Eruditorum Press

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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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Us vs Gallifreybase vs Th3m

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Pushing Last War in Albion until tomorrow – was just about to image it up when this crossed my desk, and I want to deal with it.

So, in the wake of Dark Water, the site usvsth3m ran a piece entitled “16 sexually confusing feelings that Doctor Who fans have had since The Mistress revealed her secret.” It’s a fun piece that reveals the pathetically blinkered attitudes of a lot of Doctor Who fans for what they are, which is to say the attitudes of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic assholes. It’s a sobering reminder of the at times appalling attitudes of orthodox and longstanding fandom, and was absolutely something worth doing. And to their credit, they played nice and clipped usernames, thus avoiding publicly naming and shaming people for their actions, not that publicly naming and shaming the person who said that they felt “as though something sacred has been violated” because the Master was a woman now would have been in the least bit unreasonable.

Which is probably why the forum tried to demand that the site take the article down and banned the writer over it on the supposed grounds that they’re a “private” forum and that one needs permission of people to quote their posts off-site. Like the entirely sensible people they are, usvsth3m aren’t backing down in the least, and more power to them.

But let’s be clear here. GallifreyBase’s claim that they’re a “private” forum is absolutely ludicrous given that they have open registration and nearly 80,000 members, which is to say, about the entire population of Bath. The forum is private in the same way that the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium is private, except that Yankee Stadium only has a capacity of about 52,000.

What this amounts to is the largest single community of Doctor Who fans declaring that they have the right to have their views go uncommented on and unreported on. It amounts to a declaration that scholarly research and ethnography on Doctor Who fandom is forbidden. It amounts to a declaration that journalists can’t cover Doctor Who fandom. It is a morally indefensible position that actively aims to have a chilling effect on entirely legitimate topics of media research and journalism.

I’m sure that many of you are members of GallifreyBase. If so, please use their Contact Us form to tell them your views on their efforts to stifle freedom of speech.

And seriously, check out usvsth3m. They’re a lovely mixture of fun “wants to go viral” content and leftist politics. And really, in a war between a cesspit embodying the worst aspects of Doctor Who fandom and a site with an interactive “Slap Michael Gove” game there’s only one side you can possibly be on.

Back tomorrow with the start of our coverage of the fantastic “Swamp Thing attacks Gotham City” arc.…

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“At the mouth of the night, between daylight and dark”: No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party

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It’s understandable that Kei and Yuri wouldn’t know what Halloween is. It’s a holiday that’s only come to Japan comparatively recently in its history, mostly through osmosis of Western pop culture, and there isn’t really a Shinto, Buddhist or Hindu analog. And as such, the titular Halloween party of “No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party” is strobing, neon excess of a festival, a gloriously and beautifully Long 1980s commentary on the corporate-state forces that turn holidays into celebrations of capitalism and consumerism. Indeed, this is what Halloween is now, which makes this episode probably more relevant today than it was in 1987.

But this, like so much about Dirty Pair, is conveyed strictly through mood, atmosphere and visual symbolism. The look of this episode in general is *phenomenal*, and I could, as usual, spend an entire essay gushing about that. The animation and background work already elevated to a new level from the previous show, this is the moment where Dirty Pair finally starts to look like the Long 1980s I remember. Not that the older animes looked bad by any stretch of the imagination, but this one stirs a very specific set of emotions within me. And in spite of this outsider critique and the girls’ unfamiliarity with the night, “No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party” ends up resonating with much deeper and more fundamental truths. This isn’t simply the greatest Halloween special ever, this is a story that glows with an innate understanding of ritual, associative symbolic power, allegory and synchromysticism. And on top of that, it’s a masterpiece.

There’s a wryly knowing tone set right from the start: There’s a musical cue that plays over the title card that sounds for all the world like the Jimmy Hart version of the famous theme song to the *movie* Halloween. Both it and the CRT Jack-o-Lantern, complete with scanlines, that becomes a minor reoccurring motif even feels like they’ve been plucked from the opening to Halloween III: Season of the Witch (a movie that was, in part, about returning Halloween to its Celtic roots as a rejection of its commercialization, which is maybe fun to think about). And while the Tactical Robot the girls are chasing in this episode is clearly supposed to be a skeleton, it also *looks* a heck of a lot like the T-800 from The Terminator, which also means “No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party” is a considerably better Terminator pastiche than the *actual* Dirty Pair Terminator pastiche was: The Robot never stops running and is seemingly invincible (up until the climax, of course), but Kei and Yuri just find that annoying instead of terrifying.

