Eruditorum Press

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Comics Reviews (9/25/14)

, 5

Last week is last week. I shan’t go back.

From worst to best.

The Sandman: Overture Special Edition #3

I wouldn’t normally even count this as a release, as it’s a clearly gratuitous and unnecessary publication for collectors, but I felt like I should single this issue out for having the single worst interview with Neil Gaiman that I think I’ve ever seen.

New Avengers #24

A good week if this is the lowest of the new comics. Several interesting things going on here, and if Hickman can (as he does here) stay focused on the characters and not wander off into endlessly and vaguely restating the same hope/anxiety positions about the nature of the future, he could manage a very sharp finale to this run. And, I mean, I have to love any comic that uses a splash page reveal of Molecule Man as its cliffhanger.

The Massive #27

Huge numbers of reveals, such that it’s rather difficult to see how there are three more issues of this. I suspect that there’s little this book can do to make me not feel like it was a bit of a wasted opportunity. Ultimately, I wish it had been written by Warren Ellis. Or someone who could actually do the book this is trying to be.

Chew #43

A strange sense of deja vu, inasmuch as I swear the comic has done this cover gimmick before. Plot marches on. I’ll be honest, this is a book I wouldn’t keep buying if issue #1 was at this level of quality, but at this point it would have to do something really infuriating to get me not to stick out to the end. Ah, the sunk costs fallacy, also known as the comic industry’s business model. Of course, fridging Olive like they seem to be setting up would do it.

Mighty Avengers #14

A sweet and ruthlessly optimistic ending to the current arc, setting up the “we like this book but it’s not selling so let’s do a title change and a new #1” reboot with aplomb, reminding people who have been buying the book why they like it, bringing this phase to what feels like an ending, and being well set up for the next round. Plus, it’s a book whose best line manages to be “Yay! Good work, team!” Which is cute.

Guardians of the Galaxy #19

OK, after a fluff of a first issue to this arc, this one is starting to grab my attention. The question of Gamora’s moral judgment of Quill works for me this time in a way that it didn’t the first time (probably because, having no idea of the background to this arc, I was busy being thrown by learning the questions at the same time Bendis was answering them). Curious how it resolves. And it had better resolve next issue, because I suspect three issues is a lot for this story.

Cyclops #5

This ends Rucka’s bit on the book, yes? A very solid, standard Rucka issue here.…

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Outside the Government: A Scandal in Belgravia

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It’s January 1st, 2012. Coldplay are at nuber one with “Paradise,” with Flo Rida, Rihanna, Ed Sheeran, and LMFAO also charting. Since Christmas, Samo aand Tokelau switched sides of the International Date Line, and Harry Burkhart committed two million dollars worth of damage in an arson spree in Los Angeles. 
While on television, Sherlock returns with A Scandal in Belgravia. This is, quite simply, a phenomenal piece of television. It belongs on lists alongside The West Wing’s “Two Cathedrals” and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “The Body.” It’s smart and ambitious, and everything it tries comes off nearly perfectly. It calmly and definitively sums up what this take on Sherlock Holmes can do, and why it’s valuable and interesting – a marvelous case of a show being its own best advertising. Even more than its barnstorming premiere, this is an episode you can show people to hook them on the show. 
With so much talent on display here, it seems silly to credit it all to Moffat. But in the end, this episode works because its script provides such a strong foundation. First and foremost, A Scandal in Belgravia consists of Moffat luxuriating in the structure of writing. Moffat has always been an intensely structural writer – as a farceur has to be, really. But more than that, Moffat has always been unafraid of foregrounding the structure, writing television in which part of the pleasure is watching the story unfold in the peculiar shape he’s put it into. 
But in the past, Moffat has relied on structural cleverness to create big, landmark episodes of series like Coupling and Press Gang where the budget didn’t give any other ways to go big. With A Scandal in Belgravia, on the other hand, he finds himself at a seeming summit of his career, with opportunities unlike any he’d had before. The ninety minute format gave him space to work that he’d never had before – he didn’t even have the obligation of a cliffhanger at the forty-five minute mark to work to. In Cumberbatch and Freeman he had as solid a cast as exists.  With Sherlock as a bona fide hit, there was the budget to do, if not whatever he wanted, at least more or less anything that might be required of an action-adventure plot. He’s got a top notch director.
The last time Moffat faced a situation like this he produced The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, but there, at least, he still had the advantage of low expectations. Here there’s no shield – Moffat’s only options are to show that he’s as brilliant as claimed or to disappoint. He didn’t disappoint. 
In many ways this comes from Sherlock’s structure, which is almost tailor made for Moffat to succeed with. The show is, by its nature, built around moments of dazzling exposition, that being, in a real sense, the entire point of Sherlock Holmes as a character. These are also the sorts of scenes Moffat excels at – he’s always been extremely good at using exposition scenes for characterization and comedy.
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“City of prose and fantasy”: The Last Outpost

