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Comics Reviews (March 18th, 2015)

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Comics reviews are a weekly feature provided because my Patreon provides over $200 for every week of blog content. 

From worst to best of what I bought, which wasn’t much this week.

All-New X-Men #39 and Guardians Team-Up #3

Two parts of the largely unwanted Black Vortex crossover this week, and it plods along with the relentless lack of speed that characterizes multi-title crossovers. We’ve at least made it to the point where different books follow different characters, which is something. Curious to see how this works when it buggers off to some distinctly more minor titles come April, losing its anchoring in Guardians of the Galaxy and All-New X-Men. But it’s a fairly intellectual curiosity – this is not particularly interesting, and I’m glad the X-books are now freed up to go work towards the end of Bendis’s run.

Batgirl Endgame

A wordless one-shot that ties Batgirl into some Batman event I don’t entirely understand, but that appears to involve some sort of Joker toxin virus. It’s a slender thing, but worth highlighting this week in particular for an illustration of why spiking that Joker variant cover for Batgirl #41 mattered by demonstrating the virtues of letting Barbara Gordon be resolutely undefined by The Killing Joke, which remains the worst thing Alan Moore has ever written.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #12

One of those issues that sets up interesting things more than it does them – for someone with a better knack for remembering plot lines from recent comics, I suspect the rush of references here is very satisfying and fits together brilliantly. For me, who can’t handle a comic without a recap page, it’s less engaging, although I’m still really interested in where Ewing is going with Loki in the general case.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #6

Ultimately, this just repeats the revelation from last month, although now with new details of exactly how it is that Nextwave is being considered in-continuity, where it had previously apparently not been. (That’s news to me, but.) Although the best line is clearly “The Beyonder? Oh god, I should have never taught that guy to poop.” Because remember, kids, while there’s apparently doubt that Nextwave: Agents of HATE, one of the greatest superhero series of the past decade, is in continuity, there’s no doubt at all that Secret Wars II is. Ah, Marvel. I bet next issue will have LOTS MORE PUNCHING.

Batgirl #40

Batgirl defeats the angst-ridden version of herself defined by her disability and victimization so that Gotham City can rock the fuck out. God, I love this New Pop aesthetic of comics.

The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl #3

I laughed multiple times over the course of this issue, which is really all you can ask for from a comic called The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl. Much like Batgirl, this is firmly in the New Pop style (see also Spider-Gwen, The Wicked and the Divine, and Sex Criminals), which is worth defining more rigorously, as it’s by miles the most exciting thing going on in comics right now.…

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No Question

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I wrote this for somebody as a favour, to fill some space.  I thought I might as well post it here.  It isn’t really a Shabgraff piece, but it exists.

William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.  It wasn’t the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or any of the other candidates sometimes suggested.  But how can we be so sure?

We have the accounts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  His rivals, detractors, friends and colleagues had no doubt.  Ben Jonson wrote in his published diaries about his criticisms of the plays – right alongside his love and admiration for his friend Shakespeare, their author.  Nobody questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his own work for centuries.  It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that a brilliant but eccentric woman called Delia Bacon wrote a book in which she heavily hinted that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon.  She convinced a few people – including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud (who never believed anything silly, of course).  The early-to-mid 19th century was an age still influenced by the Romantics, who had invented the idea of the Artist as a lone creator, driven by the spirit, scribbling away in a garret, listening to the Muse whispering in his ear and writing for the sake of Art itself.  William Shakespeare – a professional actor, jobbing hack, and sharer in the going concern that was the Globe Theatre – didn’t fit this Romantic ideal.  Delia Bacon preferred her more upper-class, better-educated, self-consciously intellectual namesake.  Trouble is, aside from the total lack of any evidence at all connecting Bacon to any of the plays or poems, we also know Sir Francis Bacon’s writing style, his range, his concerns, and his opinions.  They don’t fit the plays.  At all.  The same is true of the current most-favoured candidate, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the shy bard depicted in the recent (and very silly) movie Anonymous.  We have extant examples of de Vere’s poetry.  It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t compare to the style and quality of even Shakespeare’s earliest and worst sonnets.  The Earl also wrote a few comedy plays.  None of them survive, but they are mentioned by a contemporary critic, Francis Meres.  Meres also mentions Shakespeare.  The context makes it perfectly clear that Meres thinks of them as different people.  (This also rubbishes the notion that deVere would be precluded from writing plays by his social position – the excuse often used to explain the Earl’s theorised decision to use an actor as a front man.)

