Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

The Numb and Silent Depths (The Last War in Albion Part 53: Pasko’s Swamp Thing, Loose Ends)

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This is the third of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 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: Originally created as a short story in a horror anthology, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing had a brief and glorious run in the 1970s before petering out until 1982, when Wes Craven directed a movie based on the comics. 
“In the end, the darkness swallows everything. Space vanishes. Time is no longer even a memory. All is lost in the numb and silent depths of forever. Captain Britain is dead.” – Alan Moore
Figure 388: Swamp Thing returns to
capitalize on the Wes Craven film.
(From Saga of the Swamp Thing #1, 1982)
It would not do, however, for DC to not have a Swamp Thing comic in publication to go along with the movie (despite onerous conditions related to the sale of the movie rights that meant that DC could not actually produce any merchandise related to Swamp Thing whatsoever), and so in 1982 a new title, Saga of the Swamp Thing, was started with scripts by Martin Pasko, an industry veteran with decades of experience, and art by relative newcomer Tom Yeates. Under Pasko the book was a horror anthology in the same general vein as the Wein/Wrightson issues, albeit with a seventeen-page cap on the stories due to backup stories featuring another cult DC horror character, the Phantom Stranger, and a rather convoluted metaplot involving a spooky child with supernatural powers, a villainous group called the Sunderland Corporation that was hunting Swamp Thing, a reporter named Elizabeth Tremayne and her partner, a doctor named Dennis, both of whom were also trying to find Swamp Thing, and a mysterious illness that was slowly killing Swamp Thing. 
Figure 389: Ramsey Campbell would
go on to write an introduction to the first
collection of Moore’s Swamp Thing stories
where he proclaimed that “the new Swamp
Thing can stand beside the finest works of
contemporary horror fiction.”
Many, though not all of these plot points were resolved in the thirteenth issue of the title, the last by Tom Yeates. After two issues by a guest creative team, Pasko picked up his remaining plot lines, mostly focusing on the Sunderland Corporation, in Saga of the Swamp Thing #16, now joined by a new artistic team of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. Almost immediately, however, tensions began to arise. Bissette had a lifelong love of drawing monsters, and so it was in many ways a natural fit for him, but he and Totleben also came onto the project with ideas for what they wanted to draw, which they sent to Pasko.
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Outside the Government 18: A Romance in Twelve Parts

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A commissioned essay for Tiffany Korta

And so here we are again, at Faction Paradox. Let’s start, just because this is eventually going to be collected in the Matt Smith book, far from any other Faction Paradox material, with an account of what this is. It starts, as with most things these days, in the 90s, shortly after Doctor Who failed to return in the wake of the Paul McGann movie. The movie was used as the occasion to move the license for producing original Doctor Who fiction from Virgin, who had been doing a highly acclaimed line of books featuring Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, to the BBC, who proceeded to do a noticeably less acclaimed line of books featuring Paul McGann’s Doctor.
Among the only books in this line that was acclaimed was a book called Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which featured concepts like the Doctor encountering his own corpse, the declaration that the Doctor’s body is a terrifying weapon, the idea that Time Lords are defined by something called “biodata,” which is simultaneously genetic material and the sum total of their impact upon time and history, and the idea of a big and apocalyptic war that the Time Lords do not anticipate surviving. Given that none of these ideas have ever been reused by Steven Moffat or Russell T Davies, it’s similarly ridiculous to suggest that the other big idea in Alien Bodies might have any impact on the era at all. That idea is the time traveling voodoo cult of renegade Time Lords known as Faction Paradox. 
Miles wrote two more books for the BBC Books line in which he fleshed out these ideas more before a falling out with the editors drove him away from Doctor Who (save for one brief return that had little to nothing to do with his contributions to the Doctor Who mythos), and his ideas were wrapped up in a desperately unsatisfying manner by other writers. Miles, meanwhile, took the concepts he had the rights to, which were mainly Faction Paradox, and shopped them to a variety of small presses that made audio adventures, Faction Paradox novels, and an exceedingly brief comic series. These mostly had very little impact on the world, and we’ve largely checked in with them occasionally as a sort of sad “ah yes, this forgotten and dusty corner of Doctor Who.”
Eventually Faction Paradox’s rights settled in with a charming publisher called Obverse Books, who kicked off their line of Faction Paradox stories in 2011 with a collection of short stories called A Romance in Twelve Parts, which brings us to the present topic. In terms of the narrative of Doctor Who, this is a terribly obscure book. Based on Amazon sales rank I’d guess, and I could very well be wrong, that it sells something on the order of a copy a month, if that. It is a small and minor book with very little impact on the world. 
Of course, it’s worth expanding the view a little bit.
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“…passages that will invite Cthugha unto our plane”: What’s This?! My Supple Skin is a Mess

