Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

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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A Little Bit of Nip in the Air (The Snowmen)

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Abominable special effects.
It’s December 25th, 2012. Justice Collective are at number one with “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” blocking the X-Factor winner from its traditional Christmas coronation by being a supergroup charity recording for Hillsborough charities, which is basically the sort of thing it’s impossible not to have go to number one. Rihanna, Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, and Psy also chart. 
In the three months since the Angels took Manhattan, Barack Obama took a second term, Hurricane Sandy took out a large swath of the New York/New Jersey coast, and Disney took over the rights to Star Wars. Much more bleakly, the fact that Jimmy Saville was a horrific and serial pedophile who sexually abused hundreds of people came out. Also, Nadine Dorries is suspended from the Conservative Party because she decides to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! She was beaten by, among others, Colin Baker. 
While on television, after our five-week dalliance with the Ponds, the future promised back in Asylum of the Daleks finally fails to arrive again. We’ll tackle the problems and brilliances of the Impossible Girl story over the next season, so there’s not really a rush, but it is worth noting that some of its weaknesses start to appear here. This is by design a false start – the new companion is seemingly introduced and then killed. Unlike in Asylum of the Daleks, this one was billed as the debut of Jenna Coleman. If you paid a lot of attention you could tell there was a ruse, but for the most part, it was a solid bait and switch. Certainly this was necessary for the Impossible Girl arc, not least because without it the headline was “the new companion is a Dalek” and not “the new companion keeps dying.” 
The trouble is, the moment when Clara gets killed is the moment when a tremendously promising and interesting episode goes off the rails. Part of this is unrelated to the plot twist as such – the fact that “a family crying on Christmas Eve” as the only thing powerful enough to stop the snow is grotesquely unearned, for instance, has little to do with killing Clara as such. The real problem is simply that Clara’s death transforms The Snowmen from a relatively self-contained bit of Christmas fairy tale into a teaser for the next season. Which is, of course, always the problem (and brilliance) of the Impossible Girl arc – it constantly erases what’s actually there, replacing it with a mystery about what isn’t. 
So let’s, in effect, simply clip off more or less everything between Clara’s fatal fall and the cemetery scene, allowing this episode to be a tremendously charming Christmas fairy tale with one of the best images in the history of the series in the form of that impossibly tall staircase ascending to the TARDIS on a cloud that closes with a quick teaser to get everyone back in March. The future will come along eventually anyway, so no need to talk about it now.
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“It turned into a pig”: Who Cares If They’re Only Kids!

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Kids are horrible.

One lingering consequence, among many, of the damagingly retrograde social norms of the Victorian age has been an idealization and objectification of children. Drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as the scripture of the New Testament and Rosseau’s notions of the blank slate and social contract, the Victorians reconceptualized childhood (some would say invented and defined it) as a time when human beings are inherently good and innocent, free from the poisonous influence of cynical adult society. What this does, of course, is only facilitate the oppression of children and the removal of their agency, because “The Children” in the monolithic general must be looked after, sheltered and protected. It’s another manifestation of what Lee Edleman calls reproductive futurism, an oppressive ideology where one is shamed out of political agency out of respect for idealized future children.

This project itself is not immune to this reading. I’ve several times used the word “childlike wonder”, though not in ignorance of what I was saying, I might add, and I certainly do have a fixation on children’s literature and people who place heavy emphasis on children’s perspectives, such as Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki. But when I use phrases such as “childlike wonder”, I try to do so with the conceit that such a state of mind would really just be a variety of idealism and cosmic wonder that might come more easily to children than to distracted adults. And the very best children’s literature, in my view, does the exact opposite of sheltering children and forcing them to remain apolitical: It listens to them and gives them an outlet to form their voices and positionalities, and in doing so it helps them grow into better people. That need for respect and dignity in narrative is not limited to children, even if it’s the sort of thing that, for whatever reason, is thought of as strange to afford anyone but children.

Youth and maturity come in different forms and have many different meanings and contextual associations. As I’ve argued before, I’m of the opinion a perspective to strive for in life is a delicate mixture of the two elements: Youthful energy, spirit, drive and idealism with experience, maturity and wisdom. Star Trek: The Next Generation seems to be shaping up to be this sort of thing with the restless, yet worldly, sense of adventure that permeates the show’s worldview. And this is what Kei and Yuri, our evergreen seishun heroines, stand for as well. But here also I’d like to draw a distinction between childlike and childish: This is what the girls are up against in this episode, and they make it perfectly clear their intent is to dispel any outdated myths about the intrinsic goodness of children. Obviously, Kei and Yuri would be against reproductive futurism: Their affinity with Missinie in Affair of Nolandia notwithstanding, kids have not been especially kind to the Lovely Angels over the years, and the implicit shaming that accompanies reproductive futurism is something that affects women in particular.…

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Reverse Racism (‘Into the Dalek’ 2)

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The Doctor learns that he is bigoted because he refused to accept the idea that a Dalek could be good.  Indeed, he hates Daleks so much that the one time he is prepared to even countenance the idea of a good Dalek is when he meets a Dalek which says all Daleks are evil and should die.  So he hates genocidal racists so much that the only member of that race he can think of as good is the one who says that it would be a good idea to exterminate an entire race.  But, of course, that isn’t good.  That’s bad.  That makes you as bad as a Dalek.  Indeed, that’s Dalek-thinking.

