Eruditorum Press

A Warning to the Queerious

“Defrosting Ice Queen”: That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!

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It might be worth taking a little time to look at the way Original Dirty Pair was first distributed to viewers. This is, of course, an OVA series: Far from the stigmatic connotations direct-to-video works have in the West, Japanese OVA programming is best seen as an early precursor to something more akin to Netflix Originals or Amazon Prime Studios-Shows that have a vocal and loyal enough audience worth catering to, but one that’s not big enough to justify trying to pitch the show to a major network. In addition, this would be the medium of choice for more unconventional, experimental works that would be hard to sell anywhere else.

The thing about OVA though is that, as the title might suggest, these were things released only on physical home video media, which meant you had to actually go out and buy each new release as it hit store shelves. In the case of Original Dirty Pair, the show was spread across five volumes of VHS and Laserdisc, each with two episodes each. Today’s episode, “That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!”, was released on what would have been volume four as a double bill with “Revenge of the Muscle Lady!”. The reason I bring this up is that, for the first time, Original Dirty Pair sort of feels like it’s treading water a bit here, and that’s something of a larger concern when we’re talking about an limited run OVA series with a sparse ten episodes as opposed to a major network television series that ran for a full season with an episode count pushing thirty and all the accompanying pressures, restrictions and obligations that go along with such a structure.

It’s not that this episode is bad, far from it: In fact, this is a perfect case study for how much progress has been made in the past four years. The TV series basically had two modes-Unbridled masterpiece and catastrophic misfire. There were a small handful of middling or mediocre episodes later on, but by in large this was the general model we were working under. Here though, every episode up ’till now has been absolutely magnificent and a contender for the franchise’s best work. But the downside of that is when we finally hit “functional”, “serviceable” and “watchable” it’s much more more noticeable and worrying than it would be in any other context. What we have this time is a bog-standard detective story in a light sci-fi setting: There’s an unsolved mass murder on a star liner culminating in a scientist putting his young daughter into cryogenic deep-freeze and sending her off in an escape pod. Madame Beryl was assigned to the case, but couldn’t solve it, and it goes cold for twenty years until Kei and Yuri stumble upon the girl’s escape pod while returning home after coming off on an unrelated investigation. Stuff happens, there’s some cute moments with Kei trying to bond with the kid and a shootout with the orchestrator of the original attack, who turns out to be the most predictable suspect imaginable.…

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His Face, His Hair, Look at It: The Doctors Revisited (Patrick Troughton)

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It’s not surprising that the Troughton era is, in effect, reduced to a celebration of Troughton’s acting, and for the most part, this is a dramatic improvement over the standard narrative prior to this. It is, like the Hartnell era, still entirely about leading up to the present day – the main hook for Troughton is that Matt Smith based his performance on him. This is put up front and trumpeted. So celebrating Troughton for his acting is necessarily about glorifying the present.

All the same, it’s not wrong. And it’s worth contrasting with the previous official narrative of the Troughton era, in which Season Five was the high point of it because it had all the monsters. Sure, the Ice Warriors get center stage for a bit in what is, in hindsight, blatantly just a teaser for Cold War (with Moffat reflecting that we never see the actual Ice Warriors), but the previous take on the Troughton era where he was the clownish Doctor and it was good because it had Yeti isn’t even alluded to.

Instead we focus on Troughton’s acting, which is fitting, because it really is extraordinary, in a way that holds up today. He’s astonishingly subtle and meticulous. He always was. And Tennant’s statement that every Doctor is really just doing variations on Troughton now is absolutely true. And it’s a triumphant moment to see Troughton himself get the credit for that, because he genuinely deserves it. He invented the part of the Doctor as we know it today.

The problem, if you think it’s a problem, is that there’s nothing to replace the celebration of the monsters. The Troughton era becomes almost entirely about glorifying Troughton’s performance. Of course, this isn’t entirely unfair. The era played the base under siege card too many times, and didn’t do enough brilliant and weird stuff. It’s not that the bases under siege were bad, but the mix was off on the era. And, of course, there’s the problem of what survives in the archives (or possibly of what Phil Morris has turned over) that makes it tricky to valorize any particular part of the Troughton era except for Season Six, which is the toughest to glamorize in many ways.