It’s often said by ‘Anti-Statfordians’ that Shakespeare lacked the education he would have needed to write the plays.  But Shakespeare, as the son of a local alderman, would have been entitled to attend Stratford’s King Edward VI grammar school.  Shakespeare’s plays are recognisably the work of someone with an Elizabethan grammar school education – a grounding that would look more like a Classics degree from Oxbridge today.  Anti-Stratfordians often point out that, unlike other playwrights (Christopher Marlow, for instance) Shakespeare didn’t attend University.…

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“No Future”: The Best of Both Worlds

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This was not meant to be.

This war’s not supposed to be happening.

The demons of our future have finally caught up with us. Forced to face a full disclosure of human ugliness before we were prepared, they found us, they fought us and they won. A tragedy of such proportions that its reverberations are still being keenly felt to this day, made even more tragic by the knowledge of how entirely avoidable it was. What happened? What went wrong?

“The Best of Both Worlds” is the episode that just about universally gets cited as the point where Star Trek: The Next Generation stopped messing about, came into its game and at long last stepped out of the shadow of its predecessor. Even in the comparatively recent re-evaluation of the series in mainline fandom that posits the *entirety* of Season 3 as the show’s high water mark, not just “The Best of Both Worlds”, this episode *still* gets wheeled out as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s finest hour time and time again.

It’s not. It’s not any of those things. But it is important.

Nor is any of that other received history true either, by the way: As I never tire of pointing out, Star Trek: The Next Generation was never cult or unpopular, consistently being rated among the top twenty most watched shows on television for its entire seven year run. In fact, ratings had been steadily climbing over the course of the third season, and while “The Best of Both Worlds” may well be the peak of the show’s early popularity, with damn good reason, I might add, it didn’t do anything more to make or break this show’s success then anything else we’ve been looking at over the past three years. But it can perhaps be said that Star Trek: The Next Generation was still not being embraced by a particular subset of its audience, namely hardcore Star Trek fans, pretty much only because it wasn’t the Original Series. Fans being fans, they loudly voiced their non-directional dissatisfaction at anyone who made the ill-advised decision to listen to them, including members of the production team.

Due to a combination of Trekkers being pretty much the dictionary definition of “vocal minority” and a dangerously myopic view held by Paramount corporate that Trekkers were Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s primary demographic, one can perhaps understand why Michael Piller went into this story with the express intent of demonstrating Captain Picard’s humanity, which fans seemed to think he lacked, by stripping him of it. Piller had grown increasingly distant from his writing staff as the third season went on, rightly figuring most of them would be walking out on him by year’s end (sadly, this was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I’ll bet this is exactly what strained his relationship with people like Melinda Snodgrass).…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Cucumber, Banana, Tofu

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This is a bonus post, the topic of which was selected by my backers on Patreon. Voting is currently going on for next month’s bonus post, with candidates including Orphan Black and China Mieville. Also Deadwood. Please, if you enjoy my blog and my work, consider chipping in a buck a week or so. Thanks.

Let’s start with the title – mine, in this case, although Davies’s is magnificent in its own right. I say this mostly as disclaimer – there’s an awful lot to say about these three shows. They are very, very good. They deserve reams of analysis, and much of that really ought to come from within queer communities. They’ve gotten some, but not nearly enough. Nevertheless, I am me, and not the vast and polyvocal assemblage of queer communities, and I’m best known for writing a blog about Doctor Who, so the main angle here is going to be an auteur-centric take on the work of Russell T Davies. Much is left unsaid. Above anything else, I recommend watching them – if you’re in the UK, I assume they exist via some sort of catch-up or video on demand service. If you’re in the US, it looks like Logo TV is running them starting on April 13th, and hopefully they’ll make iTunes and Amazon appearances at the same time.