, 13

For a brief period of time when I was younger my family owned a small local toy store. Apart from my more cosmopolitan cousins, visiting their store was one of the only ways I had to keep abreast of the developments in pop culture, or at least the segment they catered to.

Because they were set up as vendors, this got my parents invites to the annual Toy Fair in New York City every year they owned the business. On a couple of occasions I accompanied them on their business trips, and oftentimes they were my only opportunity to be exposed to a genuine world city. One one occasion I recall quite distinctly, we went to go visit the flagship store for international toy retail giant FAO Scwarz on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Just like everything else in New York, FAO Schwarz was mostly known for very high-end, luxury things, in particular their life-sized stuffed animals, which they likely at least partially got from German toy manufacturer Steiff, whose products they also carried (and was also probably one of the reasons my parents went there, because their store carried them too).

My memories of FAO Schwarz are twofold. Firstly, I remember making a beeline for the video game and cartoon show tie-in action figures. We didn’t have anything on a remotely comparable scale back home, and this was potentially my one opportunity to get physical representations of some of my favourite characters. But secondly, I was struck by how enormous, grand and lavish it all felt: In hindsight this is at least a little understandable, considering it was the flagship store of a major brand on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, but I still remember marveling at how upscale and aristocratic it felt. FAO Schwarz seemed to be one of the most New York places we went in New York, if that makes any sense at all; it had every ounce of the archetypical gold-rimmed, art deco feeling that characterizes Manhattan, and it radiated that from every corner. It was at once exciting, but also more than a little intimidating. I guess in hindsight, my visit to that toy store in Manhattan embodied for me all the excess and decadence that capitalism naturally leads to, in spite of the nice things it can also make for us.

I think Andy Probert’s work on Star Trek: The Next Generation is criminally overlooked. His fellow designers practically worship him, deservedly and understandably so, but I’m not sure it’s as recognised outside of those small and select circles as it really ought to be. His three starship designs in particular are genuine works of art, and look like absolutely nothing else. I’ve already talked a bit about the Enterprise, though I could talk about the Enterprise basically forever, but “The Last Outpost” gives us the second of the three: The Ferengi Marauder. What strikes me the most about this ship is the thickness of that inner ring, how there are so many tiny windows, and how they all face outward towards us.…

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I Owe it To My Friend To Try, Because I Got Her Into This (The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe)

