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Comics Reviews (9/11/14)

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As ever, from worst of my pulls to best.

Amazing Spider-Man #6

You know, I am just not feeling this run on Spider-Man. I quite liked Slott before Superior. But this just isn’t doing it for me. It’s very classic Spider-Man, but in the sense of being derivative and predictable. Sure, Peter’s specific life circumstances are different, but the storytelling is utterly flat and predictable. I’ll probably give this through Spider-Verse, but I’m pretty pessimistic.
The United States of Murder Inc. #5

Woo-hoo, watch those wheels spin!
Velvet #7

Still the best comic that I have no idea what the fuck is going on in. Also the comic most in need of a recap page. Still very fun, and I enjoy reading each issue, but man, this must work so much better in trade.
Avengers #34.1

Al Ewing does a one-off featuring Hyperion, which ends up being a quite good Superman comic that happens to feature one of Marvel’s knock-off Supermans. It’s difficult to quite know what to make of this – there’s something odd about such a straight up Superman comic being done without Superman. It feels like there should be more of a sense of what makes Hyperion an interesting take on the archetype, although to be fair, it’s also not clear that there actually is anything, Hickman’s protestations when creating this iteration to the contrary. Still, it’s a fun book.
Captain Marvel #7

An odd issue, and probably a necessary one, but not necessarily the best one. The first half does some needed character work, while the second half finally brings a subplot that’s been lurking in the background to the foreground. Both are fine, and I’m sure the next issue will be an utter delight, but this is definitely a “transition” sort of comic, as opposed to one with any really strong beats in its own right.
Hawkeye #20

The resolution of the Kate Bishop arc on this book. The release schedule (or lack thereof) did some real damage with this arc, and I admit I forget who the secondary cast is, which is definitely a problem for this issue, but I’m still left with an overwhelming sense that there should be a Kate Bishop solo series.

Ms. Marvel #8
A slightly off issue for this – I suspect that the book would have benefitted from a slower issue here that spent more time on Kamala and Lockjaw, only getting to the Inventor plot at the end. More character beats and “ordinary girl superhero” stuff and less diving right into adventures would have been nice, and I feel like we’ve missed the opportunity for a wacky hikinks of Kamala and her new pet dog issue in favor of going right to another arc. Though I love the theme here of children caught in other people’s wars – especially for a book about Muslim-Americans. 

Annihilator #1

Grant Morrison nicks a substantial portion of the plot of The Fountain and proceeds to do a very Grant Morrison “fiction becomes reality” story with it and some very goth Flash Gordon stuff.

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Beyond the Police 1 (The Adventures of Ms. Smith and the Curator)

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On Saturdays, the Curator comes by Ms. Smith’s house for tea, and then they go for an adventure in his time machine. 
Ms. Smith and the Curator walked across the Worldsphere. 
The drone that followed them, Ka!ditu, announced that the wreck was another kilometer away. They continued to walk. They were both quite elderly, and the Curator walked with a cane, slowly, and slightly hunched over, but even cursory observation would reveal them to be surprisingly spry for their age. Walking through the tropical woods, they looked like nothing so much as tourists on a package holiday gone utterly wrong, but who were nevertheless keeping calm and carrying on, and largely acquitting themselves admirably in their continued survival.
“How long was it for you between when you dropped me off with Mrs. Jones and when you came by for tea for the first time?” Ms. Smith finally asked, to break the silence.
The Curator thought about it. “I don’t know. It was a lot. I stopped counting years eight faces ago. Or I might have been lying. There was the Scottish one. And the Punch and Judy man. And Merlin… I don’t remember, really.” He paused for a moment. “aM!xitsa, how old did you say the wreck was?”
“‘I’m Ka!ditu, Curator,” the drone said with unhesitating patience, although it was the third time she had answered this question, and the fifteenth she’d been called aM!xitsa. “And the wreck is eighty years old.”
“It hardly seems fair to call it a wreck,” Ms. Smith said, for the first time. “I mean, it’s a man with a Vortex Manipulator. He probably fused with something teleporting in.”
“So why are we investigating this?” the Curator asked. “I’m cold.”
“Because there’s still a life sign,” explained Ms. Smith. The Curator accepted this explanation, as he had the previous time a few hours earlier. 
Shortly thereafter, they arrived at the wreck. The man’s body was thoroughly mangled, but still impossibly, uncannily intact. Only the face was relatively untouched. He had pronounced, handsome cheekbones, and a squared, heroic jaw. His hair was short, brown, and uncannily well tousled for a man having spent eighty years lying on a pile of rocks.  “You’re,” Ms. Smith began when she was him, but he cut her off.
“Captain Boe,” he said, flashing a Hollywood smile. “I’m an immortal time traveller, but I wrecked on the Worldsphere. My body usually heals itself, but there was an awful lot of damage, and eighty years of being stranded seem to have taken their toll. How did you find me?”
“Psychic paper,” the Curator announced confidently. “Hello, I’m the Curator. Would you like a Gummi Bear?” he asked, pulling a bag full of candy from his pocket. 
“Your biodata was detected by Professor Malone at the Cal Institute,” Ka!ditu added by way of explanation, “and we identified your crash site. Since we were not fond of most of the implications of something that could survive, badly injured, for eighty years, we aided you in issuing a psychic distress call.
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“My friend, judge not me”: Encounter at Farpoint

