Eruditorum Press

Wicked.

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

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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

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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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“I just wanted to make a phone call.”: Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New

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Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for Dirty Pair to get back on its feet.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a proper farce, and one of the most memorable episodes in the series yet. The show’s rapid-fire humour and beat-perfect comic timing is the best it’s been since “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, a story which this outing is definitely in company with. This time, though, the show doesn’t need to evoke any external works to make its point: This episode works purely on Dirty Pair logic and Dirty Pair logic alone. And, if you can keep yourself together through the manic assault of comedy, you might just notice the series has gone and said something really profound about the nature of narrative and the roles of protagonists.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a story about Kei and Yuri trying to get ready for a party. It is also a story about Kei and Yuri being mistaken for 50-year old bank robbers, accidentally kidnapping a group of schoolchildren and being chased all over a city by planetary armed forces. Not only does this week’s episode intuitively understand what last week’s utterly failed to, it exaggerates it beyond infinity: Our poor girls are so chronically and ridiculously unlucky they can’t even go shopping without stumbling into some gigantic disaster. A farce is such a perfect match for Dirty Pair’s setting because this is the structure it operates under already: It’s either unfathomably tragic or unbelievably funny the amount of inconceivable destruction left in Kei and Yuri’s wake, and thankfully the show went with unbelievably funny because really it all just works better that way.

Speaking of humour, it’s maybe worth pointing out the jokes here are *extremely* bawdy and sexual, more so than I think the show’s ever been before. I could see that rubbing some people the wrong way, especially in the opening scene where the girls complain to Gooley about not being able to get dates and how their interest in the party basically boils down to them being able to chase men. However, as is the case with most things on this show, it becomes in my opinion extremely easy to explain away and forgive this once you realise Kei and Yuri are making fun of themselves. My absolute favourite bit comes near the end when a despondent and exhausted Kei and Yuri, having just outwitted an entire planet’s armed forces, escaped a mob of spoiled children and singlehandedly captured the real bad guys, are desperate to take off, fearing they’ll be late for their party. Naturally, they are promptly surrounded by reporters who all want exclusive interviews with the beloved duo, and their panicky excuses to get out of doing primetime TV are pure gold: “We already have plans for tonight! We hate kids! Look! A naked woman!”.

(Also note how in an additional bit of cynical self-deprecation, the pubic personas of the Lovely Angels are shown to be idolized by children, but the kids are horrible to the real Kei and Yuri.…

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Déjà bloody vu

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I was going to do this post all over again… (this is what we do with Palestine: say the same bloody things over and over again, because the same bloody things keep happening over and over again)… but Richard Seymour has already done it for me, very succintly.

(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour’s tweet of a screencap.  But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog.  So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him.  Not that he needs hits from me.) …

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A Presumptious Dilettante’s Five Belated Eggs

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The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years. 

This isn’t just a moral imperative.  Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed.  Always.  By definition.  Otherwise why bother being on the Left?  Otherwise, what does ‘The Left’ mean?  But it’s also a tactical imperative.  The system must be attacked at its weakest points.  The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system’s weakest points.  It hits people where they live: in their bodies.  Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism… and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production.  This is one of those things that everyone formally ‘gets’ and then puts to one side.  That’s not good enough.  Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent.  It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race.  This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that’s only going to get more crucial.  The task will be to relate all these issues to class.  Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive.  That is an end in itself – if we know what our ultimate goal really is.

The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is.  The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing ‘issue trumps’ (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or ‘primary’ or ‘causal’ than yours… and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???). 

But there is more good news.  We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying ‘capitalism’), generates and exacerbates such oppression… for the simple reason that it bloody does; it’s the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic ‘facts of life’, etc. 

That’s why this is so good.  There isn’t anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it’s a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally ‘on-side’ Marxism.  I found it so anyway – speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya’s maxim “I’m still learning”.

One (related) crucial issue to remember… and here I’d proffer the great work of Silvia Federici… is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism. …

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Outside the Government: Escape to LA