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as a cardboard box.
It’s December 25th, 2011. A group assembled under the name “Military Wives” are at number one with “Wherever You Are,” which is more or less the song you’d expect, with Coldplay, Flo Rida, and Little Mix also charting. In news, since The Sarah Jane Adventures took its bow Muammar Gaddaffi was killed in Libya, the Curiosity rover was launched by NASA, and the global population hit seven billion. 
While on television is The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, which is, apparently, the worst thing Moffat has ever done, the second-worst story of the Moffat era, the third-worst of the new series as a whole, and the thirteenth-worst story of all time, coming in just ahead of Paradise Towers and just behind The King’s Demons, but notably beaten by Warriors of the Deep, The Time Monster, and The Horns of Nimon. Or at least, that’s the word from the Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary survey, which also thinks that Day of the Doctor is the best story ever and that Frontios is inferior to The Android Invasion, and that The Celestial Toymaker is superior to stories that aren’t The Twin Dilemma, so is perhaps… inclined towards error. 
But this gets at an issue worth exploring at least a little, which is that there are two mutually contradictory narratives of the Moffat era. In one, the initial promise of the great writer of Blink and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances was steadily squandered on a stream of mediocrity and repetition that has steadily driven people away from the show. In the other, the show remains stubbornly popular without any real evidence of people being driven away, especially when you consider that a statistically significant number of people have migrated to watching on iPlayer, which still isn’t counted in ratings figures. That one of these is based on personal preference while the other is based on the actual metric of success in the television industry is, of course, basically irrelevant. These are, it seems, the two options.
Still, it’s worth entertaining the myriad of criticisms frequently made of The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, if only to see if any of them have any substance to them. Let’s start with the most idiosyncratic, if only because they are the ones it is possible to mount the biggest case against the story over. For instance, the observation that the “women are strong because they can be mothers” twist is transphobic. Which… well, it’s not. It’s cisnormative, certainly, but just as heteronormative and homophobic are not actually synonyms, neither are cisnormative and transphobic, and while I am well aware that, as a cis person, I don’t get a vote in this, I would nevertheless, in a purely advisory capacity, strongly suggest that the trans activist community start realizing that a more nuanced vocabulary for discussing trans oppression might be useful.
Which is to say that while it’s certainly the case that there are many ways the story could have been more trans-inclusive, this is an accurate but fairly minor complaint, not least because any way to make the story more trans-inclusive would have involved being a very different story.
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“To Boldly Go” Where No One Has Gone Before

, 5

All utopias are, at their most basic levels, ideas. Regardless of whether or not people have felt the need to take physical action to translate it into the material realm, the idea remains and is ultimately what’s important.

The blurb for “Where No One Has Gone Before” describes the plot as “A warp drive experiment transports the Enterprise to a region of space where thought becomes reality”. Except, that’s not true, is it? On multiple levels. Kosiniski’s experiments are nothing but, as he does nothing except unwittingly take credit for the work The Traveler surreptitiously does and there’s no actual theory to test here as it’s all common knowledge to him. But more relevantly, it’s The Traveler’s contention that there’s really no difference between time, space and thought. It’s merely the *acknowledgment* of such that allows the Enterprise to do the seemingly impossible things it does in this story. M33, that is, Messier 33, is a real place: It’s a spiral galaxy that’s the third largest in our local group, after the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. There’s no evidence that, if you were able to go there, it would appear any different than our own galaxy does, yet alone the indescribably beautiful psychedelic mindscape Rob Legato dreamed up for this episode. The reason it looks the way it does is because The Traveler helped the Enterprise attain a higher state of consciousness in order to comprehend reality. The world and the dream are one.

And it’s a captivating dream to be sure. There are a handful of images from the first season that are truly iconic, transcending the episodes they were apart of to become larger signifiers for the series on the whole. The M33 of “Where No One Has Gone Before” is one of them, the second of the year for me (the first being Q’s crackling energy net from “Encounter at Farpoint”). And yet while a few of them will take on lives of their own such that the stories they hail from seem middling and forgettable by comparison, these first two are equally as powerful as those episode they represent. Much of what I remember about Star Trek: The Next Generation is intensely surreal and abstract, especially in later seasons that deal quite explicitly with darkly psychological and speculative elements. In spite of Star Trek having a reputation for being “realistic” and the archetypical materialist Hard SF action series, The Next Generation‘s sojourns into the staunchly immaterial are just as real and important to me, despite this aspect of the show constantly being glossed over. Of course, they are real, because there’s no difference between the spiritual world and the physical one and nothing exists which is not divine.

And “Where No One Has Gone Before” is the first time in the series I start to get that same feeling. Apart from the shots of the galaxy itself, the show’s cinematography and visual effects perfectly capture how the Enterprise‘s own history plays out upon it.…

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Time Heist Review

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This review was brought to you by 155 backers on Patreon. If you like it, please consider joining them – the campaign is just $5.25 in pledges away from giving every backer free copies of my first three books.

