Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

A story is a machine that kills fascists. A story is a machine that kills whatever you want it to. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Six: Before Watchmen: Minutemen)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Darwyn Cooke got the job of writing and drawing Before Watchmen: Minutemen in part on the strength of his previous work on DC: The New Frontier, which, like Watchmen, was a formally thoughtful and heavily historicized look at the history of comics.

Figure 854: The portentous opening monologue
resolves into a gag about writing styles. (By Darwyn
Cooke, from Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1, 2012)
Before Watchmen: Minutemen shares much of that formal thoughtfulness, taking an often playful angle on Watchmen’s style. The comic opens with two pages of four stacked page-width panels that evoke the lush visions of The New Frontier while also utilizing the object-to-object transitions that define Watchmen. The first page, for instance, jumps from a first person perspective of an infant Hollis Mason staring out of his bassinet, defined by an arc traversing the panel, to a skyscape of New York City from within a tunnel, also providing a central arc, to a Kirby Krackle-filled panel of the Solar System, the sun providing a third central arc, and finally to a panel of Doctor Manhattan’s forehead. Over these panels is a portentous monologue, in caption boxes that wind down the page in a backwards S: “You come into this world, and your point of view is narrow. If you’re lucky, it’s a safe and loving place. As you grow, your view of the world broadens and you struggle to find your place within it. If you’re strong, you learn to survive it. Over time you may not decipher the mysteries of the universe, but you can make your peace with that and find strength in what you know to be true. If you’re wise enough to approach this seeming impasse with humility, you may even find a sustained happiness. Then one day you meet a guy, and he throws a wrench in the gears. He takes away your understanding of the world you live in.”  The approach continues on the second page, only with the object-to-object transitions slowly zooming out to represent the whole of the circle until, in the third panel, the entirety of a clockface, the time still hours before midnight, is visible. The text here stutters – the caption box reads “you hope that over time…” while a dialogue box, the speaker off-panel, repeats “over time…” The fourth panel simply zooms out further from this scene, the clock moved to the midground, while in the foreground, at the right of the panel, a typewriter containing the first page of the epilogue to Under the Hood is visible. The off-panel dialogue continues with a punchline rivaling “that’s quite a drop” from the seventh panel of Watchmen: “this is terrible.”
Figure 855: Cooke subverts the nine-panel grid.
(By Darwyn Cooke, from Before Watchmen:
Minutemen #3, 2012)
But Cooke’s moves following this punchline pull in two different ways. On the one hand, the opening panel of the third page features Hollis Mason staring out at the reader as he says (ostensibly to his dog), “I’ll just have to face facts, girl.
…

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Myriad Universes: The Return of Okona Volume 2

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This run of issues is an interesting one, as to my knowledge it’s the only example of a story arc being interrupted midway through. While issue 28 “The Remembered One” picks up the Return of Okona storyline from issues 25-7, the next issue “Honor Bound!”, has absolutely nothing to do with it. It also sucks and introduces a raft of difficult-to-ignore-even-for-me continuity errors, so we’re not talking about it (perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also not written by Michael Jan Friedman). Issues 30 and 31, however (“The Rift!” and “Kingdom of the Damned”, respectively), do continue this story arc and bring it to a fitting conclusion.

“The Remembered One” continues the subplot about Worf dealing with being a widower and absentee father introduced in the first half of this series. It’s the anniversary of K’Heleyr’s death and Worf isn’t handling it especially well. Discussing the matter in ten forward with Guinan, Worf reveals that the source of his anxiety is the fact that he misses K’Heleyr and feels guilty about doing so, because she died a warrior’s death, and thus an honourable one, and he should be happy for her instead. Of course, I’m not entirely certain how true that is since in “Reunion” K’Heleyr was actually murdered by Duras and I don’t think Klingons consider murder honourable as it’s not fair and equitable one-on-one combat. But I’m going to let that slide as anything that retcons even a little bit of “Reunion” out of existence is more than OK in my book. In this timeline of events, we’ll say K’Heleyr died a warrior’s death in honourable combat with Duras.