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“Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.”
-Cesare Pavese

Some of you might be old enough to remember TNN. Known as “The Nashville Network” It was one of the many hyper-niche basic cable stations that cropped up in the early 1980s capitalizing on the new booming cable and satellite television market. The idea was for it to be a kind of MTV for country music, playing mostly music videos, prerecorded concerts and the like, with the occasional country music-themed talk show. What set it apart from its competitor CMT, which launched the same year and was almost exactly the same thing, was that it had the rights to use the Grand Ole Opry and its associated properties, one of the oldest and most respected establishments in country music.

Eventually, TNN went the way of all hyper-niche cable channels and suffered massive, massive network decay in an attempt to court an increasingly shrinking audience. In 2000, TNN rebranded itself as “The National Network” and made overtures to the generation of viewers who had grown up in the 1980s. It got the rights to the WWE and started airing reruns of popular 1980s syndicated and network TV shows, like WKRP in Cincinati, The Wonder Years and Diff’rent Strokes. The network eventually went so far down this road that the entire connection to country music was lost, and it turned into “Spike TV: The Network for MEN”, about which the less said the better. Network decay 101 notwithstanding, one of the shows TNN picked up as part of its somewhat ham-fisted grab for relevance was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although looking back I bristle at TNN’s executives seeing it as an archetypical “male-oriented” show for “young men ages 18-25”, the fact remains this was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s return to television, and it wouldn’t be an understatement to call this one of the most important moments of my life, perhaps rivaled only by my first discovery of the show all those many years ago.

I don’t think there’s been a single work of fiction that’s had as long-lasting and profound an influence on me as Star Trek: The Next Generation. Why, I’m not sure I could tell you. I could point to the obvious, like the philosophical utopianism or the absolutely unparalleled cast who elevate a bunch of recycled one-note stock characters to some of the most iconic and unforgettable pop culture characters in recent history. I could once again mention LeVar Burton. Then there’s the more esoteric, like the sense of cosmic wonder I frequently attribute to it, or how the show’s art design and look-and-feel left an indelible impression on my psyche and that I have trouble even today properly articulating. It was a common shared reference point for myself as well as many others: My parents watched it, my grandparents watched it and everyone else I knew watched it too.…

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I Need A Bit of Help

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Hey all – I’ve got a spot if trouble, and I suspect someone reading this can help.

My bank removed around $2000 from one of my accounts to cover an overdraft that someone I had a joint account had made on an account I had nothing to do with. To be clear, I have a savings account with my wife. I also had an old joint checking account with Person X. X in turn had a joint account with Person Y. The bank drew from my joint account with my wife to cover an overdraft on the account held by X and Y – an account I am not and never have been on.

Despite the fact that I had nothing to do with the account that was overdrafted, Bank of America refuses to return my money, saying that because I had a joint account with X I was liable for any of their accounts, even ones I wasn’t on and had no knowledge of.

This does not seem right.

If anyone can provide some pro bono legal advice on what I might be able to do to get what is, for me, a massive amount of money refunded, I would be grateful.

To make parsing advice easier, I would politely request that armchair lawyers not chime in. I need authoritative advice from people who know what they’re talking about, not a massive list of guesses and possibilities.

Help in comments or via email to snowspinner at gmail is appreciated. Thanks.…

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Steven Moffat is a Feminist and You Are Wrong if You Disagree

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If you enjoy this post, maybe you might consider throwing a few dollars to support my blog’s reviews of Season Eight as it comes out? You can do that right here, over at Patreon. Thanks. 