There’s also the various criminal gangs the girls end up (completely accidentally and incidentally) taking down in their pursuit of the Tactical Robot, all of whom are in disguises themed after various fairy tales and children’s literature: There’s a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, a gang that seems to have a pulp sci-fi theme and (much to my delight) an Alice in Wonderland.…

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Don’t Look Away (The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone)

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Oh shit oh shit I need a new caption joke.
It’s April 24th, 2010. Usher and will.i.am are at number one with “OMG,” with Lady Gaga, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the worst ecological disasters in history, and Standard & Poor’s downgrades Greece’s credit rating, worsening the Euro crisis. Also, flights resume following the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, and we reach the last few days before the UK general election.
While on television, the first-filmed episode of the Moffat era. In the history of Doctor Who, there are two standard tricks that people have come up with to smooth the transition for a new Doctor. The first originates in 1966 with The Power of the Daleks, when Patrick Troughton’s debut was consciously and deliberately overshadowed by the return of the Daleks. Basically, you use existing characters as guest stars to lighten the load a bit on your main actor while he beds in. Variations were used in Spearhead from Space, Robot, Time and the Rani, The Christmas Invasion, and Deep Breath. The other, only ever executed once, but terribly clever all the same, is to film the first few stories out of order so that the new Doctor’s debut sees the actor self-assured and with a more developed take on their character, creating a strong impression so that the audience will subconsciously fill in the gaps when subsequently shown the earlier performances. It was used in Castrovalva. Moffat, faced with the change of the entire lead cast and most of the production team, made the sensible decision to do both, filming The Eleventh Hour as Smith’s fifth episode, and using this two-parter, featuring big iconic returning monsters and a major returning guest star, to let everyone bed in. 
On broadcast, this worked well. As we already discussed, The Eleventh Hour is the one Moffat episode even his detractors tend to embrace, making the exact big splash and statement it was supposed to. And this slotted into the season order nicely, feeling like a big turning point and an event, as opposed to like a production team desperately trying to get up to speed. In hindsight, a number of gaps are present, of which Matt Smith’s hair is only the most obvious. Many are subtle and along those lines – the decision not to pare back Alex Kingston’s makeup once she’s in camouflage, for instance, was a sensible one from a realist perspective (why would she redo her makeup, after all), but it smothers Kingston’s performance. 
But others are larger. Moffat is eventually going to develop a much more nuanced sense of what can be handwaved away and what needs explanation, but here he several times gets bogged down doing exposition about things that could be handled intuitively, while missing key bits of setup. The fact that the gravity globe is never explained in episode one makes what would actually have been a quite cool cliffhanger into a bit of a “blink and you miss it” moment.
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“The soul is the prison of the body”: Prison Riot. We Hate People With Grudges!

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The Starshine is bright and warm wherever Angels tread.

If there was ever a year where Dirty Pair could be said to have been at the peak of its pop culture saturation, 1987 was it. High on the success of Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture (which got its own Famicom Disk System game), Haruka Takachiho’s perfectly timed third novel Dirty Pair’s Rough and Tumble, a slew of tie-in merchandise and the premier of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kei and Yuri were by now most definitely in the public eye on a scale they’d never been before. But in many ways the franchise’s true home, or at least the home of the Sunrise anime branch of the series, can be said to be OVA. And it’s here where the Lovely Angels got a second wind with an entirely new episodic series following in the footsteps of the cult hit Dirty Pair television show from 1985. This series is officially just called Dirty Pair, but is usually afforded the subtitle “The OVA Series” by fans and critics to differentiate it from its predecessor. More infrequently, it’s also known as Original Dirty Pair, a nod to Sunrise’s belief that this show is closer to the original light novels than the other anime adaptations.