(In fact, with everything this story arc has been doing over the past few months, it may have just come up with a version of the Worf/K’Heleyr/Alexander story that actually *works*.)

What Guinan was going to remind Worf of, before she was interrupted by a pulsar exploding and freezing the crew’s life energies in a state of suspended animation, was that he was still raised human and thus could still react to things with human emotions. So when an energy being feeds on the life force of the Enterprise crew to assume the visage of K’Heyler to learn about love and loss from Worf (individual members of her species, which live in the pulsar, are born, grow and die in only one day, but their experiences live on through a race memory), he’s able to react to her in true Enterprise fashion by calling upon both the human and Klingon sides of his positionality. In particular, he’s able to show the new K’Heleyr how her predecessor valued loyalty and sacrifice to others and would have been appalled at what she’s doing now, consigning the Enterprise to burn up in the pulsar because the crew are rendered incapable of making the necessary course corrections.

This issue is also noteworthy for marking the comic book debut of Ro Laren: She’s not much more than an extra here, but it’s not her story after all and everyone else who’s not Worf sits out two-thirds of this issue too.…

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Belated Comics Reviews (August 19th, 2015)

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Happy to say that my comics have made it to the correct shop, and then out of the shop and to my home, where I have read them and ranked them from worst to best of what I was foolish enough to pay for. (Though strangely, Loki didn’t make it home, and I don’t think I saw it in the shops. Will follow up and review it next week one way or another.)

EDIT: After several people expressed disappointment about the lack of Loki, I got a digital copy and added it to the list.

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #4

A great issue #2.

Guardians of Knowhere #3

For most of this, it runs along without any of Bendis’s most infuriating writing tics. The Angela/Gamora confrontation is excellent character work with added punching. The plot moves off of Yotat and towards things recognizable as characters we care about. Mike Deodato draws gorgeous lightning. It’s a solid comic. And then it does a cliffhanger that amounts to “a person appears.” No explanation of this person. Maybe she is identifiable, but she’s not identifiable in a way that I can identify, and I’m nearing a quarter-century of reading Marvel comics. It’s not a cliffhanger in any useful sense; there’s no excitement. There’s a question, sure, namely “who is that,” but there’s no reason for me to be invested in the answer to it.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #2

It’s a bit longer on action sequences than plot, in a way that’s not entirely satisfying, but that’s probably going to come out in the wash given that it’s a weekly event. All the same, this is mostly reapers chasing people as opposed to actually moving forward. But there’s enough charming and funny bits to make it an enjoyable trip.

Secret Wars: Secret Love #1

A fun anthology one-shot. The Daredevil story’s a bit off the boil for me, but the others are varying shades of delightful, with the Ms. Marvel/Ghost Rider story probably being the highlight from any serious perspective, and the Squirrel Girl/Thor story being the highlight from any moral one. Nice way to get some oddball talent into Marvel, and it’s always nice to see an odd genre like the romance comic get a revival.

Captain Britain and the Mighty Defenders #2

The only possible complaint to have about this book is that it deserved more than two issues to tell its story. Still, it’s an enormously compelling case for Faiza Hussain as a character. Really, she needs an ongoing role in the Marvel Universe. Preferably as Captain Britain.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #17

A marvelous ending to Ewing’s run. Ewing is not a hugely subtle writer, which is manifestly not a criticism. He writes big, broad, and bright comics that wear their hearts on their sleeves. And this one’s heart is basically Alan Moore’s definition of magic and some infrastructure of Promethea. Given that Moore does not write big, broad, and bright comics that unabashedly scream their themes as text as loudly as possible, this is a delightful thing to do.…

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Turning the Tables

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“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1

Consciously or not, a lion’s share of SF/Fantasy is concerned with just this.  Almost to the point of running with Marx’s ‘great idea for a story!’.