Right, so, circumstances mean I can get this review up very quickly, and I’m taking the temperature of the fans who rated it on GallifreyBase within ten minutes of it airing. Two hundred and sixty-one raters, 55.55% of which are rating 8-10. Another 22.22% at a 7. About an hour later, and it’s still running right around there. For comparison, that puts it roughly in line with where the polls on Journey to the Center of the TARDIS and The Bells of St. John settled down, which suggests this one is going to be somewhat harshly remembered (although Rings of Akhaten got something more like 35% 8-10, so it’s merely a rough ride, not a drubbing). I politely disagree – I rather liked it. Although I can see the faults, on the whole, they were not unduly distracting for me. 
Still, it’s notable that this is by one of the less popular recurring writers. If Steve Thompson can be said to have one defining stylistic tic, it is that he is prone to creating elaborate plots and then populating them with thin cartoons of actual characters. The cynic might accuse Moffat of the same thing, although I obviously disagree, and certainly think Time Heist illustrates the difference. Which is to say that Sai is everyone’s first Shadowrun character, and Sabra is blatantly Rogue from the X-Men with the serial numbers filed off and a less sensible superpower, and it’s clear very little thought has gone into either of them past picking where to nick them from, in a way that just flatly isn’t true of… really any Moffat character who gets as many lines as either of them do, but let’s say Clara, just to really make the point. Although in this case, there’s barely any characterization of Clara or the Doctor either – it’s pretty much a straight shot high-paced thriller.
This isn’t, of course, inherently a problem, or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. It’s perfectly possible to have the elaborate plot be interesting enough to carry the story, and Time Heist illustrates this. Its central plot dynamic is terribly clever, in that it allows for exposition and plot twists to happen organically at more or less any moment. The heist itself provides a continual forward momentum, but all the key plot revelations concern things that have already happened, which makes for a neat structure that keeps things moving. 
There are, of course, some proper plot holes. (How exactly did the Doctor seed the bank with all of those cases without triggering the Teller?) But they’re proper refrigerator logic plot holes – ones that you don’t notice them until you sit down and think about it later. (See also the descendants of the murdered Viking settlers in The Curse of Fenric, which took me decades and Tat Wood to notice.
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Declare Yourself A Magician (The Last War in Albion Part 62: John Constantine)

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This is the twelfth 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 second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. 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: After killing Swamp Thing for the second time in his arc “The Nukeface Papers,” Moore brought him back alongside the debut of one of his most important creations, John Constantine.

“How to be a magician: Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.” – Grant Morrison, “Pop Magic!”

Figure 463: The protagonist of Phonogram:
Rue Britannia, David Kohl, is an authorial
analogue not unlike John Constantine.
(Written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie
McKelvie, from Phonogram #1, 2006)
Essentially every significant figure in the War has written the character at one point or another. Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis all wrote issues of Hellblazer, as have most of the more marginal powers: Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan both have sizable runs, for instance. The only major figure not to have actually written Constantine is Kieron Gillen, who reacted to DC’s 2012 cancellation of Hellblazer by noting that “part of me also thinks ‘you’re not a real British Comics Writer unless you’ve written Hellblazer.’ So that’s me doomed,” although as Gillen has also noted, his first arc of Phonogram, “Rue Britannia may as well be Hellblazer, of course,” which is accurate enough, and applies equally well to his run on Journey into Mystery. Beyond merely having a long running comic with an impressive array of writers, however, Constantine has also proven a profitable character for DC’s larger corporate owners, who spun out a quasi-successful movie version and, in 2014, a television series based on the character.
It is also notable that for all that Moore is known to spit occasional invective at his former employers for, as he memorably put it in one interview, “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night” in lieu of actually coming up with new ideas, Moore has never demonstrated any particular animosity over the continual use of John Constantine. As Moore himself notes, “ I understood that when I had finished with [Constantine] that it would just be absorbed into the general DC stockpile,” and even provided a blurb for Brian Azzarello’s 2000 run on the title. “I’ve never objected to that,” he stresses, in an interview where he elsewhere rails against DC’s propensity for doing “crappy Green Lantern stories” that were “based upon an eight page story of mine from twenty years ago,” further highlighting that Constantine, at least, is a character he’s at relative peace with DC’s continual profit from.
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“…no less than the journeywork of stars”: Haven

, 11

And I knew you would be this brave.