Regardless of what you call it, Sunrise released a series of ten brand-new episodes between December, 1987 and March, 1988. This was an extremely wise move on Sunrise’s part in my opinion: One thing I feel severely damaged the ultimate efficacy of the Dirty Pair TV series was that it struggled to maintain its early momentum as the season wore on. It seemed like the show was dealing with too large of an episode count and the ideas started to wear thin after some time. It’s a perfect example of why I think all TV shows need to have about a third fewer episodes per season, with an ideal of about 10-13. This allows the creative team to focus on one a handful of really solid stories at a time, and means they’re not rushed to throw something out to meet a pre-existing quota. And Original Dirty Pair definitely hits the short end of that spectrum. Combine this with the fact that the OVA medium allows for far more creative freedom just in general as OVAs are not at the beck and call of networks, ratings and broadcast schedules, and we have the potential here for an incredibly fine-tuned and honed sort of Dirty Pair anime.

So what’s new this time? Well, like all iterations of Dirty Pair, this series of course exists in its own continuity strictly distinct and separate from anything that came before or after. Stylistically, this manifests in the Lovely Angel looking like a cross between its Affair of Nolandia and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture incarnations. The girls’ uniforms similarly resemble most closely the ones they wore in Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture, but are all white, reminiscent of the all-silver wrestling outfits they wear in the books.…

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Dark Water Review

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This review was brought to you by 169 people on Patreon. There’s still one left, if you want to be number 170.

This was always going to be the tricky one. Part one of two. I’ve actually never written a review of a partial story before. I mean, arguably An Unearthly Child versus 100,000 BC, but they are by distinctly different writers, and have their origins in different places. My point there was that it does make sense to treat them differently, even if it also makes sense to treat them as one. I sort of did with End of Time Part One and End of Time Part Two, but that was a slightly joke. So I think this is the first time I’ve ever really tried to think extensively about the aesthetic goals and merits of individual parts of multi-part stories. 
Let’s start with the raves on Twitter, and the GallifreyBase ratings, which are 84.62% in the 8-10 range, 36.53% at a 10/10. Which is around what you’d expect a huge season finale to get if it’s working well, honestly. And as always with Moffat, it’s about expectations. In more ways than one. Everything that’s going to make headlines assembled the way you’d expect. Everything that’s based on clues given away in early episodes goes how you’d think. Yep, the Cybermen are using the dead. Sure enough, the Invasion homage is the cliffhanger. Missy is indeed the Master, which is a twist, but hardly the most shocking of them. The episode’s biggest twist came at the very beginning. 
It’s a good twist. Danny, the sublimely ordinary good man, turns out to have no secrets, and dies in the most ordinary, mundane, banal way imaginable. A plot contrivance par excellence, existing only to set a larger story in action. It’s played well – for all that “he was hit by a car, it came out of nowhere” is a classic lame twist, the decision to start with Clara frantic and surrounded by post-its explaining the past of the series, as though there’s some terrible secret she’s about to reveal, hides the twist perfectly.
And it’s a big enough premise to immediately escalate the stakes. Getting the volcano scene out of the way early, as Clara’s actually very clever and desperate attempt to get the Doctor to do the impossible for her when she needs it, works wonders as well. It’s a one-two punch that quickly and efficiently ratchets the tension up to a breaking point.
It’s also worth looking at these sequences in terms of just being brilliant. Clara’s betrayal is such a perfect encapsulation of her character, good and bad. But what really makes it is the Doctor’s reaction, and it’s the details of Peter Capaldi’s performance that really makes it. Moffat writes them a good scene. But part of what’s so good about it is that it gives them an incredibly large range of ways to play it. It’s just Capaldi, Coleman, and a familiar set. The emotional beats are all clear.
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Ship’s Log, Supplemental Bonus: “Oh, don’t even go to the first season!”

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Was what LeVar Burton once said in an interview with the now-defunct Star Trek Magazine when the DVD box sets for Star Trek: The Next Generation started being released. Even cast members, when prompted in fan environments, will tow mainline fandom’s party line and cringe on cue at the prospect of the series’ supposedly irredeemable first season. And while I grant there are issues to be found in this year’s crop of episodes, there are issues to be found in *all* of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s seven seasons and I’m still resolute in my belief the first year is unfairly singled out for blame. No, it’s not what we’ve come to expect from Star Trek: The Next Generation and yes, it’s a bit awkward in places, but Jonathan Frakes is correct to point out this was a year where the show took risks it wouldn’t take later on. And, love her or hate her, this is your only opportunity to see Tasha Yar as a crewmember.
So these are my picks for the absolute best of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Year One. Not every episode is a masterpiece, but each one is far better than its reputation would have you believe and well worth a look during any journey through the show’s mythos.
  1. “Encounter at Farpoint”
  2. “Haven”
  3. “Where No One Has Gone Before”
  4. “The Last Outpost”
  5. “Lonely Among Us”
  6. “The Battle”
  7. “Too Short a Season”
  8. “The Big Goodbye”
  9. “11001001”
  10. “Home Soil”
  11. “Coming of Age”
  12. “Heart of Glory”
  13. “The Arsenal of Freedom”
  14. “Symbiosis”
  15. “We’ll Always Have Paris”
  16. “Conspiracy”
  17. “The Neutral Zone”
 
