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Comics Reviews (March 11, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I bought this week. Rather a drab week on the whole, although I really did love my top two a lot.

The Amazing Spider-Man #16

A split story, with a fourteen page lead feature and a six page backup. The result was unsatisfying to me – nothing felt like it had quite enough room to be interesting, and the result falls firmly into a trap plaguing a couple Marvel books right now, namely “is it Secret Wars yet?”

Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man #11

The shock final page reveal is the appearance of the character on the cover.

Thor #6

I gather that, among misogynistic assholes, this comic has become the preferred object of hatred for its allegedly pointless diversity. This is silly. The idea of a female Thor remains a good one. The idea of Rosalind Solomon as Thor, which is the main one they’re teasing, is an absolutely great one. The decision to make this a mystery and not just do a “Rosalind Solomon is Thor” book, on the other hand, is continuing to be badly underwhelming. I want to defend this comic, given the sheer toxicity of its attackers, but… it’s just not working, story wise.

Captain Marvel #13

More basically competent space adventure. I should probably drop this.

Star Wars #3

My basic lack-of-caring about Star Wars kind of flared up here, and I was definitely reminded that this is a book I’m only reading because Kieron Gillen is writing its counterpart. Nevertheless, I suspect this is the best Star Wars comic in recent memory, just based on how good it seems to be at being Star Wars. It’s just that this doesn’t much recommend it to me.

New Avengers #31

This was the first comic I opened this week, which means I have to grudgingly admit that I’m excited for Secret Wars. That said, it’s tough to think of a revelation that could have been less promising than “Rabum Alal is Doctor Doom,” simply because of how conservative an answer it is. Ah well. Still excited, I think.

Silver Surfer #10

Capable and fun, but I have to admit, this feels in hindsight like a box ticking story. Of course a run on Silver Surfer had to do Galactus eventually, and while this was a fine take on that, it was also notably less inventive than the book can be. I was mildly surprised to find out there was going to be an issue eleven, although I’ll admit, it sounds like a very exciting one.

Southern Cross #1

Picked up on a whim. I’m not quite as sold on Becky Cloonan as a writer as I am as an artist (where she’s one of my favorites), but this is a capable sci-fi mystery story, and I’m glad I checked it out. We’ll see if I notice and remember to grab the second issue, but if I see it, I’ll pick it up. So, not quite committing to this as one to rave about and follow, but it’s worth having a glance at if “sci-fi mystery” is up your alley.…

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Shabcast 2

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Yes, Shabcast 2 is here.  This month, you get the first part of my immensely long (and ongoing) discussion with the wonderful Josh Marsfelder, writer of the Star Trek blog that makes all other Star Trek blogs look like nothing more than Star Trek blogs, Vaka Rangi.

There will be more of the discussion up next month in Shabcast 3.

Meanwhile, Shabcast 1 – with me and Phil Sandifer – is still available here.

And, once again, thanks to the lovely lads at the Pex Lives Podcast for providing me with the bandwidth to make this project possible.  Pex Lives’ latest edition is just out, and is about ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, and is very funny and opinionated (I think they’re a bit hard on Colin Baker to be honest, and far too kind to The Verve).  Download or listen here.…

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“Ambassador Sarek”: Sarek

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Ambassador Sarek.

This episode should not exist.

I don’t mean there are thematic decisions I disagree with, or there are narrative framing problems, or even that the story is morally, ethically or politically indefensible: Indeed, at its heart this is a wonderfully moving story about aging and a loss of self and identity, as every critic on the face of the planet to cover this franchise who isn’t me has already duly noted. I mean the entire ethos of this story, from conception to execution, is predicated on the demands of Hollywood business networking rather than good creative or storytelling sense. It is the most depressingly obvious of cynical pandering, and the fact the actual episode turned out to be this good is actually an incidental nonissue, albeit one that that shows how heroic the writing staff was and how connected to their series they had become by this point, whether willingly or not.

The sad thing is this still keeps my from enjoying it.

Mark Lenard recalls how Gene Roddenberry came to him with the idea do this episode after he visited the offices one day, telling him “you know, it’s about time Sarek comes back! After all, Vulcans age very slowly”. This is the same Gene Roddenberry, it should be noted, who had made it expressly clear that there was to be absolutely *no* crossover between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, even going so far as to place an outright moratorium on even *referencing* the Original Series because of his firm, and absolutely fucking correct, belief that the new show needed to stand on its own without constantly leaning on its illustrious predecessor. If nothing else this was, after all “the next generation”, and should be focused on attracting people who were not already established Star Trek fans; “the next generation” of people to grow up on the series’ utopian values ideals, as it were. But values and ideals, it would seem, last only until a respected veteran actor shows up on your doorstop and you decide you need to do a little schmoozing.