, 1

Perhaps, ironically enough, because it is so reminiscent of the original light novels, this is one of my favourite Dirty Pair episodes we’ve seen so far. The girls are actually solving a proper mystery that has real cosmic ramifications for the first time since the beginning of the series. As a result, it’s tight and engrossing in a way the show hasn’t quite been lately, largely because it takes itself quite a bit more seriously then it has in the past. That ends up being *really* cathartic, especially after what we’ve seen the last couple weeks. Don’t worry though, Dirty Pair hasn’t lost its sense of humour: In fact, the entire episode is one of it’s most elabourate and clever jokes yet.

Once again, the show is being rather blunt and upfront about what it’s doing here. However, unlike the Mouse Nazis, this time it largely doesn’t feel the need to scream this in our faces every five seconds, for which I am extremely grateful. That the monsters-of-the-week hail from the “Lovecraft Galaxy” basically tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on and what’s being pastiched. And Dirty Pair throws H.P. Lovecraft under the bus pretty much from the start, dispensing any and all pretenses that this is going to be some nihilistic work of cosmic horror by having the requisite Eldritch Abomination show up in the sewer under the girls’ apartment building. Not only that, but even though the episode raises the stakes every act (first there’s one monster, then a whole colony, then an even bigger monster that snacks on the other monsters), it absolutely refuses to let this overwhelm the rest of the story. There’s certainly nobody driven mad from unknowable truths here: Though the smaller monsters do eat people and the big one is definitely a serious threat, everybody knows exactly who and what they’re dealing with. Kei and Yuri even spend a good amount of time doing zoological research and give the maintenance workers a briefing on the creatures’ life cycles and how to combat them.

We really shouldn’t be surprised at the tack Dirty Pair takes here. The thing about Lovecraft is, beloved and influential as he may be, there are serious flaws underlying the philosophy and worldview he explores in his horror novels. The whole impetus for Lovecraft’s oeuvre is a combination of dumbfounded, slack-jawed reaction to the vastness of the universe: The point of the Old Ones is that they’re so beyond human comprehension they could wipe out reality as we know it and there would be nothing we could do to stop it because of how insignificant and helpless we are. Combine that with the fact that Lovecraft was also demonstrably a racist and it starts to become clear how uncomfortably indebted to xenophobia his work really is. There’s also the matter of Lovecraft’s legacy among other writers: Though his actual stories weren’t expressly magickal per se, they’ve had a tremendous impact on those people who do have an interest in more spiritual and esoteric matters.…

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Sunday Pancaking (July 13th, 2014)

27

To be honest, it’s been a bit of a week. We flew back from Phoenix on Tuesday, stayed in New York for a few hours so we could see the first show of Seeming’s tour, then got home to discover that user error on the part of the realtor showing our apartment meant that our beloved kitty Coraline had escaped.

As Coraline is a blind kitty with respiratory issues that lead her to go into sneezing fits and spray snot everywhere when she’s stressed, we were, as you might imagine, not optimistic about her recovery, and the few days since Tuesday have not exactly been highly productive.