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The schedule for this week will be Miracle Day on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, comics reviews on Thursday, Last War in Albion on Friday, and Waffling on Sunday. 
It’s July 29th, 2011. LMFAO remain at number one. Forever. In news, Amy Winehouse dies, Congressman David Wu resigns over a rape allegation, and Congress decides to ignore the ten year term limit on FBI Directors to keep Robert Mueller in place.
While on television, more Torchwood. “Escape to LA” falls in an interesting place within Miracle Day. Not to look ahead too much, but with the next installment, “The Categories of Life,” Miracle Day finally hits a point where you can say with a straight face that it’s working. Which is to say that “Escape to LA” is another component of the awkward start that doomed Miracle Day. And yet in almost every regard the worst of that start is over, and the series is finally starting to get to the things it’s going to do well. It’s just that it doesn’t actually do them well yet, leaving that as a topic for Wednesday.
Here, though, what is interesting is that “Escape to LA” is in many ways a bespoke episode. In hindsight this has been an element of past episodes – the entire series thus far has been unusually focused on single episode storytelling: the instantly disappearing Soulless, the single episode villain of Lyn Peterson in “Rendition,” et cetera. But “Escape to LA” takes this to, perhaps, its furthest extent. Ellis Hartley Monroe, Jack’s father, and C. Thomas Howell’s nameless assassin are all single episode characters who exist to show up, make the plot of this single episode work, and then disappear into thin air. 
This is, to be sure, an odd move for a ten-part series focused on a metaplot. Some of it is clearly motivated by a desire to do some stunt casting, although it’s not clear that Mare Winningham or C. Thomas Howell are particularly big gets. They’re both competent and respectable American actors, and the US equivalent of Torchwood getting, say, Richard Briers for an episode. But the decision to structure entire episodes around the ability to get them in for two days of filming creates a bizarre effect, in that “Escape from LA” ends up weirdly disconnected from the episodes on either side of it even as it picks up the plot from “Dead of Night” and sets up the plot of “The Categories of Life.”
Perhaps the most bewildering is Rex’s father, a scene that exists in strange isolation from everything around it. In an episode that hinges in a large part on the consequences of Esther’s inability to leave her family alone, Rex’s decision to visit his father (a father who is clearly known to the CIA, as Esther says she found mention of him in his file) has no consequences or implications whatsoever. It’s barely set up, little yet paid off. And within the scene there’s precious little content – clearly Rex and his father do not get along and never have, but there’s not even a hint of why.
…

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“It is lonely when you’re among people, too”: What? We’re Heinous Kidnappers!

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Even the best of shows can have bad days. Yes, unfortunately, it is in fact possible for Dirty Pair to go off the rails, and this is a good example of what it looks like when it does. The streak is over: For the first time, we’ve come across an episode of this series that doesn’t really work.

The basic premise is a sound enough one. Throwing Kei and Yuri into a high fantasy story and seeing what happens is an entirely reasonable idea for a Dirty Pair episode, especially in the context of the way the genres of high fantasy and science fiction have evolved over time. Though the most famous iteration of it began as technophillic futurist speculative fiction about logic puzzles, sci-fi as of the 1980s is a profoundly different thing. This is in part due to Star Wars making it OK again to do sci-fi stories on a mass-market scale not in the US Golden Age Hard SF vein, but other ways of doing high-tech stories about starships and space travel and things like that have always existed. This secondary tradition is one Dirty Pair is very much a part of, in part because of the differences between US and Japanese Golden Age science fiction, but also because Dirty Pair is the kind of sci-fi that is able to divorce a futuristic setting from futurism: This is not a series that speculates about future technology, it uses its setting as metaphor and allegory for the issues it’s trying to look at. Again, this is a hallmark of Japanese science fiction in general, but Dirty Pair takes it to its logical endpoint.

(The crowning achievement in using sci-fi settings and imagery as narrative is, of course, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film version of which it is quite clear to me that the writers of this episode had seen, if not actually understood. More on this later.)

Because of this, perhaps counterintuitively, science fiction is uniquely suited amongst genre fiction to looking at extremely ancient and esoteric themes: Look once again at, for example, BRIAN’s role in “How to Kill a Computer”, or indeed, the resolution of last week’s episode and the Lovely Angels themselves. The Dirty Pair Strike Again effortlessly tackled really complex and heady themes about spiritual enlightenment and material social progress. High fantasy (and by this I mean the kind of tradition that sprung up in the wake of people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and that George R.R. Martin seems to be a part of), by contrast, tends to be very gritty and political, focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of human society and, due to its fixation on things like kings and queens and knights and princes, enjoys gossiping about the goings-on in the halls of power and nobility. Exploring the space between these two poles and the way the two traditions have developed the way they have is right in this show’s wheelhouse.…

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Saturday Waffling (July 5th, 2014)

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The hotel I am in has deeply mediocre wi-fi, so I’m going to make this quite brief.

In the most recent Doctor Who Magazine, Steven Moffat posed a neat trivia question of the sort that TARDIS Eruditorum thrives on: in what Doctor Who story does it become unequivocally the case that the Doctor is not human? Moffat points out, for instance, that it’s not An Unearthly Child. Sure, the Doctor says he’s not from Earth, but the series is full of humans that live on other planets. So when, he asks, is it absolutely unequivocally stated.

Bonus points for whoever can convincingly argue the latest point at which you can believe the Doctor is human. Let’s stipulate also that we take all statements made by characters as true unless there’s an active reason to believe otherwise – so no going “well the Doctor could have lied when he said…”

I’ve seen some discussion on it, but I’m curious what you lot settle on.