It’s also a great illustration that the best Marxism is Gothic Marxism.  A Marxism which recognises the uncanny, the weird, the surreal, the fantastic, as both truthful expression and invaluable heuristic.  The real world is made so strange, so bass-ackwards, so haunted and haunting, so alien by capitalism, that only historical materialism informed by the uncanny and the dreamlike can truly capture it.…

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“…to antiquity its due reverence”: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

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There was a time when being the sixth film in a motion picture franchise would have been the subject of mockery. Once considered a laughingstock, a movie with five sequels all set in the same continuity is completely unheard of nowadays, being as we are in an era where it’s rare to go two films without getting a full-on “reboot” or “reimagining” with a new cast and director and suspiciously returning everything else.

So Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country feels oddly and quaintly dated today. It’s a film that sets about closing a story decisively for no other reason than it’s the artistically and creatively right thing to do, and that’s just something you won’t see today in the age of Cinematic Universes that are unfinished by design and consecutive reboots within three or four years of one another that all tell variations on the same stock plot. And make no mistake, it absolutely is and does: In 1991 there were not yet any plans for a second Star Trek film series, so this was a movie made for the express purposes of thanking the fans for their support and bringing the Original Series story to a dignified close. A lot of received fan wisdom seems to posit this film was greenlit to “make up” for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which would otherwise have been the final Trek movie, but from the studio’s perspective the past *three* Star Trek movies had all underperformed at the box office and they didn’t see much difference between them one way or the other. But this was the 25th Anniversary, and the Star Trek film team felt something needed to be done.

(This also explains why the movie looks somewhat stunningly cheap: While I remember the VFX shots having been breathtaking and they’re certainly impressive when it counts, everywhere else the fact Paramount only allowed this movie to be made if it was produced on the thinnest of shoestring budgets plainly shows. Most notably, while I slagged off Star Trek V: The Final Frontier for reusing the sets from Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s actually way more egregious in this movie. I mean, they didn’t even try to hide the fact the transporter room, corridors, observation lounge and ten-forward are painfully obviously from Captain Picard’s Enterprise. More on that later, actually.)

You might think a movie with that pedigree would be cripplingly fanwanky, and there are a whole slew of references on display here. But none of them feel like forced name-drops done simply for the sake of pandering. Everything feels organic and freeform, with the grand finale that takes centre stage flowing seamlessly into a prequel for the story that’s playing out for us elsewhere. Leonard Nimoy and Nicholas Meyer are back behind the camera, and the end result is much of what you would expect from the team: It’s Meyer’s name on the director’s chair, but it’s clearly Nimoy’s deft eye for cinematic photography that elevates the look and feel of The Undiscovered Country *substantially*: There was a chance the film could have worn its bargain-basement trappings a little too obviously, but Nimoy gives the movie a grandiose, epic sense of scale befitting the send-off of such iconic folk heroes of modern myth.…

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Faerie Tales (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)

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So we imagine ourselves to be, what, the heroes of our own stories? The protagonists of whatever story we think it is that’s being told? Or worse, some sort of god with the privilege of directing the protagonist; a consciousness that’s been put in charge of a body in the world, tasked with saving it, redeeming it, making it so that there was a purpose all along.
The bulk of our task is to find soft places in the world. Places where we pass from the seen Overworld to the hidden Underworld, and plumb the depths of dungeons to excise monsters that lurk beneath the surface of all things. This, at least, is classic Zelda, but A Link to the Past introduces a second sort of soft place in the form of portals to its bespoke gimmick, a shadow world with its own dungeons and monsters. 
The portal to faerie is a common enough image; the eccentric space where the border of the world frays. That space when you push through the bushes at the back of your yard, or the room in the basement of the school, or the corner of the store where the Nintendo used to be. The dungeon is one example, certainly – a space that opens up into a vast interior whose dimensions are utterly unsuggested by its mere gateway. But this is a different sort of example – not a cave carved into the world, but the world’s shadow; the Dark World; the second quest. The place that is not here, where we are not ourselves. 
As such, we are the only person there. The only one who knows our sins and our triumphs. Only us, our arms stretched outwards, amputated stumps grasping desperately for some means of controlling the world. All of this is predicated, of course, on the idea that some means of controlling the world exists, as opposed to the likely reality that we are in fact just the chaotic after-images of a sufficiently complex algorithm. 
It’s a matter of curious existential fact that the childhood of the Legend of Zelda series is, in Zelda canon, a discarded dystopia caused by a failure to beat the 1998 release The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A game I have never beaten because, ultimately, I was pissed off that it’s possible to blow the Skulltula quest before you actually get the quest. I played through that hell in 93 with the bonding plant in Return to Zork, thank you. Which means, I suppose, that this really is my world. The truth of who I am, created by my own later gaming inadequacy.
Certainly it’s a memorable game. A fundamental aspect of my childhood, so essential to my sense of self that it is difficult to quite believe in the possibility of a human consciousness that has not played this game. How can you be truly human if you are not shaped by the precise cultural influences that produced me, after all?
…

