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Living Under a Bridge and Doing Drugs (Book Three, Part 54: Mark Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog)

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The box art to the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, featuring Sonic looking cool af

Previously in Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison met a bad influence.

It’s clearly an entirely legitimate product from Sega, and in a Modern-Warfare-2 piece of relevancy, the eponymous spiked-creature is now homeless, living under a bridge and doing drugs. – Kieron Gillen, Rock Paper Shotgun 

On the one hand there’s nothing wrong with this. Moore deftly wielded provocation plenty of times in his rise, and Morrison’s enfant terrible persona was a well-crafted and effective attempt to do the same. What’s notable is not the extremity of what Morrison said, but simply the degree to which Millar brought this side of Morrison out, eliciting jokes about how “ I really would like to expire in some dramatic motoring accident.  There’s nothing like travelling at high speed without a seatbelt and no thrill like the possibility of hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour.  Anyway, what I’d like is to be cremated and leave instructions for my ashes to be thrown in the face of some perfectly innocent passerby.  Someone I never knew or had any remote connection with.  It would be such a lovely gesture” and anecdotes about how “my classmates and I were responsible for the nervous breakdowns of two teachers.  One of them, a kindly and inoffensive old gentleman was subjected to a campaign of sustained psychological torture that would have brought Patrick McGoohan to his knees in no time.  After a spell in psychiatric care, this dear old character bravely returned to teaching and lasted only a few months before being driven completely round the bend..  He lives quite near me actually and I often see him wandering about with a walking stick and an air of tragic bewilderment.  You shouldn’t laugh really but sometimes it’s impossible not to.” This was a version of Morrison who was more instinctively disposed to stylized meanness and transgressive jokes. They were perfectly capable of this on their own, it’s true, and there’s no shortage of examples of them indulging in it, but the fact remained: when Millar was in the picture, Morrison could inevitably be found playing the most cartoonish version of their public persona. 

Of course, this was very much the sort of thing Millar did. He was, after all, the writer of Insiders and Purgatory, for whom a nihilistic transgressiveness seemed the only aesthetic goal of any interest. In a comics scene increasingly defined by performative edginess, he offered the purest expression of it. And Morrison was open about this being the appeal, noting that “We both have a very ghoulish sense of humor.” This is clear in all of the joint interviews they did in the period, which positively brim with casual homophobia and puerile attempts to shock and offend. A 1992 interview saw Morrison complaining about how “We’re both sick of the way 2000 AD is full of poofs these days. Judge Dredd’s turned into a poof and so has everyone else. All the stories are about Buddhists, Feminism and Ecology – it’s a real drag” while Millar railed about how “I’m sick of listening to them bleating on about how bloody great they are.…

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Mirkwood: Taur-nu-Fuin

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• Name: Taur-nu-Fuin (Sindarin: forest under night), Deldúwath (Sindarin: deadly nightshade) / Dorthonion (Sindarin: land of pine trees)

• Description: An expansive forest in southern Dorthonion. Dorthonion, a forest region in Beleriand, sees crucial action in the First Age. Like the rest of Beleriand, it is wiped away.

This picture has lived multiple lives. In this form, it’s called “Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin,” illustrating an episode from The Silmarillion where Beleg the Sinda discovers Gwindor, an elf prince, who escaped a 14-year imprisonment by Morgoth and his orcs, now “spent and bewildered in the mazes of Taur-nu-Fuin.”[1] It’s one of Tolkien’s relatively few portraits of a narrative event, and a grim one at that. Shortly afterwards, Beleg is inadvertently killed “at the hand of him whom he most loved,” his closest friend Túrin, another survivor of orc captivity, “thinking him a foe.”

Yet this depiction of a heroic final act is one of Tolkien’s most colorful and distinctive portraits. The watercolors’ menagerie of brown and green and blue make Taur-nu-Fuin a disorienting, psychedelic landscape. The forest that kills Beleg won’t stay put.