Then, this evening, we got a call from someone saying they were pretty sure they had our cat in their backyard. They’d seen the flyers we’d posted, despite living a solid two blocks outside the radius we’d thought to flyer, and now we are joyfully dealing with the cat phenomenon known as “non-recognition aggression,” as her sister Lettie seems to have decided she’s actually a Nestene duplicate. (Lettie is, of course, handling this in the completely appropriate way, which is to say mostly hiding behind furniture and hissing at her.)

So life is good, but I’m at an utter loss for anything to talk about this week, and honestly, am too busy stopping every fourth word I type to go pet Coraline some more. So I’m going to get back to Secret Doctor Who Project, which I’m trying to finish a chapter of before I wrap up Swamp Thing (twenty parts, I’m guessing) and move on to the extra essays for the Williams book in the hopes that I can get that out before the equinox. Which will probably require I make it more than four words without getting up to adore a kitty.…

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Outside the Government: The Middle Men

, 27

It’s August 12th, 2011. “Party Rock Anthem” will never die. Never. In news, in the UK at least, it’s all riots, as protests over the death of Mark Duggan expand into riots in Tottenham, which in turn spark riots across the country. Cameron’s government responds with a strong law and order platform that includes such reasonable things as a six month prison sentence for stealing a case of bottled water. In the US, meanwhile, it’s mostly just reeling from the aftermath of the latest debt ceiling showdown. 
While on television. More perhaps than any other episode of Miracle Day, “The Middle Men” is a sequel to the previous. We’ve talked already about how Miracle Day is in many ways an expanded version of Children of Earth’s structure, with each pair of episodes serving as a distinct phase of the operation. But with “The Categories of Life” building to the cliffhanger it does, “The Middle Men” ends up having very little to do except to resolve its plot lines. And so we get the final disposal of Colin Maloney and the Cowbridge camp.
What’s odd, then, is how much of this episode feels at a slight disjoint to the previous one. Certainly they have dramatically different themes. “The Categories of Life” is straightforwardly an attack on particular political trends that builds towards a shock death. “The Middle Men,” on the other hand, is making a more philosophical point. The phrase “middle man” appears twice, once in reference to Colin, and the other time as a self-description of Ernie Hudson’s character. The thematic implications are in classic Miracle Day fashion, crashingly unsubtle. 
Although the particulars of how this is put together are, to say the least, elusive. Ernie Hudson’s character appears to be intended as a suggestion that the evil is not, in fact, individual actors but a fundamentally corrupt system. And yet Colin is equally clearly held up as an individual evil. And the larger message of the story, hammered home in Gwen’s monologue before blowing up Cowbridge, in Ralph’s intervention to save Esther and Rex, and, in one of the story’s few moments of grace and subtlety, in the nameless camp worker who silently aids Gwen’s escape, is the power of individual actions and defiance in fighting institutional corruption. And in many ways this is a strong point of the episode. It is, after all, a sensible transition – “The Categories of Life” is about institutional horror, and “The Middle Men” offers a meaningful response to it. 
Which ought to render Ernie Hudson’s character a more substantive villain than he is. His entire speech about a vast and faceless system, after all, cuts against the moral message of the story. Everything else is declaring that, actually, the system isn’t what matters, the willingness of individuals to take a stand or to remain violently complicit with the system is. And yet he’s not really challenged – instead he’s given a fairly significant voice within the narrative, serving as the major bit of exposition for the story, even if that exposition amounts to little more than a contextless word that could mean anything.
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A Secret Story (The Last War in Albion Part 52: Wein and Wrightson’s Swamp Thing)