Oh, and due to the same poor wi-fi, next week’s post order is going to be screwy – I should be running Albion on Tuesdays while Eruditorum is thrice-weekly due to Thursdays being comics posts, but I don’t think I can process an image-heavy post on hotel wi-fi, so I don’t know what will be what day.…

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Outside the Government: Dead of Night

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It’s July 22nd, 2011. LMFAO is still at number one, and my cheeky decision to do Billboard charts means I can’t get more than the number one single, so we’re going to be bored on charts for a while. I could switch back to UK charts, but really, this feels funnier. In news, the final Space Shuttle mission lands, and Anders Breivik kills seventy-seven people in Norway. 
While on television, Dead of Night. For the most part, the arrival of Jane Espenson was a major boon for Miracle Day. She is, after all, flat out one of the best writers of genre television working in the United States. Having trained under Whedon, she went on to amble about any number of shows, including a sizable stint on Battlestar Galactica, where she quickly shed the label she’d acquired on Buffy as your go-to writer for the light and funny episodes, instead establishing herself as a flexible writer who could make almost anything sing. She is, by any estimation, very, very good.
And it’s clear from the breakdowns of episodes that Davies picked her to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the show. Davies surely provided some lines here – “they’re so alive” is, for instance, almost certainly him. But Espenson is clearly set up to do the bulk of the actual writing – she’s the one with the job of making a majority of the scripts work. The trouble is that she’s been dealt a strangely unworked through hand. There’s a dramatic shift in tone that’s taken place between “Rendition” and “Dead of Night.” “Rendition” wanted to play at being a procedural – at being a story about what would actually happen if the Miracle took place. Yes, it cut corners in some key spots, but there was a real effort being spent to figure out what actual problems might spring out of this premise.
One episode later, however, that’s in tatters. We’ve got magic painkillers, the panels discussing what to do have derailed into being excuses to hammer on the pro-life movement instead of actual explorations of the premise, and suddenly the focus is on this Soulless cult, which is terribly ill-defined. Indeed, this is where the entire Oswald plot, dodgy to begin with, really gets into the realm of the fundamentally problematic. The problem, in a nutshell, is that you’ve got a fundamentally satiric idea – a celebrity cult around a pedophile murderer – being employed for entirely serious purposes. The “everybody falls in love with the horrible killer” story is doable, hence it having been done loads of times, but the point there is always to highlight the absurd notions involved in celebrity itself.
But this seems to be trying to employ that idea for serious purposes – as part of a quasi-realistic thriller. Although to be fair, this point could use unpacking. Certainly there’s an embrace of the ridiculous throughout Miracle Day. “Rendition” had loads of it alongside the Vera Juarez plot, and so does “Dead of Night,” with its magic contact lenses and all.
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“She who lives in harmony with herself…”: Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal

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After spending the last two weeks firmly and confidently declaring what it is, what it’s about and what it can do, Dirty Pair is now free to go back to gleefully playing around with other shows. And it pulls a real doozy of a meta-romp this time: For my regular readers, one way to read “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” is as Dirty Pair’s interpretation of the “Gunfighters”/”Spectre of the Gun”/”Living in Harmony” trilogy we looked at *way* back in 1968.

A brief refresher: Long about the same time in the late 1960s, Star Trek, Doctor Who and The Prisoner all did essentially the same story where the show’s hero (or heroes) became trapped in the narrative of a Western movie where either circumstances or some external influence conspire to force them into becoming killers (well, The Prisoner didn’t really as “Living in Harmony” was hastily adapted from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s other show Danger Man, but that’s beside the point). The crux of those stories was that while each show in some way acknowledged the performative nature of its existence, the logic of a Western was in some way anathema to all of them, that this was a role they were not meant to play, and doing so would be tantamount to narrative collapse. As the ever-astute Jack Graham, friend of the blog and frequent commenter, pointed out under the entry on “Spectre of the Gun”, it’s telling this is happening against the backdrop of the Cold War, such that the “foundational myth” of the United States is transformed into something horrific, symbolizing an inexorable predisposition towards violence and self-destruction.

Dirty Pair is, of course approaching this from a wildly different perspective. It’s not even indebted to Westernism itself as a fundamental ideology, let alone any cultural-specific manifestation of it in the United States. Furthermore, the key thing about Dirty Pair is that everything here is performative: Not only is the series itself recursively metafictional to a frankly silly degree, Kei and Yuri are professional wrestlers, so any violence we see is tacitly meant to be read as make-believe, which is an extremely good thing as an entire planet gets vaporized in this one. So clearly, any criticism this episode will be making of violence is going to be coming from the outside in and localized to the plot of the week instead of being depicted as a looming threat to the show itself. The first place this is obvious is the setting, which, far from cribbing the O.K. Corral shootout event from “Spectre of the Gun” and “The Gunfighters” or the Hollywood Western movie trappings of “Living in Harmony”, is actually doing Cowboy Bebop and Sukiyaki Western Django about two decades early.

Like in the former, we get a science fiction world that, while it is equal parts cyberpunk and old west cliches, is on the whole not actually all that removed from our own: There are street food vendors, boutique shops, Jeeps, semiautomatic weapons and the two rival gangs are both corporate political bodies.…

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