Tolkien reused the picture to depict Mirkwood for The Hobbit. Taur-nu-Fuin’s colors are gone, and it has fewer trees, but it’s unmistakably the template for this new drawing. The trees, some plants and mushrooms, and survived longer than Beleg. (Tolkien also tried to reuse the picture as Fangorn in a couple calendars, but we’re calling his bluff.)

The forest’s similarities are not simply visual. Like Mirkwood, Taur-nu-Fuin is also possessed by Sauron, with its flora turning against its denizens. Both forests are elvish territories. And most crucially, both are initially called Greenwood and transform into Mirkwood. 

For the first time in Nowhere and Back Again, we’re in Beleriand, the northwestern part of Middle-earth where most of The Silmarillion is set. The War of Wrath, fought by the Valar and Morgoth, destroys Beleriand late in The First Age. Taur-nu-Fuin, in the elvish realm of Dorthonion, along with most of Beleriand, becomes a memory preserved by Wilderland’s Mirkwood.

On the whole, The Lord of the Rings is less grim than The Silmarillion, where half the characters suffer jaw-droppingly grim fates. Similarly, Taur-nu-Fuin is even nastier than The Hobbit’s Mirkwood. Morgoth’s occupation of northern Beleriand makes it “turned little by little into a region of such dread and dark enchantment that even the Orcs would not enter it unless need drove them[2].”

The Forest under Nightshade grows ”black and grim” trees, whose “roots were tangled, groping in the dark like claws; and those who strayed among them became lost and blind, and were strangled or pursued to madness by phantoms of terror.”[3] 

With Beleriand, Dorthonion gets a creation myth. As Beleriand’s “new-raised highlands[4],” it is a young land in The Silmarillion. Its raw untamed power is purely mythic. Its echoes permeate into Wilderland millennia later. Corrupting nature is Arda’s original sin.

Like Mirkwood, Sauron occupies it in a gothic form. Lúthien, the protagonist of Tolkien’s mythology, subdues him, and Sauron “immediately took the form of a vampire, great as a dark cloud across the moon, and he fled, dripping blood from his throat upon the trees,” settling in Taur-nu-Fuin and “filling it with horror.”[5]…

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The Rings of Power: Partings Review

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“Partings” is The Rings of Power settling into a status quo. Characters in different locations face down interlocked threats, all of them vaguely pointing to Sauron, while their interpersonal relationships are threatened by Sauron’s return. Some subplots, like Durin and Elrond’s relationship, work quite well, while Arondir and Bronwyn fail to go anywhere. In short, we now know what an average Rings of Power episode looks like.

To give this show its minor due, we must concede the show has gotten stronger in its theming. It draws parallels between its sundry plots, indicated by titles like “Partings.” The Rings of Power has paired up a number of characters who seem to be working towards the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, or at least paving the way for the Second Age’s world. Elrond and Durin’s plot, which while contrived (all elves’ fates rely on Durin? Really?), uses mythology as a roadblock to character’s healthy relationships. Elrond’s devotion to his oath while Celebrimbor bullies him (and will probably close out Season 1 by crafting the titular Rings) is genuinely affecting, and works to give Elrond a character beyond “look at this guy you liked in the early 2000s.”

Galadriel and Míriel get a fair piece of the action too, guiding Númenor towards the Last Alliance of Men and Elves. Having women determine this part of the mythology is genuinely valuable, and admittedly even undermines Tolkien’s patriarchy ever so slightly. Turning Galadriel into simply a hot girl who swings swords good undermines this somewhat, but admittedly, this show is running so low on pleasures that I’ll take “hot sword lady.”

Not all of it works. Arondir and Bronwyn are still flipping a big nothing burger. Isildur’s character lacks content outside of “will be important later,” amounting to little more than a failson rather than the tragic failed hero he really should be. Nori and not-yet-Gandalf are… perfectly fine, if hardly moving forward. The moment where not-yet-Gandalf pieces together language while adjusting to his new body is one of the show’s better moments so far.

As ever, the politics are insidious. This isn’t an artistic problem in itself — if it were, I wouldn’t be a D-list Tolkien scholar. But this show’s approach of “women take charge while men stumble in pursuit of their destiny” still validates a “women need to do the hard work approach.” And the valorization of high birth lionizes an upward mobility mindset that’s absolutely revolting to come out of Amazon.