Not that they don’t give it a good try with an impassioned defense of Zoe that, watching it, also feels overdue. Moffat speaks with genuine conviction of the way in which Zoe was a triumph for young female audiences because she was made so competent, and it’s true. She may have gotten gratuitous catsuit ass shots, but she was a bolder character than the show had tried with the female companion since Susan petered out.

(Also hilarious is John Barrowman’s account of being excited to see Jamie debut and enthusiastically telling his mother there was a Scotsman on Doctor Who, since he would have been doing that from inside the womb.)

But for all of this, there is something frustrating about where the narrative focus ends up. The selected story for showing after this special was Tomb of the Cybermen, because of course it was.…

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“And let the past remain the past”: Revenge of the Muscle Lady!

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The thematic framework Dirty Pair inherits from Japanese women’s professional wrestling cannot be overstated. The inherent and accepted performative artifice of puroresu is absolutely central to how Dirty Pair operates at a basic level, as is the genre’s target demographic. As an anime or manga, Dirty Pair is typically understood as seinen in the usual system of genre classification: This would be works specifically aimed at men between the ages of 18 and 40. Except…that can’t really be true, can it? In Japan, the original market for women’s professional wrestling was women themselves, and the wrestlers became icons to a generation of teenage female fans: Men were a periphery demographic. And so it is with Dirty Pair, which, while later appropriated and stolen by men (as men always do to things targeted towards women and have done throughout recorded history), certainly must be seen as a series written with an at least significantly female audience in mind.

Dirty Pair has done pro wrestling before, of course; There’s no way it couldn’t with its lineage. We have an entire chapter dedicated to Kei narrating a wrestling match in The Dirty Pair Strike Again, the girls being confused for wrestlers in “How to Kill a Computer” and participating in a sort of mock match themselves in “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette”, then fake fighting coded as a full-on worked shoot in “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal”. “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” even featured actual wrestlers as major antagonists, Kei’s personal heroes Lan and Jerry, who were running an underground doping ring based around exploiting their brother’s developments in steroid research. This episode, “The Revenge of the Muscle Lady!”, plays out vaguely similarly, with an acquaintance of Kei and Yuri’s going rogue and getting involved in the trade of pharmaceutical muscle enhancements and the girls having to go in and sort things out.

But the major difference this time is that this is a story that doesn’t just evoke the trappings of pro wrestling as a nod to Dirty Pair’s heritage, it actually works entirely by the genre’s logic and storytelling conventions itself. The animosity between Sandra and the girls is quite explicitly a grudge match, especially the final confrontation in the rocket hangar bay, and the entire story is basically a wrestling angle. And what makes this story in particular unique and special is that it takes that style of narrative structure and blends it with subject matter more fitting Dirty Pair’s audience: Namely, young adult female fans of pro wrestling and science fiction (remember, this is Japan in 1988 so that demographic isn’t quite as strange as it probably sounds to a certain sort of Western audience). What we have here is a story that has its roots in school and relationship drama caricatured to puroreso levels.

In spite of the obvious steroid references, this is not a story about doping or drug use in sports, that’s largely just a framing device to get the girls to confront Sandra.…

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Saturday Waffling (November 15th, 2014)

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Well. It’s been a while since we’ve waffled, hasn’t it? I suppose that means I should give a sort of update on work. I’m most of the way through the next Last War in Albion chapter, and hoping to finish that in the next week or two. After that, the Secret Doctor Who Project will become my main focus until that’s done.

As for books, the Logopolis book is through the first round of copyediting, and I’m sitting down with those edits imminently. After that, I’ll start the Davison/Baker book.

So, what’ve you been up to?…

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Wait in Here Please, Susan: The Doctors Revisited (William Hartnell)

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Sorry to those of you who are already annoyed about how much I’m delaying ending this thing. You can always stop reading and end it now – I won’t mind. But I’ve always put on the brakes at the end of an era, slowing down and relishing the opportunity to make a definitive statement. The end of the blog, unsurprisingly, is going to be like that but even moreso. The last entry will go up February 9th. It’s scheduled through, I know what I’m doing with it, we’re doing the ending of TARDIS Eruditorum with deliberation and knowledge, and it’s not going to be much more self-indulgent than the end of Sandman.

But first, we’re going to go through these BBC America specials done, one a month in 2013, to lead up to the 50th Anniversary. Mostly because it’s an opportunity to look at how Doctor Who itself gave an official self-history at the same moment as we wrap up our history of it. These will generally be short entries. But they’re worth doing, as part of the end of the ritual.

