Eruditorum Press

Fashionably late capitalism

This Week in Comics (June 25th, 2014)

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Experimenting with tone a bit on these, for a couple of reasons, most of which are ones of trying to find a purpose for these while also enjoying doing them quite a bit. For the first few I was leaning towards comics evangelism, since I know contemporary comics are a niche medium. But someone asked me for some recommendations for good comics from the last few years the other day, and I had to admit, there weren’t that many that I enjoyed in a “tell other people to check them out” sort of way – more a cautious “if this is your sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it all right” way that is all too true for a lot of comics.

Which is the other odd thing in writing about contemporary comics, which is that their sales are pathetic. For fun comparison, this week’s pick of the week sold 34,839 copies last month. Its runner up, the mega-successful Saga, sold 55,442. The top-selling comic of last month was the first issue of Original Sin, all the way up at 147,045. These numbers are expanded a bit by digital, but honestly, not by much.

Comics, in other words, really are a niche medium, and while it’s worth pointing to the good bits that shouldn’t be as niche as they are, when we are talking about Underwear Fetishists Punch People #Whatever or Countably Infinite Crisis on Fifty-Two Sins #0.437 Deadpool vs Batferret the truth is that this is an idiosyncratic paraphilia that we should go ahead and be honest about. Which is to say, since we’re largely discussing my embarrassing Marvel habit, let’s all acknowledge that anyone who gives a shit about how the latest issue of Guardians of the Galaxy is can therefore be assumed to be a fetishist as well.

Which is to say that I’m going to stop pretending that I’ll drop a comic just because it’s terrible every month. I don’t drop the equivalently priced Starbucks mochas just because they are essentially sugar weaponized into a slow-acting poison. I’m much more interested in this being a thoroughly partisan, modern equivalent to a fanzine column that will simply mouth off recklessly about where mainstream American comics should be looking at any given instant. Because with an audience as small as comics have, the fanzine is actually finally appropriate, as opposed to when they started and represented a tiny and irrelevant minority of the audience.

All of which said, they’ll be taking a week off next week, as I will be out of town and will not be able to get to the shop. Looking at what’s coming out, it’ll be Uber or Lazarus fighting for Pick of the Week (which will always be something I can recommend with a straight face that someone who is not me read), with Rocket Racoon and Moon Knight the dark horse candidates. Though if it’s a crap week, I could always pick Miracleman. Even though the really interesting issue of that is going to be in August.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 80 (Grey’s Anatomy)

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On October 6th, 2011, the American medical soap Grey’s Anatomy aired the fourth episode of its eighth season, entitled “What is it About Men.” The conceit of the episode was straightforward and clever: Grey’s Anatomy, normally a show dominated by and framed in terms of its female characters, did an episode in which the female characters were all pushed to the periphery and the focus was instead on the male characters. The voiceover narration that clumsily sets up the theme for a given episode, instead of, as normal, going to title character Meredith Grey or, as occasionally the case, going to a single other character, is instead split among all of the male characters, who opine about masculinity. 
This is, to be clear, a genuinely interesting take. Grey’s Anatomy is a heavily female-driven show, both for better and for worse. It passes the Bechdel test essentially every episode, which makes this episode’s unrepentant flunking of it an appreciably interesting thing. Because it is not as though this is suddenly an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that is envisioned as being “for” a male audience. This is still clearly conceptualized as women’s television, which is problematic in a number of ways, not least of all its existence as a category. All the same, the effect of “What is it About Men” is still interesting and worth highlighting: it provides a relatively rare cultural moment of the female gaze being applied to male bodies. It is first and foremost an episode about defining what masculinity is, and, crucially, defining a vision of masculinity that is desirable to women.
All of which is lead-up for the reason we care, which is that one of the major plot lines of “What is it About Men” concerns a crush at a sci-fi convention when five hundred people rushed the doors to try to be one of the first fifteen through them and thus to win a limited edition bit of Doctor Who merchandise (a plastic TARDIS signed by Russell T Davies). We should perhaps, because we are all anoraks of the most pathological sense, note that the actual TARDIS displayed was a perfectly ordinary and easily purchased toy that uses an electromagnet to make the TARDIS hover and spin over a base, and that the toy in question is clearly from the Moffat era, making the Davies signature an inexplicable anachronism. It is, in other words, seemingly written by someone who has looked Doctor Who up on the Internet as opposed to by a committed fan. (The episode also lands slightly astray on A Song of Ice and Fire, declaring a character to look like a Dothraki princess when that is at best a puzzling description, and then blithely overlooking some deeply inappropriate and stalkerish behavior in the course of that plot line. But then, valorizing completely inappropriate and abusive male behavior actually demonstrates a fairly thorough understanding of that fandom, doesn’t it?)
Nevertheless, there’s something of a cultural watershed here. If you told an American Doctor Who fan on October 6th, 2001 that a major piece of American network television would use the word “TARDIS” multiple times, it would have been unthinkable.
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“From One Heart To Another”: Criados’ Heartbeat