This show hates commoners and poor people. Only those who align themselves with power or come from noble birth are moral people. This isn’t Tolkien, it’s Amazon with pointy ears. 

Which is to say this is one of the stronger episodes so far, and sees The Rings of Power becoming slightly less awful.

1. The Great Wave

2. Adrift

3. Partings

4. A Shadow of the Past

5. Adar…

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The Rings of Power: The Great Wave Review

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After the crescendoing disaster of “Adar,” The Rings of Power vaguely rights itself with this week’s “The Great Wave.” This episode actually had some themes, and a plot structure, and even a sense of momentum propelled by character moments. I’m vaguely shocked to report this after declaring The Rings of Power the worst TV show I’ve ever seen. The show’s inherent shortcomings are on full display, but “The Great Wave” shockingly takes advantage of its limits rather than surrendering to them like “The Shadow of the Past” or exacerbating them like “Adar.”

“The Great Wave’s” primary success is actually its plot structure. While some previous episodes were inhibited by the cast being separated by geography (and, to be honest, by a lack of drama or any connection between A, B, and C plots), this week’s episode deftly maneuvers between its myriad plots. The episode sagely pairs up characters in separate geographic locations, not unlike The Wire or Game of Thrones (though that’s not say it rivals even the intensely flawed Game of Thrones in quality, despite Bryan Colman’s fleeting presence). Galadriel and Míriel work out their problems in Númenor, Elrond and Durin rekindle their friendship in Moria, while Bronwyn and Theo… well, they do something, I guess.

This is genuinely hard to do. Having a geographically separated ensemble is often a recipe for disaster which even Tolkien only narrowly pulled off. It increasingly hampers George R. R. Martin, whose influence weighs heavily on The Rings of Power. The show has already botched the formula at least twice, although it partly circumnavigates the problem this week by altogether leaving the Harfoots out (thank Yavanna). Last week’s hour felt like a slog, while this one has a clear plot direction moving forward.

In “The Great Wave,” the show finally feels like it’s working towards something. The introductions of mithril and palantíri are irritating in how they expect the audience to care about them simply because they’re vital Rings lore, but they’re steps towards a larger project. Galadriel and Míriel are slowly founding the Last Alliance of Men and Elves in the face of Númenor’s destruction, while the Eregion-Moria plot is a well-paced tragicomedy where Elrond and Durin’s friendship is subject to history. Characters are trapped by their ancestor’s machinations, a thematic concern of Tolkien’s that the show finally seems aware of.

Indeed, theming is strong this week too. The protagonists are slowly drifting away from their people in the face of apocalypse. Númenor, Moria, and Eregion’s doom is a given, so the characters are tasked with surviving the apocalypse. This is a deft way to handle Tolkien’s themes in 2022, when the seas are boiling and the ice caps are melting. Míriel’s apocalyptic visions are powerful and feel more like The Lord of the Rings than much this show has done so far. In spots, the lore even becomes a machine for character drama, something I never expected The Rings of Power to do.

The show’s problems are still present, of course.…

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Kiss It And Make It All Infected: A Review of Manhunt

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Listen up fives, a ten is speaking.

Let’s start with the context. Although the mainstreaming of trans culture is a thing that has happened and is continuing to happen, like any future’s arrival it has been unevenly distributed, not least in the way in which it’s paralleled efforts at our extermination. One facet of this—especially relevant in the realm of trans SF/F—is the prominence of a particular trans aesthetic. It’s the one Charlie Jane Anders gestured at in her self-proclaimed “Sweetweird Manifesto”—one that’s seen Hugo nominations for Ryka Aoki and, of course, for Anders herself. It’s largely the one the Wachowskis have settled on, much as they retain a lingering fondness for fetish aesthetics. It’s the one on display in the successes of Rebecca Sugar and Nate Stevenson have had in children’s media. 

