Eruditorum Press

Wicked.

“The choices are yours, and yours alone!”: Dig Here, Meow Meow. Happiness Comes at the End

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Oh Thank God. 

Dirty Pair hasn’t quite managed to self-destruct just yet. This is brilliant. Returning to the motifs of “Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New”, the Angels are once again on vacation, which means some random ridiculous other story has to crash headlong into them. This time, it’s a wizened prospector by the name of Grampa Garlic Joe, who crash-lands into Kei and Yuri’s hotel swimming pool trying to evade the Blues Brothers goons from “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”. I could criticize the show for recycling motifs from earlier episodes, but I’m not going to firstly because even in spite of the missteps, this has been an absolutely phenomenal run of fifteen weeks for a scripted genre fiction series, and secondly this isn’t what the show is doing. This episode recognises Dirty Pair‘s by now familiar and signature themes and continues to build on and extrapolate them. And better yet, it’s another comic masterpiece.

On the surface, this is another “Dirty Pair does a genre romp” story. The genre in question this time is pulp adventure serials, but in particular the revival of the style in the 1980s that followed the massive popularity of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies. However, the problem with the Indiana Jones movies, and anything else that tried to capitalize on their success, is that they were just that: Revivals. Spielberg and Lucas (though this does seem to be mostly Lucas, given Star Wars) dug up a bunch of old film serial tropes and cliches and…did absolutely nothing with them apart from slavishly reiterating them. And the problem with that is that those old films serials tended to be appallingly racist and sexist. And, well, so is Indiana Jones because it is completely and utterly lacking in any sort of postmodern self-awareness. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is rather infamous for its depiction of India, not to mention Short Round, but in my opinion it’s the best of the three because it’s actually ever-so-slightly cognizant of how silly it is: I think Raiders of the Lost Arc might actually be the worst in terms of gender roles and I find The Last Crusade to be basically unwatchable.

And Dirty Pair is *explicit* about what it’s referencing this time and what its intentions are. Grampa Joe is manifestly an Indiana Jones analog, except instead of the rugged, manly and dashingly handsome Harrison Ford, he’s an old geezer with two missing front teeth who pretends to be hard of hearing and scatterbrained just to be annoying and who eats too much garlic. When they’re in the temple, the girls even find what are obviously the skeletal remains of the *real* Indiana Jones caught in one of La Kahanga’s traps. But let’s stop for a minute: Dirty Pair is about construction and healing, not destruction and mockery. This, by contrast, should at first feel off-putting and mean spirited and perhaps not what this show ought to be doing.…

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The Week in Comics (7/16/14)

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A new Wicked and the Divine this week. And it’s brilliant, spoilers. But, also spoilers, it’s not my pick of the week.

Fables #142

I honestly couldn’t tell you why this book is still running. I mean, I suppose soon it won’t be, so that makes sense, but we’re at the point where I look through it and I cannot identify a single character having anything interesting happen to them. It’s turned to a meandering pseudo-epic that’s just retreading the same ground. I’m starting to be unconvinced I even care how it ends. D

Moon Knight #5

I could have sworn this came out a week or two ago, so I’m not sure why it only appeared in my shop today. Bit of a… Ellis does an entire action issue to let Declan Shalvey show off. Declan Shalvey shows off. Result. Ellis does things like this occasionally, and I’m never entirely convinced by them from a readerly perspective, but I see why they’re done and what the point is, and I respect them. Very much a comic lover’s comic, this one. B

Ms. Marvel #6 (Pick of the Week)

This is an absolute delight. I compared this to Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man run last time, noting that Wilson is doing a masterful execution of that formula, and that’s true, but there’s also a wonderful splash of Gillen and McKelvie’s Young Avengers here, with a protagonist who’s as 2014 as it’s possible to be. Doge speak, video game references, discussions of fanfiction, and a character who’s grounded in the world. The discussion between Kamala and Sheikh Abdullah is as good as her teamup with Wolverine. This is a joy of a book, and one that I suspect pretty much anyone who likes superheroes at all would enjoy. Top notch. A+

Original Sin #6

Oh for God’s sake, this issue doesn’t even pretend to have anything happen. It’s not even bothering to spin its wheels. It’s just letting them sit there, sinking banally into the mud. Why is this eight issues? Why is this comic happening? Why is it being inflicted on all Marvel readers by making it a big crossove? Please make it fucking stop already. Argh.  F

Original Sin #3.2 Hulk vs Iron Man #2

Hm. The whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, I fear. Although it’s starting to become clear how this is going to pay off the end of Gillen’s Iron Man run, and the last page is great, as are several of the earlier ones, there’s also a sense that this is going to resolve timidly and banally. The question of exactly how Tony tampered with Bruce’s gamma bomb is being danced around to the point where it’s all but inevitable that it’s not actually going to be Tony’s fault. Which is fine, and even preferable, but feels too telegraphed at this stage. All in all, this isn’t quite working for me, although it’s better than the first issue. C+, though I really hope that actually is a better grade than the first issue.…

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Outside the Government: Immortal Sins