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And the first thing they do is completely torpedo each and every one of our expectations.

“Criados’ Heartbeat” is unbelievably subversive, even for this show. With its ominous countdowns, imposing and mysterious antagonist and seeming dramatic, game-changing plot twists, this is the kind of episode most shows would save for their season finale. And Dirty Pair casually tosses it at us five weeks in with another twenty to go. But we’ll get to all that later-This episode works on a multitude of different levels, so let’s take a look at the most obvious one first. One thing old school science fiction buffs like about Dirty Pair is its musing on trans/posthumanism, typically in the classic cyberpunk sense of body modification and upgrading or augmenting the human form through emergent biotechnology. This is the most visible in Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair adaptation for Dark Horse comics, but it’s a theme the franchise on the whole is known for, and, it’s worth noting, one it hasn’t actually looked at before now.

This manifests, obviously, in Criados himself, a literal mad scientist who, upon committing suicide two years prior to the events of this story, transplanted his consciousness into the computer core of a deep space automated hazardous waste processing facility. It doesn’t look like he did a particularly amazing job of it though, considering he’s become consumed by rage and has dedicated his existence to hunting down and killing Kei and Yuri, who he blames for his death after they shut down a drug smuggling ring he was involved in. And he’s brutal about it, tormenting them with horrific imagery via psychic projection and sending out entire starfleets to track them down and drag them to the space station, which is a meant for the disposal of dangerous toxic waste unfit for human exposure and actually called the Graveyard of Ships. Criados is clearly unhinged and evil and, given what we know about the loose cautionary tone pervading much of Dirty Pair, it’s possible to read this as a criticism of the kind of augmentation he attempted on himself.

But that’s not what I think this episode is actually trying to get at with this theme. As a character, Criados is, in fact, a revelation: It’s only mentioned very briefly when the girls are going over his biography, but Kei does state he had a particular fascination with the supernatural and life after death, which he, of course, managed to attain in the end through his transhumanist experiments. Combine this with his power of telepathy and his interest in hallucinogenics, which is what got him busted by the girls in the first place, and it starts to sound a lot more like Criados is a kind of futuristic shaman who was able to heighten and focus his own pre-existing power and abilities through technology. This alone is a breakthrough in speculative fiction: In the Blade Runner post I expressed concern about mainline transhumanism’s apparent ignorance and dismissal of humanity’s connection with the larger universe, meanwhile, in Dirty Pair, even Criados gets this, understanding transhumanism through his prior exploration of spirituality, and singlehandedly solving one of the biggest questions of mind and consciousness in the process.…

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Apropos of Nothing

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Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics internalised by our civilisation).  Its actual function, of course, is to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.

(This isn’t a conspiratorial view, by the way.  Conspiracies undoubtedly happen – the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else – but conspiracy is not the basis of the system.  Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable.  They are, in a very real sense, an aberration.  An endemic aberration certainly – and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get – but an aberration nonetheless.  It’s important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be.  That isn’t how systems of control endure.  Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them.  Corruption is real.  It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures.  Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity.  Everyone – the corrupt and the non-corrupt – partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)

Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories… and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things.  You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system.  It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be.  You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures.  This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system.  But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive.  Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of ‘justice’ come from the democratic impulse from below.  This isn’t to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that.  Rather, the oppressed – always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted – develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it.  Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. …

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The Universe Cries Out Like A Newborn (Lets Kill Hitler)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a duplicate of
Amy Pond’s infant daughter made out of synthetic flesh that
is sentient and has an identity but that is going to be callously
murdered in Amy’s arms just to hammer home the horrific
abuse that she has suffered and that the Doctor fails to understand
until River shows him how he has been blind. 