I neither want to condemn this aesthetic—it’s produced a number of genuinely great works—nor, really, to analyze it unduly and try to delineate its borders or rigorously define it. Let’s offer a few arbitrary touchstones and move on: anime fandom, belief that the colors of the trans flag are something other than vomit-worthy, a fandom history going back to Tumblr, catgirls, strong attachment to children’s media… you get the picture. As trans aesthetics go, it’s done well for itself, not least because it’s compatible with existing trends in SFF—what I’ve previously called Torwave and others, more pejoratively and to my mind less coherently, have called squeecore. But, crucially, other trans aesthetics exist—ones that haven’t done as well in the mainstream.

One is what I like to call “angry goth trans,” in contrast to the dominant aesthetic of “cute anime trans.” (I was very proud of this joke as a baby trans.) Anyone decently steeped in trans culture knows the type: the trans woman with the noise band and a favorite Mark Fisher book, who goes for an outright punk aesthetic and has gloriously snooty taste in films, who thinks William S. Burroughs is still relevant and hated J.K. Rowling long before she became a TERF. These are the trans we don’t let out, in part because they’re fucking terrifying—slightly feral creatures whose social failure mode is not faintly endearing cringe but doom-laden prophecies and rage to chill the Erinyes’s blood. But also, if we’re being honest, because there’s something a lot less commercial about dungeon synth than there is about Steven Universe. And that’s just the way it is for angry goth trans. If you’re lucky, you also work in tech or are in a polycule with someone who works in tech so that your profoundly maladaptive ass can pay rent. You might make art, but you do it as a hobby because you are simply too fucking weird for any sort of success or existence outside of the queer fringes of culture.

And then there’s Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose debut novel, an explicitly trans splatterpunk zombie apocalypse thriller called Manhunt, has unexpectedly found itself to be one of the hottest books out of Tor this year.…

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The Rings of Power: Adar Review

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In its second week, The Rings of Power seems to settle into whatever flavor of awful it’s fucked to be. It’s a 69-minute slog that infuriatingly avoids being “nice,” dragging along on the assumption that elves and hobbits are inherently dramatically compelling, and accidentally breaking into three-minute spurts of interesting stuff. Wherever this is going, it highlights Tolkien’s flaws and manages to make them worse. “Adar” is probably marginally more competent television than “A Shadow of the Past,” but it is sinfully ugly, and possibly the single most unpleasant episode of television I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, did this need to be over an hour long? And what is the point of it? Nori and her family are slightly-but-not-totally estranged from the Harfoots, non-Ian McKellen has said a couple words, Arondir begins and ends the episode in an orc prison camp (of which more below), Elendil and his family are introduced and apparently matter because fans will recognize them, and Galadriel and Halbrand… make some babysteps towards a plot, so minimal kudos there. But on the whole, this episode is aggressively pointless and lacking in events. Even its title character, who is mentioned once and appears at the end, has no role whatsoever in the episode. I repeat my mother’s question: who the actual fuck is this for?

I can hardly claim to be a typical Middle-earth fan. No such person would write something as absurd and eccentric as Nowhere and Back Again. But when The Rings of Power puts Númenor and Ar-Pharazôn onscreen, and even I, who knows their significance in Middle-earth, am bored shitless, something has gone very wrong. There are moments of promise: Lloyd Owen brings a tragic, kindly gravitas to Elendil, and Númenor’s immediate moral ambiguity avoids traps this show might easily have fallen into. But the whole enterprise is so drab to look at (Alan Lee’s absence is glaring) and its realization of Númenor’s problems are downright malicious. Númenor isn’t bad because it’s an avaricious ethno-state: it’s bad because its working class is a bunch of murderous thugs, leading to a grotesque out-of-place mugging scene where Halbrand, almost the show’s most interesting character, graphically maims and kills several people. It’s appallingly, unwatchably bad, and cruel for no conceivable aesthetic reason.