I had this draft lying around, so I figured, let’s do some Tuesday content, eh? I’ve already written the so-called “Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post,” which was intended as a sort of preliminary mission statement summing up my take on the Moffat/feminism controversy prior to my covering the Moffat era, and which instead went kind of viral and became the most read thing I’ve ever put on this blog. And I’ve talked about some of these issues in isolation – people looking to see my argument in a detailed form, particularly my feminist readings of specific Moffat stories, will probably find my posts on (deep breath) Joking Apart, Coupling, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, The Beast Below, A Good Man Goes to War, Let’s Kill Hitler, The Wedding of River Song, and The Angels Take Manhattan enlightening. I am not going to retrace the feminist reading of the Moffat era that I’ve made in those posts here in detail, although there’s no real reason that anyone should have to read those posts to get the argument I am making here.

More broadly, however, I would politely point to the fact that I have nearly a dozen existent essays on topics related to Moffat and feminism as evidence that this is an issue I have thought about somewhat extensively. Perhaps more to the point, I would note that my opinions on Moffat’s work are based on having seen literally every episode of television he has ever written, having listened to nearly every DVD commentary track he has ever recorded, and having read countless interviews with him conducted over the course of around twenty years. I am reasonably confident, between my qualifications as a PhD in media studies and this level of background research, that I am among the, oh, let’s say fifty people in the world most qualified to speak authoritatively on the subject of Steven Moffat’s career. I do not say all of this as some sort of prima facie evidence that I am correct, but rather to note that this is not a debate in which I am an idle participant.

These disclaimers seem to me necessary because the suggestion that Steven Moffat is misogynistic has become quite widespread, to the point where it’s often taken as a sort of assumption such that the only debate is “how misogynistic.” This claim, despite its popularity, is, in my view, incorrect, not simply on the level of “it is something I disagree with,” but on the level of “it is possible to factually disprove this claim.”

This, then, is my attempt to conclusively refute the claim that Steven Moffat is misogynistic, and, in a related but distinct move, definitively demonstrate that he is, by any reasonable standard, a feminist writer.…

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No Name

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Triggers

Apparently, they’ve found out who Jack the Ripper was.  Maybe.  At least, so says the Daily Mail, and a bloke who’s written a book about the case, and who owns a business selling ‘Ripper’ tours.  So, reliable and unbiased sources.

Turns out, Jack the Ripper was… some guy.

Who’d have thunk it?

So, will this put a stop to the lucrative Ripper industry?  The books, movies, walks, etc?

No, of course not.  Like all previous unmaskings, it’ll just fuel the fire, even if this unmasking turns out to rest on marginally better evidence that some hack’s ability to create anagrams, or an evidently untrue story told by a publicity hound, or the baseless hunch of a crime writer, or an obviously forged diary, or the manufactured bad reputation of a dead one-time heir to the throne.

Because, contrary to what everyone ever has always said about Jack the Ripper, interest in the case doesn’t stem from the fact that the murderer was never caught.  It stems from the appeal of the degradation, humiliation, punishment and silencing of women… and from the way revelling in this (with whatever spurious self justification) can distract us from other stuff about the lives those women led, and the world they lived in.

Our misogynistic culture is obsessed with the murder of women.  It is possibly the main subject of the present-day Western narrative culture industry, aside from the sexual/romantic conquest of women.

It could be objected that there are so many stories about the murder of women because so many women are murdered… but that doesn’t explain, say, the lack of a similar number of stories about the rape of women (as Alan Moore pointed out), or about the political and social subjugation of women, or about any number of other things that are more common.

The prevalence of the actual murder of women is intimately connected with the prevalence of depictions of the murder of women, but in ways that are far more complex than the merely causal (whichever way you want to imagine the causation runs).  It’s all part and parcel of a cultural misogyny which stems from sexism and patriarchy, generated by class society all the way back to what Engels called “the world historic defeat of the female sex” with the start of social hierarchy.  (None of which is to excuse our present cultural practice by appeal to the influence of older structures.)