Ironic, fairly interesting, and doubtless intentional.

But there’s another interesting irony here, which probably wasn’t intended.

As has been frequently pointed out, SF often falls into the trap of a race essentialism.  Alien races in SF all have the same characteristics.  The same sort of thing is true in Fantasy, and in other forms of storytelling featuring sapient non-humans.  All Vulcans are logical, all Sontarans are militaristic, all House Elves are servile, all Orc are psychopaths, etc.  The problems with this are obvious.  It rests upon a reductionist view of race, society and sentience… not to mention a set of assumptions directly related to biological racism.  But that’s all obvious, and well covered elsewhere.

Back to the unintended little irony in ‘Into the Dalek’… which, to be fair, is more an irony about the Daleks themselves.  No, not the irony of creatures which metaphorically express the evil of racism themselves being based on race essentialism.  I’m not really talking about race here.  I’m talking about politics.

Because, as is also well understood, the Daleks are metaphors for the Nazis.  Actually they hardly even bother being metaphors.

So we wind up in a peculiar situation politcally when we question the idea that there is something wrong with assuming that all Daleks are evil (an assumption that ‘Into the Dalek’ more or less explicitly questions).  We wind up essentialy questioning the idea that all Nazis, all fascists, are bad.  But you see… they are.  By definition.  The DWM review of Timewyrm: Exodus said that Hermann Goering was the closest thing to a nice Nazi (a pretty startling remark if you know anything about the man).  But you can’t have nice Nazis.  You can’t even approach that.  It’s like talking about dry water – if it’s dry, it ain’t water.

We have bumped up against a standard misunderstanding about discrimination.  It isn’t something that can happen to anyone or everyone.  There’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism’, or ‘misandry’ (at least as the term is meant by the crybabies who object to feminism on the basis of their bruised manfeels).  There certainly isn’t any such thing as unfair discrimination against fascists.   That’s why they shouldn’t be allowed on Question Time, no matter how many people vote for them.  You can’t have democratic fascists.  Obviously, therefore, you can’t extend them the boons of democracy. …

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Death in Heaven Review

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Thank you so much to the 171 people on Patreon who made these reviews possible. It’s not been the easiest past two months, and this has been an absolutely huge help. Come Christmas, I’ll be back with one more review, and a season wrap-up, and then a bit after that I’ll have something or other about future uses of Patreon, as it’s been rather lovely, frankly. So thank you very much. This has been a wonderful bit of fun. 

Well here we are, for one last round before, you know, the next round. Twitter is a somewhat mixed reaction. GallifreyBase has 71.65% on 8-10, with 34.62% of those tens. Me? I loved it. 
It’s ostentatious as hell. It builds on Moffat’s previous tricks in so many interesting ways. You can accurately describe it as “the Doctor Who version of His Last Vow” or as “Eric Saward done right,” it’s got the first companion departure to top Doomsday (Donna is disqualified for the horrific consent violation involved), and it manages an entirely different take on the phrase “tomb of the Cybermen” than the one we had last week. It frames that perfectly, with Clara and the Doctor having the exact inverse of the conversation Clara was trying to have with Danny at the beginning. It’s the Master as an evil River Song, while Clara plays out Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with Danny in River’s role. It’s as perfectly timed for Remembrance Sunday as Deep Breath was for the sunset. Clara applies the moral legitimacy she earned in Kill the Moon to the question of granting her boyfriend’s request for assisted suicide. The opening credits recycle the trick from the sixth episode of Jekyll. Clara’s an adult Linda. The fucking Brigadier. Moffat, a writer whose work is defined by narrative substitutions, plays it completely straight while doing weird inversions of everything else around him while telling a more or less straightforward point A to point B story over ninety minutes. 
It works. There are plot holes. I identified several in the immediate aftermath. On a second pass, all of them have, at the very least, a line of dialogue. Yes, Missy’s entire reason for bringing the Doctor and Clara together and intervening in their timestreams to keep them together was that Clara would eventually lead the Doctor to try to rescue a loved one out of heaven. It’s a scheme by the Master, what did you expect, sanity? The Doctor probably could have commanded the army to self-destruct, but he recognized that Danny was the right person to do it. They’re not always satisfying payoffs, though for the most part, they’re as satisfying as they need to be for the amount the show built them up – if fans inflated the minor mysteries further, that’s their problem.
And when anything falters, it’s willing to get through on sheer bravado. Moffat returned to the two-parter on the back of Sherlock, and built one with a corker of a cliffhanger.
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Outside the Government 20: Wizards vs Aliens