Addendum: If this is your first visit to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I have to begrudgingly throw in “Datalore” as well. It’s not good, but the events it sets in motion come back to play an important part in later story arcs. But even without it, I look at this list and still see a pretty formidable success-failure ratio. I’m recommending roughly the same amount of episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 as I would from the entirety of the Dirty Pair TV series-While this season doesn’t have anywhere near the same number of unmitigated masterpieces as that one did, that’s pretty high praise coming from me.
Speaking of…
Since we’re compiling enumerated episode lists anyway and since I never officially did one for this show, here are my picks for the very best episodes from the Dirty Pair TV series, for the five DP fans who actually follow this site. While as of this writing I’m still going with Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia as my absolute favourite Dirty Pair story overall, the first two novels are a must-read if you can find them and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is probably worth a look at least once, they’re not included here (nor is any Classic DP material I’ve yet to cover) as I’m strictly focusing on the 1985 anime TV series today.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 84 (Call the Midwife, Supernatural)

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Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues, a general badass, and my wife.
In case you missed the boom, Call the Midwife is a BBC period drama about a group of midwives servicing London’s East End in the 1950s, originally based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth. It is the newest big show to hit UK television with ratings roughly matching those of Sherlock and Downton Abbey and surpassing Doctor Who itself. Call the Midwife was also featured in 2013’s Comedy Relief sketch (partnering with Doctor Who in this endeavor) and has Paul McGann’s brother, Stephen McGann as a prominent character in their series. UK TV ends up being a bit incestuous. 

Medical shows are a hard sell to those who work in the medical field. Much in the same way those in the tech field often cannot help but point out the inconsistencies and illogical moments when tech appears in TV or cinema, those of us in the medical field see the problems others can safely ignore. Even “reality” medical shows fall afoul of this issue, I remember yelling at a Mystery Diagnosis episode that “there is dumbing the facts down for the laypeople and then there is outright lying to them!”
But this is a problem that Call the Midwife sidesteps so well. Because the medicine is very rarely, if ever, the focus of the episode. With the emphasis shifted, they only have to include as many medical facts as they see fit. We never get a long and convoluted explanation of what is going on or why things are stressful, we get just enough to see the broad shapes of the situation and are led to conclusions about the situation by the players reactions to it. They stay vague enough to avoid getting things significantly wrong (though I feel I should disclaim all this by mentioning I am very much NOT a maternity nurse, there may be errors I do not pick up on). This era is also just out of step enough with the present that, unless there are glaring “no, that cannot possibly make sense if they’ve got brains in their heads,” I may not necessarily notice the errors. These are all things I appreciate enormously. It is so nice to be able to watch a medical show without the nurse brain picking apart every little detail.
So what’s the focus of Call the Midwife if it’s not the medicine? Well, it’s the people of course. And not in the schmaltzy, soapy Grey’s Anatomy sense. It’s what I adore about Call the Midwife, it’s the key to how they do convey how stressful situations are. It’s never the stress of watching numbers trend down or hearing alarms blaring, it is watching the people who are in the trenches give each other knowing and mildly terrified looks, gritting their teeth and getting through it. It is watching these women get their patients and each other through heart-wrenching, soul-crushing and nightmare-inducing situations. It is about them going home and getting on with their lives after.
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“Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded”: The Neutral Zone

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Let’s address the obvious things first. Yes, “The Neutral Zone” rehashes key elements from both “Space Seed” and “Balance of Terror”. Yes, the Romulans as depicted in this episode bear no relation whatsoever to the way they were portrayed in the Original Series, in essence throwing all the interesting commentary and contrast they bring with them out an airlock. Yes, those bases were indeed meant to be destroyed as part of a story arc to introduce the Borg that gets promptly forgotten about as soon as this episode airs. And yes, the motivations of the main cast are seriously wonky and out of character such that characterization of people like Picard and Riker waffles back and forth bafflingly from scene to scene. This is all self-evident and indisputable. There, is, however, a pretty simple explanation for all of it that can’t just be laid at the creative team.