Seriously, watch them, because they are the best work of Russell T Davies’s career, and whatever we might say about the slow march towards an inevitable and entirely predictable end that was the tail end of Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who, Davies remains one of the best television writers in the history of the medium, so a phrase like “the best work of Russell T Davies’s career” carries some fucking weight.

So, to recap, after Miracle Day landed with the wet slap of a piece of tofu, Davies began developing a series for Showtime to be called Cucumber. This was a show he’d been talking about making since the latter days of his time on Doctor Who – a show about middle-aged gay men. Unfortunately production on this got delayed when his partner was diagnosed with cancer and the pair moved back to the UK, beginning a several year period of Davies basically not working save for Wizards vs Aliens and an episode of Old Jack’s Boat that I bet you haven’t seen either. Until, eventually, Cucumber re-emerged, now at Channel 4, and with a pair of spin-off shows in the form of Banana and Tofu.

The names, as Davies cheerily explained way back when he was making it in the US, and explains again in the opening scene of Cucumber, come from a study he read that classified the male erection into categories based on produce, with tofu being the softest and cucumber being the hardest. Indeed, much of the show is unchanged from the early teases, with the first episode retaining much of the description Davies gave Ben Cook back in The Writer’s Tale when talking about what he wanted to do next.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.06: A Golden Crown

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones is supported by my Patreon. Please consider backing.

State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly.
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Eddard Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark
Stags of King’s Landing: King Robert Baratheon, Joffrey Baratheon
Direwolves of the Eyrie: Catelyn Stark
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Vaes Dothrak: Daenerys Targaryen, Viserys Targaryen
Bears of Vaes Dothrak: Jorah Mormont
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Starks of Winterfell: Robb Stark, Bran Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
And the Lion of the Eyrie, Tyrion Lannister
The Wall is unmanned.
The episode is in thirteen parts. The first is four minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The first shot is of Ned Stark in bed recovering from his injuries.
The second is two minutes long and is set in Vaes Dothrak. The transition is by dialogue, from Ned and Robert talking about Daenerys to Daenerys. 
The third is five minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by family, from Daenerys Targaryen to Brynden Rivers. It features the death of several wildlings in a skirmish with Robb and Theon. 
The fourth is one minute long and is set in the Eyrie. The transition is by image, from Osha being taken captive to Tyrion in a skycell. 
The fifth is two minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from the closed door of Tyrion’s cell to Syrio closing the door. 
The sixth is six minutes long and is set in Vaes Dothrak. The transition is by hard cut, to Arya beginning dancing lessons with Syrio having heard his views on the Many-Faced God to Daenerys eating a horse’s heart. 
The seventh is eight minutes long and is set in the Eyrie. The transition is by hard cut, from Jorah to an establishing shot of the skycell. At the episode’s halfway point, Tyrion is demanding a proper trial. 
The eighth is six minutes long and is in two sections; it set in King’s Landing. The first is section is two minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Bronn shrugging to a shot of the forest and Robert’s hunting party. The other section is four minutes long; the transition is by theme, from Robert to the Iron Throne. 
The ninth is four minutes long and is set in the Eyrie. The transition is by dialogue, from Ned Stark talking about the Lannisters to Tyrion. It features the death of Ser Vardis Egan, killed in battle by Bronn.
The tenth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion walking free to Sansa and Septa Mordane. 
The eleventh is one minute long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by theme, from Sansa kissing Joffrey as part of his abuse and manipulation of her to Theon confronting Roz as she goes to King’s Landing. 
The twelfth is two minutes long and is set in King’s Landing.
…

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“Point of Singularity”: Transfigurations

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If you’ve seen “Transfigurations” and know literally anything about me, you know what my feelings on it are going to be.