The women murdered (as is supposed) by the man dubbed Jack the Ripper are objects of morbid fascination because they shared a fate which made them only slightly unusual for women of their class and time.  Lots of these women were raped, abused, beaten and/or murdered (by men – let’s not efface that vital part of the story).  It just so happens that some of these women were murdered in particularly vicious and gruesome ways, with their bodies mutilated and insultingly displayed afterwards.  (It’s by no means clear how many women were the victim of the one escalating killer who ended up reaching a crescendo of perverse cruelty in the killing of Mary Kelley and then vanished, but it does seem likely that at least four were part of his distinct sequence.)…

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Outside the Government: The Man Who Never Was

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It’s October 17th, 2011. Rihanna is still stuck in a hopeless place. Maroon 5, Christina Perri, LMFAO, and One Direction also chart. In news, Liam Fox resigns as defense secretary, Occupy London starts up outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Israel and Hamas engage in a prisoner swap at a ratio of roughly 1027:1. 
While on television, it’s the end of The Sarah Jane Adventures with The Man Who Never Was. Let’s start by reminding ourselves what The Sarah Jane Adventures was. Not just what it strove to be – an intergenerational celebration of Doctor Who’s effect on children. But what it was, which is to say, a consistently well-made piece of children’s drama that was watchable and enjoyable by adults. This used to be one of the UK’s great cultural exports. Now television is essentially devoid of any shows comparable to The Sarah Jane Adventures that aren’t animated, and most of the animated ones aren’t British. It’s a show that boldly held the line on an important sort of television that’s tragically faded from popularity, and its existence and the effort put into making it good was one of the things that the BBC could point to and sincerely, honestly say “look, see, we’re not just another commercial television station, we’re a public good.” At its best, it’s a series that took its audience seriously, treated them with respect, and was unafraid to tell emotionally honest stories about difficult and complex topics. At its worst, it was at least usually all good fun. 
It’s not, I assume, a surprise to anyone reading at this point that I strongly consider Gareth Roberts the best writer that the series had. I’ll admit to not being completely unbiased here – Roberts is at this point one of those sorts of casual Internet friends one acquires via things like Twitter. We’ve e-mailed a couple of times, he follows the blog. It’s also the case that I genuinely like his work and look forward to his episodes of things, and that I really do think he was consistently one of the strongest arrows in The Sarah Jane Adventures’ quiver. So it’s a fortunate thing that he’s the one who writes the finale. 
It’s an even more fortunate thing that it’s one of his best scripts for anything, ever. There are a load of good things about it. Many are the sorts of things one expects from The Sarah Jane Adventures. The story is, at least in part, about Luke and Sky finally and properly meeting. It handles this well, acknowledging the difficulty and complexity of acquiring a sibling, especially via the foster system, which is at least ostensibly how Sarah Jane adopted Sky. Which is a real thing – there are genuinely unique challenges to forming a sibling relationship with someone who you meet at age twelve as opposed to meet as an infant and watch grow up. The resulting relationships are not lesser sibling relationships, but they have their own unique features, and The Man Who Never Was does a genuinely lovely job of acknowledging that. 
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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: The Next Generation Series Bible

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The beloved crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D were not always the people we know and love and have become so intimately familiar with over the years.

Though Star Trek: The Next Generation did not undergo as radical a transformation as some shows do between preproduction and filming, there are still a handful of drastic differences between the show as conceived and the show as aired, in particular in terms of the characters. There are a number of surprises in store for the Next Generation fan who decides to look back into the show’s early brainstorming sessions and first-draft series bibles, and before we boldly go off into the show that was, I think it’s important for us to take a moment and reflect upon the show that almost was. A show that is many respects the same as the one we all know, but in many others significantly different, and, perhaps in some respects, more intriguing.

This essay then is not a straightforward transcription of the original Star Trek: The Next Generation Writer’s Guide by Gene Roddenberry, but is rather an amalgamation and distillation of a number of early drafts and ideas that Roddenberry and the team were working on before the cameras finally started rolling. I make no pretenses that I’m organising all this according to any particular structure or logic apart from the one that emphasizes the things I think are most important to focus on and keep in mind about this period of the show’s history. Honestly, I’m not even sure the actual preproduction of the show was as ruthlessly concise and methodical as I’m making it out to seem, but I maintain my goal here was to create a sort of unofficial, pseudo-bible for a version of Star Trek: The Next Generation that had a very respectable chance of actually happening. With that in mind, let’s have a look at

The New Crew

Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Sir Patrick Stewart, takes his name from Swiss inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard. Auguste is famous, along with his brother Jean-Felix, for their scientific expeditions in hot-air balloons to record data on the upper atmosphere, their studies of cosmic microwave background radiation and their invention of the bathyscaphe Trieste, which his son Jacques piloted to Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in Earth’s oceans.