But I mean Mark Lenard is a great actor, obviously, and even if the decision to cast him was business motivated, that doesn’t mean the episode had to be a write-off or that the character you’re going to have him play absolutely *needs* to be the one who it just so happens the most obsessively fannish contingent of your audience is going to recognise and expect. I don’t see any reason the show couldn’t have had Lenard fill just about any role they could have thrown his way-It didn’t *have* to be literally Sarek again. Hell, even if you *explicitly wanted* to invoke the Original Series you didn’t need to do that: Diana Muldaur had a stellar tenure on Star Trek: The Next Generation playing someone who quite plainly *wasn’t* Ann Mulhall, Thalassa, Miranda Jones or Bones McCoy yet who successfully stood in for all of them to serve a more nuanced narrative role.…

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The Goodies

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Ah, thank heavens for NATO, those white guardians of light and order.  And boo hiss to those nasty old Russians.  It’s a good job ‘we’ don’t behave like ‘them’.  NATO is proof of ‘our’ sanity (in both senses: rationality and cleanliness), isn’t it?

Human Rights Watch has conducted a thorough investigation of civilian deaths as a result of NATO action. On the basis of this investigation, Human Rights Watch has found that there were ninety separate incidents involving civilian deaths during the seventy-eight day bombing campaign. Some 500 Yugoslav civilians are known to have died in these incidents.

We determined the intended target in sixty-two of the ninety incidents. Military installations account for the greatest number, but nine incidents were a result of attacks on non-military targets that Human Rights Watch believes were illegitimate. (Human Rights Watch is currently preparing a separate report with a full analysis of our legal objections to the choice of certain targets.) These include the headquarters of Serb Radio and Television in Belgrade, the New Belgrade heating plant, and seven bridges that were neither on major transportation routes nor had other military functions.

Thirty-three incidents occurred as a result of attacks on targets in densely populated urban areas (including six in Belgrade). Despite the exclusive use of precision-guided weapons in attacks on the capital, Belgrade experienced as many incidents involving civilian deaths as any other city. In Nis, the use of cluster bombs was a decisive factor in civilian deaths in at least three incidents. Overall, cluster bomb use by the United States and Britain can be confirmed in seven incidents throughout Yugoslavia (another five are possible but unconfirmed); some ninety to 150 civilians died from the use of these weapons.

Thirty-two of the ninety incidents occurred in Kosovo, the majority on mobile targets or military forces in the field. Attacks in Kosovo overall were more deadly-a third of the incidents account for more than half of the deaths. Seven troubling incidents were as a result of attacks on convoys or transportation links. Because pilots’ ability to properly identify these mobile targets was so important to avoid civilian casualties, these civilian deaths raise the question whether the fact that pilots were flying at high altitudes may have contributed to these civilian deaths by precluding proper target identification. But insufficient evidence exists to answer that question conclusively at this point.

From the Human Rights Watch report ‘Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign‘, 2000.

“I just need an answer from NATO: Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?”

That quote, attributed to Faiz Fathi Jfara from the town of Bani Walid, appears in a Human Rights Watch report released this week titled “Unacknowledged Deaths.” The report details eight specific incidents where at least 72 Libyan civilians died as the result of NATO’s bombing campaign. A third of the victims were children under the age of 18. HRW researchers found the remnants of a laser-guided missile in the ruins of the Jfara family compound, where five members of the family, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed when bombs fell on Aug.

…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.05: The Wolf and the Lion

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones is funded by my backers on Patreon. I apologize for the late post this week.