, 16

This is the second of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 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: French postmodernists Deleuze and Guattari used vegetable metaphors to argue against the notion of fixed identity, while Alan Moore got a phone call from Len Wein, acting as a representative of the assemblage known as DC Comics.
“It’s a secret story. It’s a story of two brothers.” – Neil Gaiman
Figure 382: Detective Comics gave DC
Comics its name, was the reason Jack
Liebowitz had a financial stake in the
company, and, in its first issue, featured
an appallingly racist cover.
The Time Warner subsidiary known as DC Comics has its origins in the merger between National Comics, itself a merger of two companies initially formed in the mid-1930s by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a World War I veteran turned pulp writer, and All-American Publications, which, at the time of their merger was co-owned by Jack Liebowitz, who had also come to own National Comics after forcing Wheeler-Nicholson out. National Comics’ two major publications were Action Comics and Detective Comics, the latter of which was the title that had given Liebowitz a stake in the company, as he underwrote its publication. All-American Publications was a 1938 partnership between Liebowitz and Max Gaines, and published a number of other significant characters: the Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman, most notably. The companies, due to the shared presence of Liebowitz, were always stablemates, but after Liebowitz bought Gaines out, leaving him free to create the competing EC Comics, they officially merged into one company in 1944 under the official name of National Perodical Publications, although they were by this time generally referred to as DC Comics, a name they’d officially adopt in 1977. 
During its early days, unlike what would eventually become its sole major competitor, DC invested hard in superheroes, churning out characters to follow its initial smash success with the adventures of Superman in Action Comics. This began with Batman, created by Bill Finger, with Bob Kane on art, which appeared in Detective Comics, and eventually expanded to a large and familiar stable of characters. The breadth and success of this line meant that when superheroes went out of fashion at the end of World War II, DC, unlike Marvel/Timely, did not entirely abandon superheroes, publishing title featuring Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman continually through the 1940s and 50s. And when the superhero comic proved a useful way of getting around the censorship imposed on the industry in the wake of psychologist and public intellectual Frederic Wertham’s 1954 attack on comic books, it was DC that jumped back upon that bandwagon, developing new versions of many of its old superhero properties and eventually, in 1960, teaming several of them up in the Justice League of America, a move that prompted Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four for Marvel.
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“Television causes…Not smartness!”: The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie

, 1

There is, believe it or not, an upper limit to how much forced zaniness I can handle in Dirty Pair. As it turns out, that tolerance threshold is somewhere around “Mouse Nazis”.

This episode is pretty much the inverse of “What? We’re Heinous Kidnappers!”. Like the earlier story, this absolutely doesn’t work in any conceivable respect, except this time it’s the first half that’s an unwatchable disaster and the second half that features one or two intriguing bits of erudition. Let’s just get the big one out of the way right off the bat: The plot is, ironically enough, insufferably dumb and idiotic. There’s a very fine line between “offbeat and clever idea” and “unbelievably annoying idea”, and this episode leaps across that line with boundless enthusiasm. For the first time on Dirty Pair, absolutely none of the humour feels natural or appropriate: Kei and Yuri’s incessant quips about vacations and bonus pay, disarmingly cute and endearing in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” and “Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always be brand New” now just feel strained and overused, and that’s just one example. There’s an overwhelming, and unsettling, feeling of the show trying far, far too hard to be “wacky” and the whole thing just comes across as stilted.

The 3WA gets overrun by an army of mice who want to form Mouse Nazi Germany with swastikas and everything! Aren’t we clever! Mughi (who we’ve retconned from being an advanced sentient extraterrestrial being to a genetically engineered house pet) is terrified of mice! Isn’t that so funny? Let’s have Nanmo fly in at the last second and shoot some stuff to save the day because robots! Everyone in the building is shockingly cruel to Kei and Yuri, who spend half the runtime throwing temper tantrums, breaking things or talking about boys, vacations and special bonuses! Those girls sure are silly! We even have our own more-than-vaguely racist comedy relief Chinese stereotype now, who naturally will go on and on about ancestors and Chinese history and is actually named Chan, because those funny Chinese people across the pond are quirky and strange and we don’t quite understand them.

You get the picture. Frankly, fuck this.

There is, obviously, an attempt at meta-commentary about the novel and short story Flowers for Algernon here. This episode is trying to do something similar to what “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” did by referencing a familiar plot, mashing it up with a mixture of different motifs and signifiers and then from there exploring themes that build off of the ones in the original work, but are fundamentally separate from them. However, it can’t even do that right, because this episode isn’t *referencing* Flowers for Algernon, it *is* Flowers for Algernon, down to the plot centring around a genetically engineered laboratory mouse with artificially enhanced intelligence who is actually called Algernon.