Captain Picard is described as an aesthete; someone who enjoys the “privileges” and “eccentricities” his rank affords him. A veteran officer, Picard got command of the Enterprise due to already being a “24th century Stafleet legend”. I seem to recall someone commenting once in a Star Trek magazine that Roddenberry had described his conception of Captain Picard as a dashing, suave and debonair “hairy Frenchman” who enjoyed things like fine wine. Apparently, women in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s universe consider men like Picard (who is described as being in his fifties) to have “just entered [their] best years”.…

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Good Soldiers (Into the Dalek)

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‘Into the Dalek’ is about good soldiers vs bad soldiers.

The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.

But, of course, what do we mean by terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’?

For the army, a ‘good’ soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn’t let themselves be haunted.

A ‘bad’ soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior… perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.

In a soldier, morality is a malfunction.  A good soldier is a ‘bad’ soldier.  Because good people can’t do a soldier’s job, which is to fight and kill.

At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way.  The Doctor doesn’t like soldiers.  As in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’ he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course.  He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she’s a soldier.

But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels.  They are specifically described as rebels.  Rebels against the Daleks.  The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil.  This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type.  He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die.  Because he’s a Dalek, and that’s how Daleks think.  So, contrary to the Doctor’s hopes, there’s no saving the Daleks… which makes Rusty pretty much right: they’re beyond saving, so they must be fought.  Which is what the rebels are doing.  So Rusty kills all the Daleks… which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor’s defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn’t happened escapes me).

So, once again, as in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’, we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another.  Soldiers are scary and irredeemable… umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.

See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle.  They’re rebelling against the imperialists of the universe.  I’m supposed to think they’re wrong or suspect for shooting to kill?  When you’re in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you’d better obey orders and shoot to kill.  That’s what the soldiers of the International Brigades did.  That’s what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites.  If the Whites, or Franco’s troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that’s ‘good’ at what it does to come and fight them.

Of course, Danny is a former soldier… and Clara doesn’t reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey.  She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.…

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Robot of Sherwood Review

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This review exists because of the generous support of 149 backers at Patreon. Please consider becoming the 150th. Or 151st, or whatever, if someone beat you to it. In any case, you can contribute here. Also, a second reminder that once the comments section gets a certain length, displaying all comments requires you to hunt and click the “load more” link. It’s right above the ad at the bottom of the page.

Right. Top-line assessment is that this one’s a bit more polarizing than the last two, which seemed to be widely liked with an inevitable pool of detractors. The first comment on the episode to come through declared it to basically be the worst thing ever, and GallifreyBase currently has it at 55.48% in the 8-10 range. Which is on the whole still pretty good, but clearly the most mixed reception of the season to date.

For my part… well, look, this was never going to be my favorite episode. I’m not a huge fan of Gatiss, the celebrity historical is not my favorite Doctor Who subgenre, and I’ve seen enough Doctor Who at this point in my life that the business as usual/meat and potatoes episodes, while often enjoyable, aren’t exactly highlights. And this was, at the end of the day, a meat and potatoes celebrity historical written by Mark Gatiss.

But none of those are reasonable things to hold against the episode on any level other than ranking it in the list at the end of the review. One can’t critique a beach for not being a paperclip. Instead, what jumps out is that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re doing. This alone puts it ahead of Gatiss’s previous swing at a celebrity historical, in which nobody quite seemed to know what tone to go for at any given moment. Here, everybody from Gatiss on down understands that they’re doing a fluffy one.

Perhaps more to the point, however, everybody gets how best to approach one of these. Gatiss is at his best when he’s taking an old and well-worn structure and giving it a spit and polish to modern tastes (The Unquiet Dead, Cold War, The Crimson Horror), and so this is firmly in his wheelhouse. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the script (indeed, when the first five scripts leaked, more than a few people proclaimed four of them good and this one to suck), but it moves through its set pieces and knows what it’s doing at any given moment.

But this isn’t a story about the clever script. It’s a story about dancing merrily through the obligatory set pieces. Gatiss holds up his end of the bargain by getting them all in and keeping the pace up. But the heart of this one is the execution, and it’s there that this does sparkle. It’s pure melodrama, and everybody gets that. The episode would be completely derailed if either of the two major guest roles (Robin and the Sheriff) pulled a Graham Crowden (or, if you want a more recent option, a Roger Lloyd-Pack).…

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