It’s August 27th, 2011. Wretch 32 is at number one with “Don’t Go,” with Emelie Sand, Maroon 5, and Christina Perri also charting. In news since a good man went to war, the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, fled to Saudi Arabia to receive medical treatment for injuries sustained during an attack by protesters upon the Presidential Palace. The Arab Spring also progressively heated up into the Syrian Civil War, and South Sudan becames a country. In tremendously symbolic news, the Space Shuttle program ended with STS-135, commanded by Christopher Ferguson. Anders Breivik did unimaginably terrible things. And Muammar Gaddafi’s government effectively falls in Libya the week this story airs.

While on television, Doctor Who is back after its summer break with the provocatively titled Let’s Kill Hitler. It is, unfortunately, here that we must abandon any pretense that Doctor Who under Steven Moffat can be said to consistently work. By any measure, this is clearly where it goes off the rails. The reasons for this are, on the whole, complex. First and foremost, the series seems to have turned into a production nightmare at this point. Moffat, as has been well documented at this point, simply turned out not to be as fast a writer as Russell T Davies was, and found overseeing fourteen episodes of Doctor Who and three double-length episodes of Sherlock while writing six of the Doctor Whos and a Sherlock (or two) to be more than he could manage while actually ever seeing his children or breathing. It’s an understandable problem – the schedule Davies maintained was inhuman, as The Writer’s Tale amply demonstrates, and the solution come to after the botched production of this season – slowing down and not trying to maintain quite as mad a production schedule for Moffat’s two hit shows – was a sound one.

And so Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song were the last two episodes shot for Season Six, and even still the scripts were appallingly late – to the point where they had to start preproduction without scripts in hand. What was shot were in effect Moffat’s first drafts. This introduces a degree of sloppiness to proceedings – a word that is a problematic bedfellow for Moffat’s puzzle box complexity. Last season Moffat made an entire reveal out of a fake production gaffe. This season, even if there are no howling continuity errors, there’s a constant sense that Moffat is making it up as he goes along. 
This is exacerbated by the basic twist implicit in Let’s Kill Hitler. There is a basic grammar to a season of Doctor Who that had, by this point, been well-established.
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“We’re on a mission from God.”: The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death

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It would be one thing if all Dirty Pair did was ramble through different film and literary genres parodying and riffing over them in the process. It’s reliance on Long 1980s postmodern cinematography notwithstanding, that would not be an especially novel concept. What Dirty Pair needs to do is to carve its own niche within the televisual landscape of the era: Not just making witty commentary, but delivering its own unique message about what science fiction means in this day and age. The books are very upfront about declaring that it’s Kei and Yuri’s purpose to usher humanity into a new era, by fire if necessary, but the anime does seem to prefer building to this ultimate revelation a bit more methodically.

We will, of course, eventually get there, and sooner rather than later. And while “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” at first seems like a complete romp, this episode is in truth another step towards that (I mean, it is a complete romp too, but it’s more than that). This is another great example of how postmodern cinematography and knowing constructed artifice can be used to emphasize different narrative truths, and be a bloody fantastic evening of entertainment to boot. The comparisons…Well, they’re obvious, aren’t they? There’s no way this is anything other than a knowingly wry and comprehensive send-up of The Blues Brothers. For those unaware of that particular movie (for shame), The Blues Brothers is a 1980 comedy film by John Landis, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd based on their Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name. Both concern the titular Blues Brothers, a blues revivalist band fronted by Belushi’s and Akroyd’s characters Jake and Elwood, who grew up in a Catholic orphanage and form a blood pact by cutting their fingers with a guitar string said to belong to Elmore James after being introduced to the genre by the orphanage’s janitor.

The film sees Jake and Elwood breaking parole to reunite their band to perform a benefit concert at the orphanage they grew up in, which is facing foreclosure. They go on a cross-country quest, which Jake constantly reminds us is “a mission from God”, to locate their old bandmates, all the while being hunted by the police as part of a ludicrous car chase that lasts essentially the entire movie. The climax is a thing to behold, with Jake and Elwood screaming through a downtown metropolitan area in the “Bluesmobile” trying to shake their pursuers, whose ranks have been bolstered by the addition of a Neo-Nazi group and a country band, whom the brothers somehow managed to also arouse the ire of.