(The story, for those who haven’t read it, concerns a janitor named Charlie Goodwin who undergoes the same treatment as the titular Algernon, swiftly gaining and then losing remarkable intelligence, and is about how people treat him differently every step of the way.…

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Othering Thursday

, , , , , , , , , , , 5

Someone called ‘Bright Coat and Bravado’ (you can guess their favourite Doctor), posted this on tumblr.  Here’s a snippet:

I have a serious problem with  the “Cartmel Masterplan”. It’s not really about Looms, if you’ll believe that. It’s about The Other.

I can’t fucking stand the idea that the Doctor – or anyone – is “destined for greatness”. 

I posted the following off-the-cuff response (which I reproduce here, opportunistically, because I quite liked it when I read it back):

On the whole, I love the Cartmel era, and have a lot of affection for the Virgin New Adventures… but I don’t like the idea of the Doctor as the recycled ‘Other’.

I don’t like the idea of him being ‘exceptional’ for his society.  Much as he is bound to be exceptional from a human standpoint, I think that should always be because of what he does rather than what he is.  I like the idea of him as someone who failed in his home context – “…scraping through with 51% at the second attempt” – and being a bit rubbish, a bit of a dilettante, a bit of a second-rater, a bit of a fartaround.  Probably because I feel like one of those myself.  But that’s okay.  I hate the winners vs losers view of life.  I hate the idea that one’s worth is determined by one’s ‘success’ in the competition of life, in carving a niche for oneself in a hierarchy.  I still more hate the idea of those kinds of judgements being made without taking into account the fact that some people start off at higher rungs and with greater advantages.  The Doctor should be someone who started off at such a high rung but who proved unsuited for it because of his infinite distractability, his vagueness and his inability to ‘play the game’… and also because of the moral sense – and the imperative to be a social actor – that he acquires from his involvement, from his breaching of the walls of the enclosed and reactionary envelope of Gallifrey, from his adventures and researches and friendships ‘out there’ in the muck and strife and pain of the universe.

The transformation of him into the reincarnation of a godlike founder figure from mythological pre-history injects a 80s/90s ‘epic’ sensibility into a 60s/70s ‘rebel’ storyline.  It is a post-defeat rationalisation overwriting an artefact that originated at a time of struggle.  The Doctor-as-drop-out-from-the-ruling-class is an (admittedly imperfect) artefact of 1969.  It gets renewed – even intensified – in 1976.  And then it gets downplayed and downplayed until – interestingly enough – Holmes gets his hands on it again at the end of the Trial in 1986.  But in the run up to the ‘long-90s’, Cartmel et al lay the groundwork for a potential vitiation of it.  Even as that crew take the show to angrier and bolshier territory than its has visited for quite some time, they’re also utiling an affect from various cultural strands that bigs the Doctor up and fetishizes him, and his ‘power’. 

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Comics Reviews (July 2nd and 9th, 2014)

4

Since we have two weeks of comics here, I’m doing two picks of the week. No idea if both or either are from this week, last week, or what.


All-New X-Men #29

After an issue where I felt utterly lost we get one I understand, at least. Not sure about the ending, mind you – the time travel is still way too muddy and full of characters I can’t keep straight. But the Angel/X-23 love plot is a nice ending. I’m still not loving this particular phase of Bendis’s X-Men, though. Hoping that whatever shakeups are planned with Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier get things flowing a bit better. C

Avengers #32

These “Steve Rogers moves ever forward in time” issues are… not exactly a solid gold premise, even as the individual issues are pretty good. There’s an increasing sense of sound and fury in Hickman’s run that’s worrisome – the mysteries and secrets are stacking ever higher, with each issue being more and more setup and very little payoff. There’s a staleness that can set into a book when it goes too long without a feasible jumping on point, and we’re at thirty-two issues since the last usable one. I suspect that, when all is said and done, Hickman’s Avengers run will be looked at as something of a let-down, and as a wasted opportunity in terms of feeding out of or into the movies. C-