Halbrand is particularly infuriating here. Starting out as a vagabond who saves Galadriel’s life out of pity for a stranger, his presence as a homeless descendant of Morgoth’s followers almost makes him a break from the Hobbit/Dúnedan/Sinda mold Middle-earth keeps clinging to. For a little while, Halbrand is a counterweight to Galadriel, a normal personal who’s compelling for his interiority rather than anything mythological significance. And then, quelle surprise, Galadriel figures out that Halbrand is a pseudo-Aragorn lost king. This show can’t even rip off Peter Jackson right.

Where do you go with this? Everyone onscreen is stumbling around in boots they have no reasonable chance of filling. Morfydd Clark remains the show’s best paltry hope by merit of doing things Cate Blanchett wouldn’t have done.…

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America a Prophecy 2: The Devolution of the Funny Pages, 1895-2022

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CW: Racist imagery, not discussed by the larger essay

One complicating factor in our exegesis of the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip is that the strip exists in two different forms with two distinctly different resonances. Last year we discussed a five panel version of the strip, however another version exists and saw publication with an additional sixth panel at the beginning of the strip.

At first glance this version of the strip seems to collapse some of our discussions, particularly around whether Snuffy’s final line constitutes a punchline or not. The addition of Snuffy reading a newspaper marking the anniversary of 9/11 and weeping while Jughaid looks in from the window and weeps alongside him removes the element of bathetic surprise that the five panel version of the strip traded on. More to the point, it renders the strip strangely incoherent—if Jughaid has just been weeping at the cover of the newspaper, his confusion as to what the strange perambulatory ritual that Snuffy is engaged in might be about becomes harder to reconcile. 

Broadly speaking, and inasmuch as discussions of craft can be applied to the strip, the addition of the new opening panel unquestionably harms the strip, muddying its intentions and rendering it incoherent in places where its coherence had been, if not strictly speaking a positive, at least broadly interesting. But while the panel muddies interpretation of the strip, it is clarifying in a different sense. The key question to ask is simple: why are there two different versions of the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip in the first place?

The answer is tied to the medium of newspaper comics themselves. By 2011 (or indeed decades earlier) newspaper comics sections had become extremely compressed things that attempted to fit as many comics into as small a space as possible. To accommodate this, the syndicates that distribute the comics sought to ensure the comics were rearrangeable. Part of this meant that the initial panels of a Sunday strip had to be disposable—the comic had to work with or without them. An ordinary example can be found in this 1991 Calvin and Hobbes strip, in which the first two panels are a standalone gag that the remaining panels do not depend on.

In fact the rearranging goes far further, however. Note in the Calvin and Hobbes strip that the second two rows divide into four equally sized quadrants. This means that if a newspaper wants they can shrink the art down, move the first panel of the second row to the first row, and run the remaining panels as a second row, taking up even less space (while also using the full version of the comic). A similar thing is possible with the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip—in its five panel version, panels two and three are equally sized so that it can be run in two rows instead of three, which is the format we discussed it in last year. Other strips are even further compressible—it’s entirely normal for a strip to be comprised of entirely equally sized panels so that it can be rearranged in any sort of grid or even in a single column that can be shoved down the side of a page.…

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The Rings of Power: The Shadow of the Past & Adrift Review

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There are margins of error for how bad Jeff Bezos’ The Silmarillion could be. Those margins widen when you factor in the two unknown Mormon showrunners from McLean, Virginia, the most corrupt city in Northern Virginia. The Rings of Power is further hampered by its need to recall the audience’s memories of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings while satisfying the Tolkien Estate by keeping the show self-contained. And then there’s the fact that Amazon essentially bankrupted its corporate client state New Zealand to produce this show. Everything about The Rings of Power’s conception is self-evidently evil. The question is what it does with that evil.

Remarkably, The Rings of Power just about keeps its damning circumstances at bay, if not quite escaping them. It broadly understands the assignment: do the Second Age for TV while connecting it to The Lord of the Rings. As a prequel, the show is a mixed success, utilizing recognizable iconography while broaching mythological ideas that Jackson’s (in my opinion, justifiably) protracted films lacked space for. It preserves The Silmarillion’s sense of the sublime and takes advantage of the Second Age’s relatively sparse material by filling in blank spaces. The series works to reconcile Jackson’s aesthetics with Tolkien’s mythology, trying to stay on the right side of everyone involved.