This is plainly the best episode of the entire third season precisely because it’s so unlike anything else in it, with the exception of perhaps “Tin Man”. This is the moment where the promises and themes Michael Piller hinted at in “Evolution” finally come to fruition: It fulfills the potential the earlier episode could only grasp at and is where Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s new mission statement finally becomes clear. Tellingly, it’s not written by any of the current staff writers, but is a concept fleshed out and fully realised by “The Offspring” scribe René Echevarria at Michael Piller’s personal request, in the pitch that actually got him his staff job. Knowing this, the title of “Transfigurations” becomes particularly apt, as change finally does seem to be in the air. It’s a fleeting burst of clairvoyance, a brief glimpse at what this show could be, should be, and has always had the opportunity to be in the last moments before everything implodes in on itself.

It’s curious that this is a story Piller warmed up to as much as he did (even putting the finishing touches on it himself), considering it’s once again a script that seems to go against his central tenet that everything must fundamentally be about the main characters. That it’s so self-evidently successful and beautiful is also the clearest sign we’ve seen yet that Piller might be wrong about this particular conviction, or at least that he ought to refine it a bit. Because in spite of its origins as a story about “how 24th century medicine works up close and personal”, this episode is absolutely about John Doe and the effect he has on the crew, and critically, the effect they have on him.

Doctor Crusher is John’s primary and obvious interlocutor, and yet her actual role in the story is somewhat elusive and deceptive. A number of readings try to interpret this story as her falling in love with him, but that’s not what’s actually going on (indeed, this is a tack even the show itself seems savvy of, given the dinner scene between Bev and Wesley). No, while “Transfigurations” is unquestionably Bev’s best outing so far, what’s happening here is a full realisation of her new role as live sciences mystery solver: John is the ultimate science mystery for her to crack, because in him she (rightly, as it eventually turns out) sees the future of humanoid life, albeit perhaps only unconsciously. The quest for knowledge and understanding, and a hope this will help us know the universe and our place within it even just a tiny bit better, drives and energizes her. And let’s not forget that for all of John’s miraculous and seemingly impossible acts of healing, as both he and Beverly repeat a number of times throughout the episode, it was she who “gave him life”.…

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And So It Begins (The Last War in Albion Part 87: October Incident: 1966)

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This is the fifteenth of sixteen (it grew) parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Eventually, the wheels came off at Warrior amidst a number of ego clashes, many involving Moore, who fell out with both Dez Skinn and his Marvelman artist and longtime collaborator Alan Davis. 

“There is a moment of crystalline silence. The storm holds its breath. And so it begins…” – Alan Moore, Marvelman

the period in question was one where Moore was bringing a number of projects to a close. He ended his Captain Britain work in June, done his last D.R. & Quinch in May, and then pulled Marvelman in August. Taken in the context of his ceasing work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD in the wake of the Swamp Thing job and a different picture of why he was dropping projects starts to emerge – especially given that this is around when DC would have started offering him additional work. Certainly that’s Alan Davis’s contention when he states bluntly, “Alan clearly quit both Captain Britain and Marvelman at virtually the same time but claims external, unconnected reasons for both. Isn’t it simpler to accept that with Swamp Thing and new offers from DC – which were far better paid – the volume of work increased to a point where choices had to be made. I know I, amongst many other creators, was hoping for a call from DC.” But this “pure self-interest” theory of Moore’s actions still doesn’t explain why he persisted with V for Vendetta in Warrior, which would have been just as low-paying. Some of it, surely, is that Lloyd was keen for it to continue, noting that “I was very happy to keep doing it because Dez was still paying me money,” and that, more importantly, he was passionate about the work, saying that “nothing was more important to us… it was ours. And we could do what we liked with it.” And there was, to be sure, a practical consideration: the project had a planned ending that, one reached, would allow it to find new life as a stand-alone volume. Whatever Warrior’s flaws, it was at least adequate to the task of funding the work’s completion, and if Lloyd was happy with its payment, well, he was the one who most needed the money. V for Vendetta was still his main job, as opposed to a passion project to be done on days he didn’t have any Swamp Thing work to do.
…

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“Paint me like one of your French girls”: Ménage à Troi

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“ahahahahaha I have no idea what’s going on”

Possibly the kindest thing I could say about “Ménage à Troi” is that it perfectly encapsulates the entire third season in one convenient package. If you want to know what Star Trek: The Next Generation looked and felt like in its third year of existence in soundbite form, look no further because this one episode runs the entire tonal gamut.