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Myriad Universes: The Return of Okona Volume 1

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It’s perhaps inevitable that at some point spin-off media will begin to revisit one-shot characters and plotlines from their parent series. I don’t personally consider this to be necessarily bad or fanwanky: A lot of times it makes good storytelling sense to return to those concepts, so long as it’s not done simply because it can. You could argue that this is in fact the point of media like this, to go back to things the parent series abandoned and examine it in more detail, and while I think there are a lot of other reasons spin-off media is good, that’s certainly one of them.

The title of this story arc is a bit misleading, as while it does indeed mark the return of Captain Thaddeus Okona it’s actually about a great deal more than that. The Return of Okona immediately follows on from The Star Lost, and expands greatly on its predecessor’s approach to character building: This miniseries marks the first time Michael Jan Friedman begins to seriously double down on the number and intricacy of parallel subplots for DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation-From here on out each issue or set of issues is going to explore at least one important story for every one of the main characters and several reoccurring characters to boot. It gives the comic line a very novelesque sense of pacing and scale and makes the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation feel far more vast and expansive as a result.

In fact, it’s so lengthy, gets so intricate and I’ve got enough to say about it (and I’ve got a whole other summer event miniseries, plus assorted one-shots and two and three parters I want to look at for this summer hiatus) that I’m breaking protocol a bit for the comics: Instead of doing a post for each issue, I’m covering the first three stories, “Wayward Son”, “Strangers in Strange Lands!” and “City Life”, in one extended essay and calling it “The Return of Okona Volume 1”. I’ll do the back three (“The Remembered One”, “The Rift!” and “Kingdom of the Damned”) a post from now, with the expected entry in-between. I’m not technically sure all six issues are considered part of the same story arc as the major plot is different between the two sets of books, but Captain Okona features prominently in both of them so I’m considering them all part of the same story for category purposes. If I didn’t, I’d basically end up reviewing the entire comic line issue by issue and quite frankly nobody wants to see that.

Right now the important thing is that The Return of Okona is every bit as elegant and meticulously crafted as anything else Michael Jan Friedman has done. You wouldn’t think so given how Captain Okona is a bit of a broad-strokes character, not the sort you’d expect to divine a lot of nuance out of, but Friedman manages it: His care and attention to not just narrative structures, but the symbolic context, meaning and associations of said structures, enables him to craft a compelling and provocative story about the kind of character Okona is and the role he plays in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 15th, 2015)

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I was pleasantly surprised when, along with the expected release of the Janelle Monáe-led The Eephus EP, the end of the week brought a new FKA Twigs EP as well. The Eephus is solid; its main effect is to stress the intriguing talent of Jidenna, whose “Classic Man” is probably the highlight, getting the obligatory remix with Kendrick Lamar verses (not as good a version, but charming in its own right). Monáe’s “Yoga” (also featuring Jidenna) is also great. The remaining tracks are somewhat filler, although Roman GianArthur’s “iKnow” is decent.