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: Robert Baratheon, Joffrey Baratheon
Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister
Direwolves of the Eyrie: Catelyn Stark, 
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Direwolves of Winterfell: Bran Stark
Dogs of Kings Landing: Sandor Clegane
And the Lion of the Eyrie, Tyrion Lannister
Vaes Dothrak lies abandoned. The Wall is unmanned. 
The episode is in eight parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the opening shot is an establishing shot of the city over a bridge, which Ned Stark is walking across. 
The second runs three minutes and is set on the road to the Eyrie; the transition is by hard cut, from Ser Loras sharing his victory with the Hound to one of Lady Stark’s men gathering water, and by family, the previous scene having featured Sansa. It features numerous deaths in a small battle, including a hill tribesman killed by Tyrion, who smashes his head with a shield repeatedly.
The third runs four minutes and is set in Winterfell; the transition is by family and into dialogue, from Catelyn to Bran, who brings her up in conversation. 
The fourth runs fifteen minutes long and in three sections;  it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is mere seconds long; the transition is by hard cut, from Theon and Ros to a cat being chased by Arya. The second is eleven minutes long; the transition is by family, from Arya to Ned. The last is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Varys addressing Littlefinger to Arya exiting the catacombs. At the episode’s halfway point, Arya is trying to warn her father about what she overheard in the dungeons just before Yorren arrives to warn him of what Catelyn has done. 
The fifth part run one minute and is set in the Eyrie; the transition is by family and dialogue, from Ned Stark learning that Catelyn has taken Tyrion to Catelyn and Tyrion.
The sixth runs five minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by family, from Catelyn to Ned.
The seventh runs three minutes and is set in the Eyrie; the transition is by family, from Ned and Littlefinger to Catelyn and Lyssa Arryn.

The eighth run fifteen minutes and is in three sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion shivering in his skycell to Renly and Loras. The second is six minutes long; the transition is by family, from Renly to Robert. The third is five minutes long; the transition is by family, from Robert to one of his bastards. It features the death of Jory, stabbed in the eye by Jaime Lannister.
…

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“The Collector”: The Most Toys

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“Well, shoot or be damned!”

I’ve been pretty negative on this show lately, so lest you think I go into these looking for things to complain about, here’s another episode I never saw when it originally aired and never managed to catch on reruns. I had no preconceptions about how good or bad it was going to be, but I had read a lot about it and knew it got a lot of praise. So no prior baggage to jettison here, just a solid example of how Star Trek: The Next Generation worked when it was at is supposed creative and aesthetic peak.

And guess what? I still didn’t like it!

My big problem with “The Most Toys”, as has been the case with most things this season, comes down to a philosophical disagreement on my part as to how Star Trek: The Next Generation should be approached (Yes, I rib Bailey, Bischoff and White, but only because I see where they’re coming from and empathize. It’s always healthy to be able to laugh at things you care about, doubly so if it’s traits you see in yourself). I’ll touch on that a bit later (I suppose I have to), but for the moment let’s take a look at something I think will be of more interest to the readers of this blog: I have heard from more than one reader or critic in Doctor Who fandom about a prevailing theory that in this episode Kivas Fajo is meant as a stand-in for The Doctor. Considering Kivas Fajo is an evil psychopath with no regard for sentient life who literally kidnaps and imprisons living beings for his own amusement I find this highly interesting, as I generally thought Doctor Who was understood to be about sort of the opposite of those things.

The obvious explanation would be that, Doctor Who fans being Doctor Who fans and thus having some unfortunate complex in regards to Star Trek: The Next Generation that compels them to view it as the staunch enemy of everything they hold dear because they seem to have a pathological need to define themselves in opposition to something, are reading “The Most Toys” as some kind of malicious satire of Doctor Who’s philosophical and ethical groundwork. Which…doesn’t actually make sense if you watch the story itself. I mean, Fajo himself doesn’t seem to me to bear even a passing resemblance to the good Doctor, apart from I guess the fact he has a quirky and offbeat manner of speech and has a female travelling companion. Over the course of the episode’s runtime, I racked my brain trying to come up with some way this could be read as a parody of Doctor Who or some attempt to put Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s values (well, such as they are at this point in time and yes, I said it) in conflict with it and I honestly could not come up with any way to make even a shoddy simulacrum of an argument out of it.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 7, 2015)

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In case you missed it, Recursive Occlusion, aka the Logopolis book, is out. It’s $15, and available exclusively through the Createspace store.

Over on Tumblr, I randomly banged up a thing and called it “The Golden Age of Adolescent Literature: A Manifesto for an Aesthetic Movement.”

0. It is better to go too far than to be boring.

1. We must embrace the hubris that characterizes other great aesthetic movements. But as the great aesthetic movements of the last century have already laid claim to the future, we cannot. There are no further footholds to be found on that terrain. Instead, our hubris will have to be historicized. We will not be the future. When we lay claim to the phrase “golden age,” the purpose is not self-promotion, but a demand to ourselves that we live up to the promise of that title.