These are basically clip shows with talking heads and a generic narrator to link up the talking heads. In practice, this one is narrated by David Tennant and Steven Moffat, who do most of the heavy lifting of actually explaining the Hartnell era. They slot into their respective roles quite well. Tennant enjoys giving the sort of official factual fan history, dutifully trotting out the basic descriptions and acting as the sort of head teacher and guide. He’s good at it, providing your basic factual history.

What’s more interesting is Moffat’s role. Moffat, as executive producer, now, as he’s put it, doesn’t get to have opinions about Doctor Who anymore. But here he’s called on not only to have opinions, but to contribute to a narrative of how Doctor Who has always been brilliant – a narrative that we know full well he doesn’t actually subscribe to, because he’s too much the critically-minded professional to forgive things like The Web Planet.

The magic of this, though, is that he handles this challenge not by doing what one suspects Russell T Davies usually did to arrive at his “it’s all marvelous” policy and simply lying through his teeth, but by actually identifying small bits that he thinks work well. The result enlivens this considerably, because you have Moffat picking up on small and odd details that he loves – for instance, he gives a quite enthused account of how The Daleks is satisfying because it’s not actually building the Daleks to return, and so they have their own self-contained concept, which makes them work better. One suspects that this is more or less the only thing he likes about the Daleks, along with the Dalek reveal and the first cliffhanger. But it’s a compelling case, and actually looks at The Daleks as a weird historical artifact. His accounts of why Barbara works and of the Doctor’s declaration that he’s going to fight the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth are similarly magnificently chosen details.…

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“Someone who’s loved you forever”: Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!

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This is the moment where Original Dirty Pair finally lives up to its title.

“Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!” is a very Yuri story. Structurally, it’s extremely reminiscent of the other big stories that have focused specifically on her as a character, namely “The Curse of the Backwoods Murder”, “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” and “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in each of those past adventures, Yuri becomes entangled in a love story that plays out very much akin to stock or cliched Harlequin fare, with Kei becoming the third wheel. Part of Yuri really wants to just completely immerse herself in the romantic atmosphere of it all, because she does have an attraction to that sort of mushy stuff and wouldn’t necessarily mind living a quiet and charmed fairy tale life like that. This time, she falls in with the second son of a notorious mob family involved in a counterfeit operation the girls have been sent in to bust. She goes along with it mostly to keep up her undercover identity and gain access to the family’s printing room, but she pretty clearly has real feelings for the guy too.

In spite of being a deft Miami Vice style “you become your alter ego” sort of plot on top of things, this is largely the archetypical Yuri story. The reason why this is her signature plot is because the girls’ personalities and characterizations are drawn quite explicitly from astrological symbolism, and Yuri is a Piscean. Those born under this sign are said to be romantic dreamers who are infinitely fluid and malleable: They can reshape themselves into any number of different identities, but tend to be most drawn towards roles that allow them to be very expressive, such as art and dance. This makes sense because, if you recall, the Dirty Pair novels are all told from a first person perspective, namely Kei’s. This means Yuri isn’t technically a character, or rather it would be more accurate to say she’s a *diegetic* character and the only things we learn about her are what Kei cares to tell us. In that respect, Yuri really is an ephemeral, intangible being.

However the downside to all this is that Pisceans can get so wistful and so formless they can become totally detached from reality and become lost in their own fantasy worlds they imagine for themselves. And, like clockwork, in each and every one of the stories that has taken care to seriously engage with who Yuri is at a fundamental level, this is depicted as the greatest threat she faces. In “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”, she starts to dream about rekindling a relationship with her childhood friends Thunder and Lucha: Yuri can only view them through rose-tinted and distorted memories of her youth, and imagines running off with them as part of a inauthentic romanticized conception of simple country living.…

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Comics Reviews (November 12th, 2014)

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I liked the “post this as soon as it’s ready” approach last week, so I think I shall make it a regular thing. As ever, ranked from worst to best of the week, with everything being something I voluntarily paid money for…

Captain America #1

If not necessarily deliberately paid money for. This was picked up in a miscommunication (Jill did the comics run today, and mistook my request for Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1 as a request for Captain America #1 and The Mighty Avengers #1, which I submit as an illustration of the sheer number of stupid bars to entry for people who aren’t obsessive about comics purchasing, because really, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to release two comics called Captain America #1 on the same fucking day). In any case, it’s an action sequence with captions that are some of the most cliched “white person writing about black people” ever. It’s heart’s in the right place – the joke about America’s prison system is wonderfully bleak. But it’s… not good, and is in fact that other thing.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1

I’m sure this will be a lovely series once it’s not tying into Axis, but right now it’s exactly nothing I want out of a book called Captain America and the Mighty Avengers. 