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It’s August 19th, 2011, and the last week in which “Party Rock Anthem” is at number one. In news, Michele Bachmann briefly appears to be a credible Presidential candidate due to the inherent silliness that is the Ames Straw Poll, and not a lot else happens. It’s a dull enough week that Miracle Day’s “Immortal Sins” is actually one of the highlights.
Though truth be told, more than any other episode of Miracle Day, this is the showpiece. Two interleaved stories that are virtually two-handers, one of which finally and triumphantly gives us the Gwen/Jack content that the show has been missing, the other one of which gives an effectively touching and tragic love story that sets up a bunch of background on the Miracle. Rex and Esther are pushed almost entirely to the margins of the story, while Oswald sits out another week entirely. This is, more than any other episode of the run, one that is made for people who were familiar with Torchwood and invested in it as a long-running show as opposed to as a new thing on Starz.
It is in many ways the Gwen/Jack scenes that are the highlights. Eve Myles has always been Torchwood’s strongest element, and she’s always been capable of getting John Barrowman to up his game. Gwyneth Horder-Payton, directing, doesn’t have to do much more than get some basic camera angles on a car and let the two of them go, and through some marvelous use of mirrors to control how the characters can and can’t look at each other she makes their scenes together absolutely sing. Underlying it is an absolutely majestic dynamic: two people who are absolutely best friends but who are also immediately ready to accept that only one of them is walking away from this. Their joy at being saved, accompanied by their firm reiterations that they take back nothing they said, is marvelous, and it’s almost certainly the best set of scenes in Miracle Day.
The scenes with Jack and Angelo are not quite as solid, but are still quite good. Espenson writes a relationship deftly and efficiently, and Daniele Favilli plays Angelo with deft humanity, making his betrayal of Jack seem like an inevitable price for Jack’s hubris in assuming he can charm his way out of everything. Espenson makes a couple really deft decisions, including giving Jack the faux-confession scene in which Barrowman, for the first time in Torchwood, gets to play the character as the libidinous rake he did in the Eccleston season of Doctor Who.
Ah, yes, Doctor Who. Because that’s the other thing “Immortal Sins” does – play up Torchwood’s heritage as a product of Doctor Who, with explicit acknowledgment of both that show and The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is, to say the least, weird. Not least because attempting to fit Miracle Day into any sort of coherent shared universe with Doctor Who is, shall we say, a challenge. Not necessarily a huge one – it’s not exactly unbelievable that the Miracle would fail to come up in any of the on-screen conversations we see within Doctor Who.
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“The fault is not ours, but in our stars.” The Vault or the Vote? A Murderous Day for a Speech

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I really, really hate it when Dirty Pair is bad. Probably more so then in any other series. And this one is really, really bad. As in, actively unwatchable. This episode gets pretty much everything wrong it was possible to get wrong, and is a serious contender for the worst Dirty Pair story ever.

I’m not going to waste any more time on this then strictly necessary because this one genuinely, properly makes me angry and offends me on a personal level. The plot is boring crap about a possible assassination attempt on a presidential candidate due to give a speech at the 3WA headquarters. There’s a modicum of interesting content here about there being two ways to disappear a person, physically killing them and erasing their social records such that they’re no longer part of the capitalist system and thus never existed, but it’s never developed upon enough to merit pursuing it to any serious degree and I honestly don’t care enough to make the effort. Racist Chinese Chef Stereotype shows up again, as does a particularly shocking blackface character in the soap opera Kei is watching in the beginning of the episode, and this is all compounded horrifically by the main plot going out of its way to infantilize, belittle and dismiss the Angels in the most blatant, upfront and disturbing ways imaginable, in particular Kei.

The show attacks them at every possible level, and it’s no longer in on its own joke. Kei and Yuri ask for overtime and get brutally shouted down by Gooley, who is, need I remind you, by this point completely beyond redemption and yet is someone whom this show bewilderingly *still* thinks we’re going to sympathize with, accusing them of being spoiled, irresponsible and wasting the company’s money to the point he actually makes them cry. And the girls get *no* comeback to this-We’re not meant to side with them *at all*. This becomes a recurring theme throughout this episode, the “joke” being that Kei is apparently careless and addicted to gambling and blows all her money at the casinos and by compulsively making bets with people she can’t uphold. Yuri, meanwhile, is of course depicted as mature, responsible, demure and altogether more competent and together then her hapless partner. Aside from making light out of a kind of addiction that real people actually do suffer from, this is retrograde and wrong on a very basic and fundamental level.

It is flatly out of character for Kei to behave this way, and unlike when Yuri seemingly acted out of character several weeks back, this time it’s provably a misreading that reinforces a false notion of who these characters are and how the logic of the series works. The idea likely stemmed from Kei being Sagittarian, as Dirty Pair’s series bible is basically written out of astrological signs. Sagittarians are supposedly bad gamblers and are advised against picking it up, so what probably happened is someone took a look at that and decided to write the shittiest possible script around it.…

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Force Decides

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Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don’t want peace.  Give them everything they’ve ever wanted, and it still isn’t enough – because what they say they want isn’t what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it’s become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn’t do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious – that ‘what happened’ to the Native Americans was terrible – doesn’t seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you’re talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it – rightly – in the context of the Native American’s fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people – the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted – with a sigh and a tear – by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes ‘we’ are even allowed to be the baddies – as long as it was a long time ago, and we’re all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.…

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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

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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)

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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

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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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