Humans claim to always be in search of truths, yet all too often we blind ourselves and refuse to accept the ones we find. I am increasingly of the belief we overcomplicate our lives, not just in a material sense, but in a spiritual and philosophical sense. To go back, look back, to remember things we may have once known intuitively but have since forgotten…This is not sacrifice, but gaining an understanding of who we are and what’s truly important. And sometimes we need our routine disrupted to remind ourselves of that. If the universe seems to be trying to tell you something, perhaps you might listen: We all find our own paths in time.

The issue at stake for Deanna Troi and Wyatt Miller, and indeed of Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole, is one of destiny. In Westernism, we tend to think that our entire lives, our past, present and future in the common parlance, are either entirely up to chance and individual will or, conversely, planned out for us in advance, spelled out to the letter. An arranged marriage can than be seen as a metaphor for this in microcosm: The young couple’s lives are planned out for them by forces entirely beyond their control and they have no say in the matter, seemingly bound by fate. And the show itself is caught up in this, threatened with the loss of a major character four episodes in. Given the washout of “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor”, it does seem worryingly as if Star Trek: The Next Geeration is in the process of rapid implosion. Even Captain Picard seems to sense this, opening the episode apparently preoccupied, musing as to whether the titular Haven will provide some much-needed, yet “all too brief”, reprieve for him and his crew.

This subtle awareness seems to permeate much of this episode, almost as if Star Trek: The Next Generation is in some way aware of its recent transgressions and its desperate need to move onward and upward as quickly and as dramatically as possible. And “Haven” is in many ways the exact story this show needed to do now: It’s the first episode since “Encouter at Farpoint” that unquestionably exists in its own world and doesn’t make sweeping, obvious callbacks to the Original Series. If “Haven” does resemble any Original Series high water mark it might arguably be “Journey to Babel”, both being character studies about one of the regulars who has a strained relationship with their parents set against the backdrop of a diplomatic incident. But unlike its immediate predecessors, if it does, it’s only on the level of basic storytelling structure, not a whole plot reference. And “Haven” goes above and beyond anything “Journey to Babel” ever did, by weaving all of its subplots together into an elegant demonstration of cosmic synchronicity.…

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No Comics Reviews This Week

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Sorry – I couldn’t get to the shop yesterday, so I’ve not actually read anything this week save for WicDiv, which I didn’t want to wait for, and so pirated in advance of buying a floppy today when I actually do make it. If I make it today. Which I might not, because I have to go into NYC to record that Slate podcast. So, yes, it’s a rather busy week.

WicDiv is marvelous though.

In any case, I’ll either run reviews on Sunday or fold the highlights into next week’s reviews. Last War in Albion will be up tomorrow, and is a fun one – pretty much all John Constantine, and one of the most extended discussions of magic thus far in the War. I’ve started writing the next chapter now as well, and that’s proving fun as well. I’ve decided that the sort of standard “two or three posts of historical background followed by a more or less chronological working through of the comics interspersed with digressions” approach that I developed starting around the Doctor Who/Star Wars chapter, and really honed for the Captain Britain chapter has clearly become a crutch to be discarded, if only for the sake of clearly establishing for the umpteenth time that thinking you know what to expect from Last War in Albion is never entirely safe. So the chapter has all the right bits, but not in the most obvious order – instead, it’s very much structured to come right off the end of the Swamp Thing chapter, and to maintain the tone that ends with. It’s the first time I feel like I’ve really used the “continual essay” aspect of Last War in Albion well over a chapter transition.

More broadly, I’ve finally gotten to where I’m looking at this first volume as a book unto itself, and it seems pretty clear to me that the one-two punch of Swamp Thing and V for Vendetta is the climax of the book. The first seven chapters are an extended exercise in anticipation – the structure of the Captain Britain chapter writ large, in effect. They go through almost everything they can possibly justify going through before getting to one of Moore’s masterpieces. Then we do two in a row in a big, triumphant roar of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century announcing himself to the world. And then it shrinks back down for the final two chapters, to try to get back to a sense of quiet and calm so that when I finally face Watchmen in Book Two, it lands in a world prepared to be completely upended. I suspect Chapter Nine will be 10+ parts again, but that Chapters Ten and Eleven will both be <10. I fully expect to weep, remembering the days I was foolish enough to believe that.

One of these days, I’ll have to sit down and outline Book Two. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to fulfill the promised structure on that, but I find myself weirdly confident that it can be done.…

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