Captain Marvel #9

Wonderfully silly one-off space romp with gratuitous rhyming. Good fun. I still don’t feel like I enjoy this book as much as I should, though – it often, as with this issue, feels competent without having any spark. The big cleverness here is the gratuitous rhyming, which is… forced, to say the least. Fun, but inessential.

Thor #2

This really should have been Thor #1, as it’s charming. The use of thought bubbles to convey the new Thor’s uncertainty and self-doubt is delightful, and there’s some good characterization here. I’m still not sure about the “don’t tell us who the main character is” hook, as it makes characterization for her trickier, but this was at least a good, fun Thor comic.

Wytches #2

I love what the book is doing, particularly with its transitions among scenes, but I find the obliqueness challenging. No recap page, no captions telling us what or where a scene is, and Jock’s scratchy art makes it hard to know what’s going on – it took me a couple tries to get that Sailor’s father and uncle were different characters, which made the final scene a challenge. A cast page or a recap page or something would be nice – I completely forget what Lucy’s deal is. But this remains a promising horror comic.

Spider-Verse #1

A collection of shorts. In general, the shorter the better – the one-page Hostess Fruitcakes pastiche and the two-page newspaper comic one were both particularly brilliant. Quite liked Skottie Young’s as well. I continue to really be enjoying this Spider-Verse crossover, and I’m glad I snagged the silly tie-in anthology.

Batgirl #36

There’s some awkwardness at the start – the book’s post-Young Avengers social media aesthetic runs aground with some dodgy pseudo-computer stuff where finding a couple terabytes of storage to use is actually something that requires time and effort.…

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Random Thing #4: Woss Going on ‘Ere Then?

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I have become convinced that the fundamental appeal of the detective story lies in fantasies of autonomy.

Think about it.  What does every detective story have in common?  The hero or heroine who can move as freely as they choose from place to place, doing what they wish according to their own judgements as they make those judgements, managing their own time, roving from person to person conducting interviews, or from scene to scene gathering evidence or perceptions, entirely under their own steam.

Sherlock Holmes hangs around in his rooms until he decides to take a case, whereupon he follows the scent wherever it leads.  He makes money from his cases and doesn’t do any other kind of work.  Poirot similarly – when he isn’t on holiday, that is.  Like Miss Marple, Poirot is retired and financially self-sufficient.  Other classic detectives combine one or more of these traits.  Spade and Marlowe run their own detective agencies.  Some detectives are aristocratic and wealthy, some live off their earnings, but they are all, essentially, either unemployed or self-employed.  Even the police detective characters – Morse, for instance – manages his own time.  He leaves his batchelor home and goes to work, but once on the job he and Lewis perambulate around Oxford as they please, stopping off in pub after pub, etc etc etc.  Most detectives, like Morse, are single.  Some are apparently asexual, some widowed, some divorced, some eternal bachelors, whatever.  But they tend to live alone or with a same-sex buddy like Watson.  The queer dynamic is often there, but usually non-diegetic.  There are detectives with families or busy personal lives – Wexford, Bergerac, etc – but even they leave their domestic or romantic entanglements behind while on a case, and rove around freely instead.  Often, in these days when cop shows have to include loads of dour and gritty stuff about how being a police officer harrows your soul and consumes your relationships, the detectives with family lives are resolutely miserable, those family lives being a catastrophic mess of some kind.  They then leave the mess behind when they zoom off to investigate.  In this case the pleasure of ditching the domestic may be furtive and guilt ridden (the trope of the cop’s wife glowering when he gets a phone call that will take him away from her) but it’s still there.  Called back to work, he doesn’t have to go and sit in an office.  Whatever the fictional copper’s notional complaints about paper work, the body of the story will see him or her cruising from suspect to suspect in a car.  The appeal is of not being tied in some way in which most of us are tied.