Also essential viewing is the entire Wondaland crew’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a live cut about police brutality.

The FKA Twigs release, M3LL155X, is of more consistent quality. Nothing comes close to “Two Weeks” in quality, but that’s the sort of song few artists ever hit the quality of twice in a career, so that’s churlish. The standout track is probably “In Time,” though as I said, they’re all quite good. The above link is a combo music video for the first four tracks, and is disturbing and weird and wonderful.

What’ve you all been listening to?

Or, alternate second topic, Vox Day decided to reply to a couple days old tweet in which I suggested he was a massive sequence of junk DNA by calling me a pedophile and insulting my appearance, which seemed like rather weak game from such an accomplished troll. I mean, it’s not even good libel.

Which led to me tweeting claims like “Vox Day is incapable of maintaining an erection unless there’s a photograph of Francisco Franco visible” and “Vox Day has the Innsmouth Look” with the hashtag #betterlibel.

Please, amuse me with further high quality libel about Vox Day, either here or on twitter.…

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Yet More Thoughts on Hannibal (Lecter)

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“You can tell that Hannibal is fiction because Jonathan Jones has not been murdered and put on ostentatious display.” – Dr Philip Sandifer

The first chapter of Red Dragon includes mention of the moon (of course), Sirius and Jupiter.  The second chapter mentions a meteor shower.  The first of two mentions of meteor showers in the book.  The second mention (of the Perseids, in the second case) is directly followed by a quotation from scripture.  The people of the novel Red Dragon are haunted by stars and planets, and by rituals and scripture.

Nothing in Red Dragon is more horrifying than the short digression on how tabloids work.  Yet this chapter is also evidence of the empathy of the book’s narrator.  His empathy extends even to the unscrupulous reporter, Freddy Lounds.  His pride, his resistance to scorn, his refusal to be exploited.  Meanwhile, cancer, to the tabloids, is a fact of life, as are serial killers.  But the tabloid Freddy works for also deals in sightings of Elvis, and astronomers who glimpse God.

The narrator of Red Dragon is the empath.  Will Graham’s empathic gift is more talked about than seen. It is Dr Bloom, not Graham, who interprets Francis Dolarhyde’s eating of the Blake painting as an attempt to stop killing.  Graham noticeably fails to empathise with anybody throughout the book. He observes Crawford, Molly, Lounds, Reba, Dolarhyde, Lecter, Chilton, and all, as from the outside looking in. Crawford is more imaginative that Graham because he projects what he needs onto Graham.  Crawford is more like Dolarhyde than Graham is.

Even as it recites the standard line on ‘sociopathy’, Red Dragon contradicts it as much as it accepts it.  The ‘sociopaths’ in this book are not always lacking empathy.  Lecter certainly can, and Graham acknowledges it.  I have always thought that sadism requires empathy.  How can you enjoy the pain of others if you cannot imagine it?

In Red Dragon, Hannibal already has his maroon eyes which reflect the light in points of red, and his preternatural senses.  He gains his prodigious memory and his extra finger, like a Gallifreyan’s second heart, later, in The Silence of the Lambs.

Speaking of which, Dolarhyde talking to Lounds sounds like a Robert Holmes villain.

Also, that scene is regurgitated in a bowdlerised form in The Dark Knight, in the scene in which the Joker kidnaps a Batman-copycat and tapes it.

In Hannibal Rising, the boy Hannibal emerges from privilege, from the Renaissance, from the Sforzas (a right bunch of bastards).  But he also emerges from the aftermath of Barbarossa.  His childhood tutor is a Jew who escaped the holocaust.  He is adopted by a woman from Hiroshima.  His early years are haunted by mention of the Nuremburg trials.  He is born of the 20th century’s ultimate horrors.

Cannibalism is part of WWII-Gothic.  Most particularly Barbarossa-Gothic.  Thanks the Siege of Leningrad, and to Andrei Chikatilo’s (possibly bogus) childhood reminiscences, it is linked to the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (see also Child 44). …

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