Captain Marvel #5

A book that feels like it’s been rolling along at a simmer for a bit too long finally bursts out and does something interesting. There are satisfying echoes of the start of Messner-Loebs’s Wonder Woman run here – the balance between alien weirdness and real drama is satisfying. I wish some of the plot revelations had come earlier – I suspect this arc could have lost an issue without serious damage. But we appear to have reached the parts of the arc that are important and that do belong there, and that’s exciting and fun. Still not one of my favorite books, but this is a solid issue that delivers some real entertainment. B+

Daredevil #0.1 and #5

A pair of Daredevil issues, each of them functionally one-shots. I believe 0.1, also called Road Warrior, is a reprint of a digital “Infinite Comic” – certainly the panel layout seems to suggest that. (No splash pages, and every page bisects neatly at the halfway point) It’s a prequel to the current Daredevil run, and is, like most of Waid’s Daredevil, a perfectly satisfying little adventure. #5 fills in some backstory on Foggy Nelson that was left mysterious for four issues, and is… a perfectly satisfying little adventure. It’s hard not to wonder if Waid’s Daredevil is on a downward slope at this point – certainly nothing in the six issues so far of the San Francisco iteration suggests the book has a raison d’etre. Pleasant, but unambiguously for the sorts of fans with large pull accounts. B-

Lazarus #9 (Pick of the Week)


The conclusion to an arc, and the thing that jumps out at me the most is that you can still basically jump in here and understand everything that’s going on.…

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Outside the Government: The Categories of Life

, 27

It’s August 5th, 2011. Yep. LMFAO again. In news, terrible flooding strikes Thailand, the US manages one of its periodic narrow aversions of global economic catastrophe by increasing its debt ceiling, but suffers a downgrading to its credit rating anyway, and some guy named Mark Duggan is killed by the police in London, but really, what are the odds that that’s going to go absolutely terribly. 
While on television, Miracle Day reaches the halfway point. “The Categories of Life” is a ruthless, effective thing. It is not quite a surprising piece of television – it is an episode built around major character death, which is by this point an absolutely bog standard trick that television pulls. But Jane Espenson has been around the block more than enough times to execute it correctly, and “The Categories of Life” is a well-worked example, with the standard approach of focusing the episode heavily on the character you’re about to off, and initially making it appear that they’re going to be newly minted as a primary character before unexpectedly killing them.
There is a certain degree to which this is an inherently flawed practice, especially given how common the episode structure is. The use of shock deaths as a default way of adding tension to a show has become a cliche and a crutch – an easy way to generate the feel of something being a “major episode.” Torchwood has been plenty guilty of this in the past, most infamously with the finale to Season Two, but it’s hardly a Torchwood-specific vice. 
The most infamous version of this phenomenon, named by comics-writer Gail Simone in reaction to a particularly grim plot twist in an issue of Green Lantern, is the trope of “women in refrigerators,” a trope whose naming serves to identify and condemn the tendency to use female characters for the job of being gratuitously killed in order to anger and motivate male characters. And the killing of Vera Juaraez, the series’ most promising new character, in order to give Rex some more man pain, fits squarely and frustratingly into this tradition, so much so that the means of her death – being incinerated in an oven – has to go down as the most bitter joke Jane Espenson has ever written. 
And yet for all of this, “The Categories of Life” bristles with a potential not previously seen within Miracle Day. Part of this is the fact that Miracle Day has been consciously configured to take character death off the table. Shock character death is, it has to be admitted, a materially different trick in a show where nobody can die, and the fact that the previous episodes contained three separate instances of a character who visibly should be dead being shown to be alive, including the gruesome eyeball-in-a-crushed-car scene at the end of “Escape to LA,” further emphasized the illusion that this was a show that wasn’t going to kill characters. And so killing Vera feels wrong and shocking in a way that other television deaths don’t. 
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