The original fictional detectives were a focus of anxiety about transgression of privacy boundaries.  They tended to be eccentric masters of disguise, or common-as-muck policemen who broke into the middle class home to snoop (like Mr Whicher).  The detective story settled into such a popular staple of modern fiction when the detective was transformed from a figure of disconcerting and nosy instinct (i.e.…

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Giants With Leaking Boats For Feet (The Last War in Albion Part 70: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Third Death of Swamp Thing)

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This is the twentienth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two 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 six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fifth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: As a coda to his extended arc about the apocalypse, Moore penned a tale in which Swamp Thing lays siege to Gotham City, causing vegetation to grow wild over the city. The final issue of this story, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” was named after a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
“[Anarchy has] become a kind of shorthand standing for the breakdown of society and order into screaming chaos; into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape populated by looters, berserkers, giants with leaking boats for feet and eggshells for a body.” -Alan Moore, “Fear of a Black Flag”

Figure 527: Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden
of Earthly Delights, closed.
This ambivalence is reflected in the title of this last issue, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is drawn from a triptych painted in the late 15th/early 16th century by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting consists of three distinct panels, following the general convention of the form in that era and moving from a depiction of the Garden of Eden in the leftmost panel and the Last Judgment in the right. The first panel depicts God presenting Eve to Adam, which flows smoothly into the largest panel, the center one, continuing the skyline across the gap so as to give a sense of this image emerging directly from the first one. This center panel depicts the titular garden as a scene of vast, libidinous excess. Nude figures embrace within a transparent globe that is itself the fruit of a plant, birds the size of people frolic in the stream, vast phallic and yonnic towers emerge out of the lake, there are men with heads of fruit, and men riding fantastic beasts, all spilling out across the panel in an overwhelming, breathtaking spectacle of man and nature in seeming harmony. Finally there is the rightmost panel, which breaks from the flow of the skyline, depicting a night scene in hell in which people are inventively and grotesquely tortured. The overall message, at least initially, appears to be an anti-materialist one that considers the earthly delights of the central garden but that ultimately concludes that these delights, which stem out of the original temptation of the flesh in the Garden of Eden, lead only to demonic ruin.
…

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“Know when to walk away/Know when to run”: And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore

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If there was going to be an episode that caused me any manner of trepidation, it was going to be this one.

Dirty Pair has historically not been good when it comes to gambling or games. Any kind of games: Casino games, card games (unless the Bloody Card is involved), video games, the lot. Despite “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette” being an early highlight of the TV series, “The Vault or the Vote? A Murderous Day for a Speech”, which saddled Kei with a crippling gambling addiction basically for shits and giggles, gets *my* vote for quite possibly the single worst bit of filmed Dirty Pair ever made. Even the first chapter of “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” from The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair bugs me a bit, because Takachiho seems to cluelessly conflate video arcade games with gambling, and as someone who has very fond memories of afternoons spent in such places and for whom video games as a medium became dreadfully important, it left something of a bad taste in my mouth. I know Japan has a much stronger tradition of linking arcades with gambling then the West does, such as in pachinko halls, for example, but it’s still not to my tastes. And of course, there was that terrible, terrible Famicom Disk System game from last year.

So I was a bit nervous to see the trailer for this episode prominently featuring the girls dressed to the nines in a casino, a deeply worried Gooley and Mughi dressed as what appears to be a pallet-swapped Mario. Thankfully, the episode itself turned out to be completely contrary to any expectations I might have had. It really is it’s own thing (indeed, this may well be the episode that codifies what the stylistic tone and general themes of the OVA series are), but if we were to compare it with one of the TV episodes, we wouldn’t liken it to either of the casino or gambling romps, but rather to “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in that story, “And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore” is actually about, at least in part, diegetically and extradiegetically underestimating Kei and Yuri. It leads us along thinking the girls (and in one scene, even Mughi) are going to go badly astray somewhere along the line, building to some embarrassing failure and then just…doesn’t. And, I have to sheepishly admit, I fell for it.

Most of the plot for “And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore” is essentially window dressing for its central joke, but there is a point to the to the high-rolling casino trappings. There are two main threads to unpack here, one of which flags the story’s ultimate resolution and one of which involves the fact Meteo is a game that’s built to be rigged and built to get people addicted. The casino can control where the asteroids land, and thus determine the winner game to game based on their video surveillance of the bets people are placing.…

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