The problem is that this appears to be The Rings of Power’s main occupation. It studiously accomplishes the bare minimum, throwing hobbits and elves at the audience with a mild semblance of plot structure and nebulous sense of theming. Its desperation to recall the Jackson movies reminds me of The Force Awakens, but without that movie’s clarity of purpose. The first episode, “The Shadow of the Past,” hops from setpiece to setpiece, throwing Galadriel fighting a cave troll Legolas-style and then quaint little “Oirish” hobbits bantering about food and adventures with hardly a coherent theme to be found. It slogs its way through sixty minutes with a weirdly loose hand on tone, trying to open with a mythological prologue that awkwardly segues into Galadriel’s childhood bullying.

“The Shadow of the Past” is weirdly unable to grasp how to portray its characters, presenting them as tropes and icons before wrestling with any kind of interiority. Elrond (whose portrayal by young Ned Stark is a steep decline from Hugo Weaving) is only recognizable through his name, and lacks few distinguishing characteristics beyond that. Individual performances shine — Lenny Henry as a hobbit is casting genius, while Morfydd Clark plays a thoroughly convincing young Galadriel that recalls Cate Blanchett without imitating her. But on the whole, characters are reduced to ciphers, having less to do with dramatic arcs than “hey, remember this character?”

 The exception is Galadriel. Clark is brilliant, elevating her material, which sometimes turns her into “female Legolas” in a way that flatters Tauriel. Galadriel was always one of The Lord of the Rings’ most compellingly understated characters, serving penance for her disobedience to the Valar. Her “instead of a dark lord, you would have a queen” monologue is a virtuous character’s admission of profound rage and envy (and makes for my favorite chapter in The Lord of the Rings).…

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Understand and Appreciate

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My father, Edward Sandifer, passed away on Wednesday after a long illness. He was a neuroatypical wonder of midwestern farmfolk the start conditions of which simply do not exist in the world anymore. He is also, in many ways, why I am the sort of person I am, and why this site is what it is.

This is the eulogy I read this morning at his burial.

You used to, whenever the family would come over, find a way to sneak off with some tea and read. It wasn’t that you were rude to people. Quite the opposite; you were always charming, interested in what people had to say, enthusiastic, and warm. You loved your friends and your family. It’s just that after enough time being extroverted, you’d get overwhelmed and find it necessary to retreat. I was always much the same way, which suited us both, not least because we often didn’t seem to count towards the other’s sense of being overwhelmed by company. So even when we were visiting someone else, we could find a corner of a room, sit, and talk about whatever interested us that day. I loved talking to you, loved engaging with the way your mind worked: the long, fascinating arcs of your reasoning and knowledge, and the swerving paths of connections you could draw from one thing to another. And so my audience will, I hope, forgive me if I do it one last time. I’m supposed to talk to all of them here, but I can’t. I’m overwhelmed. I need to sit down with some tea and talk to you.

My favorite time we ever talked was when we were on a Metro North train back from New York City, and I asked you a question that, perhaps eighteen years into my life, I realized I still did not have an answer to. I was attempting a reconciliation with Christianity that proved theoretically possible but practically unsatisfying, and I finally got around to asking you about religion. Mom and Grandma always made me go to church, but you never had to go and never spoke of it, agreeing the proscription existed but having no visible investment in the principle behind it. Twenty years of hindsight and I can see the parental faultline negotiated clear as day, the conversations that must have taken place away from your child’s ears. At the time, it was just a mystery. You looked thoughtful, as if I’d asked a good question, which was always a good feeling. Our discourse was Socratic—you answered with a question, and I replied, until my query had narrowed to something about the divine. I wanted to know your take on the noumenal. What did your spiritual life consist of? Or, as I finally ended up framing it, how did you worship? Mom worshiped, and I was expected to worship, through church, prayer, Christianity, but what did you do? And you thought for a minute, and said “the only way I know how to worship is to understand and appreciate.”…

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