If you guessed it’s the Writer’s Guild strike, well, good for you! You’re getting good at this. I’m afraid you don’t win anything, though.

“The Neutral Zone” is basically a first draft spec script. The reason it is a first draft spec script is because it was the only thing the team had lying around to put into production to close out the year, and essentially nobody was allowed to actually revise it so it would, you know, make sense and be coherent. Every single fault the finished product has can straightforwardly be pinned on this, and to single out “The Neutral Zone” in particular for blame seems a bit unfair to me, not only given how sketchy things are going to get next year, but also due to the altogether reasonable defense that, through such gems as “The Naked Now”, “Code of Honor”, “Angel One” and “Skin of Evil”, this team has demonstrated itself to be perfectly capable of screwing up *without* an industry-wide Writer’s Guild strike to slow them down further. But also because, in spite of everything, “The Neutral Zone” really does work and contributes quite a lot to the unfolding text of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Romulans are, of course, a problem. After D.C. Fontana and others spent the better part (and I mean that quite emphatically in several senses) of the Original Series trying to make them a social parallel of the Federation, in some sense a people more cultured and sophisticated than us, “The Neutral Zone” basically undoes all of that in one fell swoop by making them an entire species of Dick Dastardlys. This does not, it should be noted, doom the Star Trek: The Next Generation Romulans for good: Future stories set in this continuity will make impressive strides with them and redeem this early tactical blunder by essentially depicting them as a fractured and splintered figurehead empire in decline…which actually *does* build off some themes from the Original Series, though they’re back to mustache-twirling by the Dominion War.…

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Comics Reviews (October 30th, 2014)

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As ever, ranked from least enjoyed to most, with everything being a book I was willing to spend money on.

All-New X-Men #33

The original X-Men touring the Ultimate Universe is proving a bit sloppy. Too many characters split up into too many storylines emphasizes one of Bendis’s weak spots, which is that an issue can pass without a sense that much has happened. Split that over four plots and you run into issues where not a lot actually does happen. A promising cliffhanger, but aren’t they all?

The Massive #28

The six-part structure of the final arc turns out to be at least slightly artificial, with this very much being the start of a new three-part arc. But I suspect calling it a six-part arc was wise, as there’s a real flagging in the momentum here. This is not unusual for this book, which has always disappointed a bit. Not bad, but I’m not going to miss this much when it’s over.

Guardians of the Galaxy #20

Hm? Oh. Yes. This plot. The death of Richard Ryder, and all that. It wraps up pretty well. I’m not sure it was three issues of story, and certainly not sure it was worth pausing the actual Guardians for three months, but fair enough. It wasn’t half bad. Glad to be moving on though.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #4

I admit, this threw me for a bit of a loop, just because I’d gotten used to done-in-ones, and really wasn’t expecting a multipart story, which in turn made the pacing feel weird throughout. Rereading it, it’s a nice setup for a story. Alice, in particular, gets some excellent material here, as she and the Doctor come into a subtle sort of conflict. This fits into Eleven’s overall story arc quite well, and into the way the nature of the companion has evolved over the Moffat era. Good fun, this. Still highly recommended.

Wonder Woman #35

And so the Azzarello run ends. The rest of the New 52 did away with this book’s ability to actually define a new generation’s Wonder Woman, but it soldiered on and at least provided an interesting vision of her that was consistently one of the few books in the New 52’s first three years capable of being interesting. Here it ends, with some nice callbacks to Marston and the book’s legacy. There’s even talk of submission. There’s little to be excited about in the next phase of Wonder Woman. This, at least, was a book you could be proud of. Good for it.

Saga #24

Is it possible to write a bad comic with a Lying Cat splash page? No. It probably is not. I should really archive binge this in the gap months to actually get up to speed on the plots and characters, because it’s self-evidently an absolutely brilliant comic. Apparently there’s a nice oversized hardcover of the first eighteen issues coming out. Lovely Christmas present, that.

Uber #19

The stuff this book is doing with war comics is absolutely fascinating.…

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