It is a comedy episode, or at least a decent stab by the creative team at what a comedy episode should maybe look like, it ticks off the “bring in Majel Barrett for her annual guest spot” box, it gives certain actors room to relax and clown around a bit, it had Gene Roddenberry pop in to make a minor tweak to the script, it’s an episode prominently featuring both the Ferengi and a surplus of silly and embarrassing costumes, has some clumsy attempts at world-building and art direction that manage to completely ruin the wonder of a Star Trek alien society, it’s built around a few surprisingly touching and well done (and obviously Michael Piller inspired) character moments that echo each other (yet that don’t *quite* manage to get a real hold on the people involved) and it shoves Deanna Troi in a box to shut her up for twenty minutes while men talk over her.

Let’s talk about the good first. Namely, this is the first proper “Lwaxana Story” the show has done, meaning the first story actively invested in looking at who she is as a character rather then wheeling her in either to shake things up and set the show straight (like in “Haven”) or to take part in a tragically unfunny sexist runaround (like in “Manhunt”). And true to form Barrett runs with it, delivering a wonderfully interpolated and multi-layered performance that manages to be poignantly sympathetic and broad-strokes comedic all at the same time. Here’s where we get the first glimpse of precisely *why* Deanna and Lwaxana have such a strained relationship, and it’s painfully relatable: There’s an actual “generation gap”, as it were, in play here where mother and daughter have two conflicting and irreconcilable views of what makes for a fulfilling life. And I will say this is sort of the first time this year the show has tried to do something like this and has actually managed to pull it off, as this feels like a genuine extension of what we knew of Lwaxana before that adds genuine depth to her character as opposed to just kind of throwing all of that out in favour of generic angst. The way her unwavering love for her daughter and her well-being shapes all the decisions she makes is actually really touching and heartwarming.

(Although that said, it is a bit weird in hindsight to have the notoriously vivacious and flirtatious Lwaxana Troi suddenly so interested in heteronormative domestic wedded bliss-Thankfully this doesn’t manage to completely take for her later appearances.)…

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Subspace Radio

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Hi Everyone!

My friend and colleague Jack Graham of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph’s Paradox recently started his own podcast series The Shabcast (graciously hosted by Kevin and James from Pex Lives, another superb podcast y’all should check out. Jack and I were on this past December), and he was kind enough to invite me on as a guest this month!

Ostensibly, Jack wanted to interview me about this blog, but me being me the conversation inevitably spun off in a number of different directions. Fair warning, this is over two hours, most of which consists of me never, ever shutting up. And this is just part 1. In all seriousness though, we had a delightful conversation I was honoured and privileged to be a part of.

Some of the things we talked about were, naturally, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dirty Pair and how I fell into all three and came to be writing about them for the Internet. We also talked about my interest in Polynesian wayfinding, my training in cultural anthropology, philosophy and science and technology studies and my conception of reading derived from me reading someone else reading Jacques Lacan. There were also brief mentions of non-Dirty Pair anime and manga and how Japanese media was introduced to Western audiences, such as Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Urusei Yatsura, my other loves Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Project A-ko and my uneasy ambivalence about Sailor Moon.

A few housekeeping notes: This being a completely unscripted and largely directionless conversation, I caught myself after the fact in a few factual slip-ups. I’m not sure how much of this made it into the show, but I figured I should cover my bases either way:

  • I believe at one point I called “Masks” from the seventh season of The Next Generation “Brannon Braga at his finest”. That’s a bit misleading-The episode was, of course, written by Joe Menosky, though Braga was, I believe, a producer and staff writer at the time.
  • When I’m talking about Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, I’m refering to the Takarazuka Revue.
  • Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers was written by David Turnbull. You should all still read it, though.

You can listen to the show here. Thanks again to Jack for the opportunity and to Kevin and James for hosting us! I hope all the listeners get as much a kick out of hearing this as I did recording it!…

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