2. Just as the Golden Age of Children’s Literature is a specifically British movement (albeit one with American practitioners), the Golden Age of Adolescent Literature is ultimately American, embracing the grand cultural tradition of disaffected loners just as the Golden Age of Children’s Literature embraced the grand cultural tradition of portals to faerie.

3. Adolescence must necessarily be fetishized, but we must be clear on what we fetishize. The appeal is the certainty of one’s alienation, the complete rejection of aesthetic or moral compromise, a sense of identity largely untainted by the notion of “work,” and an incandescent focus on the present moment.

4. Adolescent is an adjective. We fetishize adolescence. We do not fetishize adolescents. (Indeed, there is no intrinsic reason why adolescent literature needs to feature adolescents as such.) We leave adolescents to their own devices, for they are better at being adolescents than we can possibly be.

5. Adolescent literature is not made by adolescents. Inherent to the movement is a sense of loss – a desire to recapture our own disaffection. This is the central appeal of adolescent literature to the present moment. Adolescence is defined by a propensity to take radicalism and extremism seriously, and thus adolescent literature gives us a license to contemplate the rejection of basic premises of the world.

6. A rejection of naturalism, whether subtle as with magical realism or emphatic as with outright sci-fi and fantasy, is a strong tool in adolescent literature. It is going too far to say that adolescent literature cannot be naturalist, but naturalism is not a default assumption.

7. Adolescent literature must be queer literature.

8. Adolescence is not about coming of age. If characters come of age, this must be understood as emergence from a chrysalis and as transformation, not as growing into a role that has already been prescribed. The only thing for which growing up is an acceptable metaphor is death.

9. The Hero’s Journey, with its embrace of the return home, is fundamentally a reactionary structure that must be emphatically rejected.

10. Nostalgia is not the enemy. But its purpose is to uncover what has been forgotten about the past.…

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Physics Bubbling Down Into Chaos (The Last War in Albion Part 86: Marvelman’s Unraveling)

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This is the fourteenth 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: The seventh issue of Warrior contained an installment of Marvelman that would, ultimately, cause Moore to depart from the magazine two years later. The eight page strip jumps among settings, starting with Sir Dennis Archer shortly after briefing the sapphire-toothed Evelyn Cream on his mission. Archer reflects on the events of October 12th, 1963, when they blew up the Marvelman Family. The second page has Mike and Liz out on Dartmoor, getting ready to test Marvelman’s powers. Liz brings a stack of American superhero comics, reading off possible powers he could have. 

“We’re not gods from space who can survive planetary impacts and physics bubbling down into chaos and clashing timelines. We’re just human.” -Warren Ellis, Supreme: Blue Rose

Figure 656: Evelyn Cream murders the terrorist upon
 getting the information he needs. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Alan Davis and Garry Leach, from “Secret
Identity” in Warrior #7, 1982)
The third goes to Johnny Bates, now in the hospital, catatonic. The scene shifts to inside Bates’s mind, where Kid Marvelman berates him, calling him a “snot-nosed little pratt” and a “snotty little virgin.” Then it cuts back to Marvelman and Liz investigating his powers, trying to figure out exactly how they work and how, for instance, the impact of a massive boulder falling on him doesn’t drive his feet into the ground at all. Page five has Evelyn Cream, with caption boxes explaining how he has figured out that Marvelman must have been one of the reporters at Larksmere, that the transformation probably resulted in some sort of energy transfer, and that the terrorist with burns was probably closest when it happens, arriving at the hospital. This is followed by one more page of the Morans, with Marvelman having turned back into Mike and the two of them driving off. As they do, Liz tells Mike that “I’ve missed my last periods and I’m going to have a baby and it isn’t yours its Marvelman’s.” The final two pages form a single scene depicting Cream’s encounter with the terrorist, who lies in his hospital bed, heavily bandaged. As Cream enters, he wakes up, and murmurs, “Huh? Whaddayou want, chocolate?” Cream communicates with him by writing on a notepad, promising not to kill him if he answers his questions. He proceeds to ask enough questions to identify Marvelman’s secret identity, and then explains to Steve that he was lying about the promise not to kill him, smothering him in his hospital bed and calmly walking out.
…

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“The world of fictional things”: Hollow Pursuits

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I never liked “Hollow Pursuits”. I still don’t. Make of that what you will.