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One of my favorite moments in About Time, a book series I don’t get to talk about much anymore having long since gotten ahead of them, is in its critique of The Sensorites, a story that is wrongly, if understandably, unloved. Miles and Wood open by saying, “Opinion is divided over this: the common reaction is ‘why?’, but the correct answer is ‘awww… bless’.” Which pretty much sums up not only The Sensorites but Wizards vs Aliens, a strong contender for the single most heartwarming origin story of any television series ever.
Following the death of Lis Sladen, Russell T Davies didn’t want the Sarah Jane Adventures production team to be out of work. He also didn’t want the BBC to abandon production of children’s drama. And so he came up with a suitably high concept series that he could oversee from a distance (much as he had Sarah Jane Adventures), this time while caring for his partner, whose diagnosis with a brain tumor led to Davies’s abandonment of his “break out in America” plan. 
It is, to be fair, a good premise. The start of the first episode, which begins with a standard sort of “pagans chanting in a stone circle” thing, goes far enough to confirm that magic is real, then drops a spaceship onto the stone circle and has the wizards abducted by aliens who triumphantly proclaim that they have come for Earth’s magic, is a triumph of mashing up genres. Really, the entire idea is long on cleverness – what’s basically a Harry Potter knockoff gets invaded by what are basically the default setting of Doctor Who aliens. The tropes of each, unsurprisingly, prove good fits for one another. Davies is well aware that the types of stories you can tell with fantasy and science fiction are basically the same, and is slyly taking advantage of the supposed distinctions between the two iconographies to make a decent playground.
And it does. It’s a clever hook, and while Davies’s suggestion that it could run for ten years is almost certainly over-optimistic, it’s not a huge surprise that this is currently on its third season. It fills the same role that The Sarah Jane Adventures did of providing good, classic, and well-made children’s television. It’s got much of the same commitment to diversity, making the extremely good decision to have Benny, the nerd character, be played by a black man. Although to be honest, its commitment to diversity is visibly weaker than that of The Sarah Jane Adventures. There’s no equivalent character to Maria or Rani, and instead we’re generally using the two boys setup of Merlin, only with clear analogues of Clyde and Luke in the leads.
But on the whole, this is a loving and full-throated homage to the classic tradition of British children’s television. And, in turn, a celebration of the classic tradition of British children’s literature, which, fair enough. If you’re making a list of things the UK can legitimately have a sense of national pride in, its legacy of children’s fiction is absolutely something that should be on that list.
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“Prophets of the Galactic Spirit”: We’re Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It’s Like Magic?!

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If a god is in truth the idea of a god, what does it look like when gods fight?

“We’re Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It’s Like Magic?!” opens up seeming like it’s going to be a cross between the Dirty Pair novels and, of all things, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. The girls arrive incognito on an agricultural planet that’s been subject to a number of mysterious unsolved murders. An extremely religious culture, the settlers on this planet all swear fealty to a massive church that dictates their social, spiritual and material lives. It’s the belief of the local police that it’s the planet’s God itself that’s responsible for the killings, though they see it more as “divine retribution” than murder. But Kei and Yuri suspect something else is up, so they sneak in undercover to investigate. The design of the planet is definitely a memorable one, featuring a mix of pastoral farming scenes and twisted, nightmarish imagery straight out of a horror movie, Original Dirty Pair upping the ante with futuristic space ravens and blood red, almost volcanic skies, befitting the tone of the story.

It at first seems as if the show is building to the reveal of an implausibly massive Scooby-Doo hoax gambit: We get early confirmation this “God” is a “new” one, far more stringent and judgmental than the old one and, while there are a series of awe-inspiringly grotesque scenes of God’s supposed furor, Kei and Yuri swiftly reveal them to be part of an elabourate, yet mundane (albeit futuristic) technological smoke-and-mirrors trick. But it’s then that this episode gets *really* good, because, as the Lovely Angels face down *God himself* and declare to a giant space church full of parishioners that all of his miracles were the work of sophisticated technoscience, God blindsides us all with the confession that yes, obviously everything he does is thanks to science. But what does it matter? He is, so he claims, the “One True God”. The God of Science. Someone who has “cast off” his “mortal bonds” to become a Divine Machine. In other words, this God is the God of Scientism and technofetishistic positivist atheism. This is the God of the Church of the Singularity.