And, true to form, “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” is about three-quarters car chases throughout the neon canyons of Elenore City, with Jake and Elwood replaced by Kei and Yuri and the Bluesmobile replaced by two slick motorcycles. Dirty Pair even manages to *one up* The Blues Brothers in this respect because the police here have futuristic hovercars and go after the girls in *three-dimensional traffic* before the epic showdown on an incomplete section of bridge held aloft by a helicopter.…

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Voluminous Description

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Finally finished Kershaw’s biography of Hitler.  I’ve been working on it – both volumes, unabridged – for years, picking it up for a bit, putting it down for a bit, etc.  (This is how I usually tackle mammoth reading projects.)

Can’t help feeling underwhelmed.  I mean, I’m in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project… but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers – Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc – that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.

Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history.  The narrative history of one protagonist.  This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority.  Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind.  He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity.  His reactions are utterly predictable once you’ve spent any time (so to speak) in his company.  This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like “Hitler’s reaction was predictable”, followed by a re-run of something you’ve already read a hundred times.  Kerhsaw isn’t to be blamed for Hitler’s personality, but he is – perhaps – to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project.  Kershaw doesn’t really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people.  He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc – all the usual explanations – and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.

Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history.  He’d been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography – a more ‘popular’ type of book – and often brings insights from social history to bear… especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)… but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist.  The asides can be genuinely fascinating.  Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example.  The repeated motif of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical ‘solution’ to any problem.  In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable – often unwilling – to do anything about it. …

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Saturday Waffling (June 21st, 2014)

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Happy summer.

Been working on the next Last War in Albion chapter for three days straight. It’s officially the longest chapter to date now, and still not done. So, first off, let’s have fun – take your guess on what the final word count of the Swamp Thing chapter will be. The closest guess gets the ebook omnibus of it for free. Clue – it’s at least 24,000 words, since that’s where it’s at now.

Second of all, I’ve been doing these comics reviews, but it occurs to me – I have no idea how many of you actively read comics, or what titles you read. So, comic and me-reading people – what are your pull lists these days?…

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The Best Way To See Glasgow (The Last War in Albion Part 49: Glasgow Comics Mart, Moore’s Last Captain Britain Strips)

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This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Late in his run on Captain Britain, Moore recounted a trip to a comics mart in Glasgow.

“Until very recently it had been my opinion that the best way to see Glasgow was from an aeroplane, or, at the very least, by driving through at eighty miles an hour with the windows wound up.” – Alan Moore, “I Belong to Glasgow”
On October 21st, Moore attended a Comics Mart in Glasgow. An account of this trip is printed in Mighty World of Marvel #9 under the title “I Belong to Glasgow,” alongside the Captain Britain strip “Among These Dark Satanic Mills,” a title that quotes Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” about attempting to build Jerusalem (by then imagined as Liberty, the emanation of the giant progenitor of all humanity Albion) within England via a mental war of creative effort. There he met a twenty-three year old comics fan and sometime writer named Grant Morrison.
Figure 363: Grant Morrison’s last comic work prior
to his 1983 meeting with Alan Moore was an issue
of Starblazer illustrated by José Ortiz. (From Starblazer
#86, 1982)
After a promising beginning writing and drawing avant garde stories in the new wave science fiction style and a superhero strip for his local paper, as well as a couple of stories in the space action digest Starblazer, Morrison had not published a comic in a year, and was at the time more interested in a music career, but was also active in the fanzine scene, and gave Moore a copy of his fanzine Bombs Away Batman, which contained both some positive reviews of Moore’s comics work and an interview with Morrison’s band, The Mixers, in which Morrison asserts Aleister Crowley as one of his influences while one of his bandmates cites Jerry Cornelius.
Moore’s account of the event in “I Belong To Glasgow” is primarily a glowingly comedic take in which he goes on for several paragraphs suggesting that he was only at the event because he was bribed and making fairly generic if well-executed jokes at the expense the Scottish (“While incest, murder and cannibalism have been outlawed for centuries in our own land, in Scotland they are still very much a part of everyday family life”) before settling into the meat of the piece in which he praises “the level of friendliness that we encountered,” a paragraph about Bob Napier’s AKA fanzine, and the declaration that “we had an incredible time” in Glasgow.
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