploring space, so as part of the first wave of releases they included a handful of aliens you could either speak or spar with: A Borg drone, a Ferengi, a Romulan commander and Gowron. In hindsight these are sort of interesting picks; the first wave came out in the wake of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s fifth season and was clearly meant to capitalize on it-Just take note of how Captain Picard is wearing his “captain’s jacket” and, of course, the Star Trek 25th Anniversary branding. But while these aliens are in many ways the iconic ones for Star Trek: The Next Generation, none of them played especially major roles in the fifth season (with the notable exception of the whoppers that were “Redemption” and “Unification”): If anything, you’d at least expect a Cardassian to be among the initial releases, but nope. Presumably Playmates figured that since this was the first set of Star Trek: The Next Generation releases, it’d be best to start with the recognisable staples.

Even so, the inclusion of a Ferengi pirate, particularly one who looks like this, is an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. Although they were intended to be Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s primary antagonists, they were supplanted at the beginning of the third season by the Romulans, and they haven’t really played any significant role in the TV series’ plot in three years. But Playmates’ Ferengi is explicitly modelled after the ones in “The Last Outpost”: He’s got it all, from the animal skin uniforms to the fur boots to the crackling energy whips, down to the fact he looks eerily like Armin Shimerman’s Letek. Even the clip-and-collect card cites the same Federation intel the crew went over in “Encounter at Farpoint” and “The Last Outpost”. Furthermore, this Ferengi is most assuredly not meant to be a joke, with the card making numerous references to how cunning, dangerous and ruthless his people can be.

Here I am finding myself talking out of two sides of my mouth again. Because I have to write this with the conceit that I’m just now discovering this toy and the Playmates line now, when in truth this guy was one of the very first pieces of Star Trek anything I ever got. To me, this is *always* how the Ferengi have looked and acted, and this figure gave form to the half-remembered dreamlike imagery from half a decade prior I could only hazily recall.…

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The Arc of Alchemy (Doctor Who: Season Twenty)

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What is it about anniversaries? We made another circle around the sun, that’s all. Well, not a circle. An ellipse. There are no perfect circles in the universe. There is no perfection in the Universe, let alone in Doctor Who’s twentieth season, back in 1983.

But perfection is so much more boring than messiness, than the chaos that lies at the heart of all truly surprising art. Perhaps that’s why we love Doctor Who so much, why it even works—the mercurial element of the show feeds on chaos, on messiness, on constant change, which is truly the natural arc of history, not to mention the unfolding of the cosmos.

Back in Season Eighteen, we had something resembling thematic unity for the season, and on a cosmic scale: Entropy. Yes, it’s explicit in Logopolis, a force that only psychomathematics can shunt into a box for safe keeping. But it’s present throughout the season. You’ve got it working on the Argolins in The Leisure Hive. Its perniciousness is what prompted the Logopolitans to create a CVE through which the Doctor and Romana fly in the third episode of the season. The “state of decay” they later find in E-Space. The collapse of the Warriors’ gate. The dying of the Keeper. The gobbling up of Traken. And, of course, the fall of the Doctor. The Arc of Entropy: death comes to us all.

Entropy is a state of decay. It is vampiric, sucking away order and producing chaos. But look what entropy actually produces in Season Eighteen—it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s still a circle. The Argolins are renewed. The Alzurians have their evolutionary circle. So too do the lion-men of the Gate. And, of course, there’s the resurrection of the Doctor, at the “Pharos” project, no less. So while entropy is a metaphor for death, it is trumped by the Eternal Return implicit in the structure of the show.

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at a similar thematic resonance that permeates Season Twenty, the first self-conscious “anniversary year” of the show. Because it’s fascinating. There’s more here than anniversary appearances and the nostalgic trotting out of old memories. But let’s get past the reverie of the past. When dipping into those memories, let’s bring them up from the deeps and look at them with free eyes, fresh feelings, that we might better understand Season Twenty’s “arc to infinity.”

 
Arc of Infinity
 
First up is Arc of Infinity, which is a telling phrase in of itself. I posit that the “arc of infinity” is in fact a descriptor of Season Twenty, insofar as the season’s “arc” is one oriented around themes of “infinity” in juxtaposition with “death.” There’s more than one kind of infinity, of course.
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Eruditorum Press: A Manifesto

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People of the universe, please attend carefully. The message that follows is vital to the future of you all.