What this story becomes then is one of gods in conflict with one another: Kei and Yuri are up against an opponent who is genuinely playing on their level. The God in this episode bears some resemblance to both Criados from the TV series episode “Criados’ Heartbeat” and The Master from The Dirty Pair Strike Again: Like Criados, he’s an explicitly transhuman character who has attained both his trashuman status and his spiritual enlightenment through experimenting with technology, but while Criados went mad from the process, this person decided his enlightenment gave him the right to start a religion around himself. Much like The Master, he designed and built an entire hierarchical church structure with himself at the centre, although unlike The Master he decided he was both God’s Chosen and God Himself.…

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Some Incomprehensible Biological Process (The Last War in Albion Part 69: The Greening of Gotham)

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If you were expecting comics reviews today, they went up last night.

This is the nineteenth 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: Alan Moore’s apocalypse in Swamp Thing was a strangely muted affair, not so much ending the world, or even substantially altering it, as engaging in a semi-graceful climbdown from the eschatological rush.
“I feel that I have become an essential part of some incomprehensible biological process. The house is an organism hungry for madness. It is the maze that dreams.” – Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum

It is not fair, however, to frame this as a failing on Moore’s part. For all that he was rapidly becoming the golden boy of DC Comics, Moore was never going to be allowed to fundamentally and irrevocably alter the nature of the DC Universe, and he was certainly not naive enough to think otherwise. He had, after all, by this point, already had his plans for a story called Who Killed the Peacemaker? This story would provide sweeping and transformative take on some obscure superheroes that DC acquired when it bought out the failing Charlton Comics in 1983, vetoed by DC on the grounds that it would render the characters unusable, resulting in the proposal being reworked as Watchmen with original characters that could be cordoned off from DC continuity, with the first issue coming out the month after Swamp Thing #50. The idea that he was going to get away with destroying heaven and letting the primordial darkness reign once more was unlikely to have seriously crossed his mind.
Figure 518: Swamp Thing #51 marked
a change of direction for the series,
with Swamp Thing seeking to rescue
Abby from prison.
Indeed, his next story arc, a three-issue tale that brings Swamp Thing into conflict with Batman, is largely about reiterating this precise point. It is easy and tempting to draw a dividing line between Swamp Thing #50 and the story that commences with Swamp Thing #51. DC does exactly that in the collected editions of Moore’s Swamp Thing, ending the fourth volume, A Murder of Crows, with issue #50, and commencing the fifth, Earth to Earth, with #51. And there is a marked shift in tone between the apocalyptic battle on the shores of hell itself that takes place in issue #50 and the much smaller scale story of Swamp Thing attempting to rescue an imprisoned Abby that follows it.
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Comics Reviews (The Fifth of November, 2014)

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As ever, from least favorite to favorite, with everything being something I willingly paid money for.

AXIS #4

I’ve been getting this out of spite, out of a general commitment to know what’s going on with Marvel, but after the miserable slog that was Original Sin, this, another overly serious take on “what if heroes WEREN’T HEROIC ANYMORE,” is just a bridge too far. I’ll pick up number nine, but this “heroes are villains and villains are heroes and the Avengers and X-Men are going to war again” baloney is just too much.

Miracleman #13

I was commenting on Tumblr that increasingly, it’s difficult to straight-facedly recommend many of the classics of 80s comics to people who didn’t grow up with them. This is no exception – it’s still brilliant, and you can see so many of the roots of what Alan Moore and his successors would go on to do in it, but everything here has been done better eventually, even if only by Moore himself. At $4.99 for sixteen pages, it remains impossible to straight-facedly recommend.

Chew #44

In some ways this is an improvement for Chew, a series I’m reading in a sort of vigorous demonstration of the sunk costs fallacy. It’s narrowly survived so many culls of my pull list. It’s trying to do something interesting here, and I have hope that part of that being interesting is doing something more interesting than the pile of generic shock deaths it’s pretending to be here. But right now, it’s still just hope.

Gotham Academy #2

This is currently a triumph of style over substance for me, but it’s such a complete triumph of style that I’m going to stick with it in the hopes that it fulfills the brilliance of its premise soon. It’s a book one so wants to see succeed, but it’s still not quite.

The Amazing Spider-Man #9

This was very much why I stuck through eight very generic issues of this. It’s clever and fun and bold, and feels like it’s determined to be a brilliant Spider-Man story that will be remembered for decades. Whether the future history of superhero comics means that a 2014 Spider-Man comic is, as a cultural object, capable of being remembered for decades is uncertain, but it’s everything one could reasonably want out of a Spider-Man comic.…

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