I would seem to be in the minority, as I am with literally everything else in my life, up to and including Star Trek. Apparently, a whole lot of people relate to Reginald Barclay on a very profound level, some even going so far as to claim he is the *only* relatable character in the entire Star Trek: The Next Generation cast. Now, I like Barclay too, even though I manifestly do *not* share the same connection with him that so many others have: He’s an interesting character and obviously Dwight Schultz is massively talented, no argument there, but, knowing as I do what a sizable subset of Star Trek fandom looks like, I have to wonder about precisely what so many people see in Barclay, what that says about Trekker culture and whether or not that’s even a reading “Hollow Pursuits” can support. And furthermore, there are some structural and creative quibbles I have with this episode that give me pause as to whether it’s actually sending the proper message it ought to be sending in the context of the situation it’s trying to examine.

The thing about Barclay is that, thanks to his awkwardness and sense of isolation (emotions that are not by themselves shameful or problematic, it should be noted) it’s altogether too easy to read him as a more sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of Nerd Culture than what Wesley Crusher affords: He’s an engineer, he suffers from crippling social anxiety such that his only recourse is to escape into a world of make-believe and is constantly and unfairly bullied and alienated by his peers, peers who are even described by Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann in their writeup of this episode as “the cool crowd”. Indeed, they even go so far as to say

“Rather than mixing with the cheerleaders and the football stars at hot weekend dance clubs, those kids are more likely to spend their time at home reading a little sci-fi, or playing games online, or attending a Star Trek convention. 
Barclay’s a nerd who’s good at solving engineering puzzles, but not at making conversation. he works in a world where sci-fi is reality, online games are life and death and conventions-like baseball-are a thing of the past. So he finds something even better. He finds the holodeck.”

And I’m sorry, but no. No, no, no. This is wrong. So very wrong, and on so many different levels. First of all, it should be stressed, that this was absolutely not the intent of anyone in the creative team. Director Cliff Bole makes it perfectly clear that this episode was not meant to be about Star Trek fans, he would have heard about it if it had and he certainly didn’t see the episode that way himself.…

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Comics Reviews (March 4th, 2015)

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The next episode commentary will go up next week some time, in its own post. Comics reviews follow, from least favorite to favorite of what I bought this week.

Rat Queens #9

Issue #8 of this came out five months ago. This is part four of an ongoing story. There is no recap page whatsoever. I know I’ve ridden this hobby horse before, but this is suicidally dumb, in an “I think I’m dropping this title because I can’t be bothered to figure it out” sort of way. Seriously, I don’t remember a comic from five months ago. I have enough trouble with one month ago half the time. And yet nobody thought “ooh, maybe we should remind readers of the plot instead of throwing them in the deep end.” Yes, I could dig through my unorganized back issue piles looking for issues 6-8. But I could also save $3.50 a month, and that’s what I’ll be doing. This looks like a fine issue, but honestly, I’m done with comics that don’t make the slightest concession to the fact that I read 30+ comics a month on top of all the other media I consume and probably need a refresher when I haven’t seen an issue for five months. You had room for a six page preview of another comic, you could have given me a fucking recap page. Ugh. So, yes, dropping this, and going to commit to being much more aggressive about this. I’m not asking for dumbed down comics, but I am asking for some basic reader friendliness.

Saga #26

A perfectly pleasant issue, although man, again, a cast page would be so nice right about now. Does this work better in trade? This must work better in trade. I think this has turned into the latest equivalent of The Unwritten – a book I pay money for so that in two years when I pirate it because I’ve lost all my back issues and reread it in one night I feel no guilt. In any case, if you’ve enjoyed the twenty-five issues prior to this, you’ll probably like this a lot too.

Avengers #42

Whatever I may think about some of the steps along the way, Hickman is managing a gloriously effective pounding climax here. I’m especially fond of the teases of where Bendis’s X-Men plot is going, although the “massive alien army about to nuke the Earth” plot is fun too. I’m curious how he’s going to pivot to the Steve/Tony confrontation that obviously underlies all of this, and I don’t quite trust him not to just drop all the spinning plates, but right now this book is a countdown to May, and I admit, each step is suitably breathlessly exciting.

Blackcross #1

A superhero horror comic by Warren Ellis that doesn’t sell itself on its own value after one issue, but that is by Warren Ellis, and so gets trusted to pull it together over the next five, because while there are Warren Ellis comics that are not great, there aren’t really any that are bad, or even not good.…

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