Welcome to Eruditorum Press, a group blog and small press dedicated to innovative and intelligent cultural criticism. I suspect most of you, at least right at the moment this posts, have come from Philip Sandifer: Writer. Hi, I’m still Phil Sandifer, and whatever it is you came here for is still here and will continue to be here, unless you came for that monochrome paisley, in which case your life will now be an endless sea of disappointment. I’ll still be doing weekly comics reviews, Last War in Albion, and a rotating project a la The Super Nintendo Project, as well as hosting Weird Kitties. There’s also going to be a lot more.

We, or at least I, am acutely aware that there is no shortage of pop culture analysis sites on the Internet, all of them claiming that they’re different and unique. We, however, think that we are different and unique. For one thing, we’re a somewhat more personal affair. We’re still funded by the same Patreon the site has been funded for a year now by you, dear readers, although some of that money will be going to people other than me now. (Everyone is either paid a modest sum or stubbornly refusing my money here.) And there’s a new milestone goal called “Phil stops losing money on this idea” that I’d love to hit, by the way. But more than that, I think we offer a perspective that’s unlike what you can get from any of the other sites in this vein. And that perspective is… well… hmm.

One of the most absolutely satisfying things about my blogging career over the past few years has been the fellow travelers I’ve met and befriended. I’ve become a part of an intellectual circle of critics, not through any active attempt to create a critical empire, but just because I’ve had the honor of meeting cool and brilliant people doing cool and brilliant work. Which, now that I think of the implications under late capitalism, is appalling. I should absolutely have a critical empire, dammit, and so now I’m making one.

More seriously, I don’t want to be so crass as to define the terms of this intellectual circle or anything. I’m sure that if you asked the other contributors what the vision or mission statement of Eruditorum Press is, you’d get different answers, which is as it should be. Indeed, you’ll get different ones, of varying degrees of sincerity and coherence, every time you refresh the page. But it’s traditional, when christening mad endeavors like this, for the editor-in-chief (oh fuck, that’s me) to offer some sort of confident mission statement as to what it’s all about. So here’s a faltering attempt at, if not a manifesto, at least a description.

Obviously, we’re most easily united by common interests. This is not a Doctor Who blog, and some day I may even hire someone who doesn’t like Doctor Who, although it is obviously always going to have something of a special place within Eruditorum Press, as will British culture in general.…

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You’re On the Global Frequency (Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge)

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Comments are going to be temporarily disabled across the site for a few hours this evening due to some site maintenance. Relatedly, you should be sure to check back here tomorrow.

I had three great loves in childhood, and though I have forgiven them, they all betrayed me. Doctor Who I have, of course, written about at length; it turned on May 12th, 1996, the day before Super Mario RPG came out. Comics, a topic relevant to this game, were a more gradual process, with no clear moment the line was crossed from a certain tension between us to outright betrayal. The beginning of seventh grade, in any case; around my twelfth birthday. Mortal Kombat II, perhaps, or Final Fantasy III. And then there are video games. 
It’s hard to count how many times I’ve been betrayed by video games. There is, after all, a high potential for it. We’ve discussed already how the basic model of business games relies on the idea that they’ll be fun for a decent number of hours. There is nothing, then, quite as awful as the phenomenon of the shit video game. To buy a game is not a small thing; there are ultimately a finite number of moments in a year where you’ll get to do it. Picking a bad one is awful.
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge is an example – a crushing, awful disappointment waiting to sting anyone foolish enough to be seduced by its branding. It is as though they took two-level demos of five games deemed unworthy of further development, reskinned them to include Marvel characters, and released them as an omnibus. The connections between levels and the five playable superheroes are often tenuous at best. Cyclops is randomly thrown in a mine-cart level. Storm is trapped underwater, seemingly mainly so nobody would have to figure out how to get good controls for a flying character. Wolverine is fighting evil clowns. Controls are sloppy and imprecise.
But in another sense, video games betray you from the start. It’s how they work; their central dynamic. The resistance of rules to will. We bind our very nervous systems to them, and they twist away and sever us, leaving us staring at the sudden amputation of the Game Over screen. Even today, Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge exists within me. I have not touched it in a decade at least, but when, in the first level, I drop down a shaft and find three paths that I can go down, there is an deep instinct, beyond even a memory, of what order to go in. In yet another, then, it’s only ever one big betrayal: an ongoing process of being repulsed by what defines you. 
I am about fifteen minutes from most of the places I grew up, halfway up Morris Ridge, overlooking downtown. Summer is breaking on the shores of the shrinking days, but retains the high ground for now. The sense of oddness that has permeated the weather for years persists; it feels as though it didn’t used to be this hot in early September.
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