Eruditorum Press

Discontent creators

That Have Bred The Most Terrible Things (The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People)

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You, um, might want to get a doctor to look at that.
It’s May 21st, 2011. Bruno Mars is at number one with “The Lazy Song,” which is unseated after a week by Pitbull and several other artists with “Give Me Everything.” Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, David Guetta, and LMFAO also chart. In news, the EU agrees to a bailout for Portugal, Ratko Mladi? is arrested in Serbia, Queen Elizabeth II makes the first monarchal visit to Ireland in a century, Oprah Winfrey’s talk show goes off the air, and Herman Cain declares that he’s running for President.
On television, meanwhile, it’s The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People. Perhaps first and foremost, this is the story that seems to have scared the production team off of two-parters for a while. It is in many ways easy to see why. Despite a very strong first episode cliffhanger, both halves of this feel overly long. This is mostly due to specific problems introduced by Matthew Graham – instead of using the extra space to better develop characters, he simply goes overboard with numerous flatly developed characters (quick, name a single character trait of Dicken’s. Actually, being able to remember which one Dicken is counts). Instead of elaborating or developing his various themes, he just repeats them over and over again, endlessly reiterating, for instance, the bit about the eyes. Significantly emphasized things don’t even end up mattering – Cleaves acquires headaches in the second episode that are stressed a bunch, contribute nothing, and then cleared away with a miracle cure at the end of the episode. It’s bizarre and disjointed and ultimately rather unsatisfying.
But in many ways it’s not the particulars of why this doesn’t quite work that are most significant. It’s sufficient to note that they just don’t. Yet again. This isn’t unique to two-parters – it’s not as though the one-part episodes in any given season are devoid of crap. But there is a reasonable sense that the two-parters are prone to faltering for some reason or another. The reasons differ, but they seem to flounder when they’re not season finales. Moffat, in particular, has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to make the two-parter work, saying in more than one commentary that he believes the trick is to have the second episode begin in a markedly different place than the first one leaves off. 
Certainly The Almost People attempts that, devoting its second episode to the existence of a Ganger Doctor, but in doing so it reveals the potential problem with the approach, which is that it ends up feeling like the real premise of the story doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. This isn’t helped by the fact that the basic version of the premise – the Gangers getting loose – takes a third of an episode to get established. It is in many ways the same problem that plagues a lot of episode ones in the classic series: the gravity of the cliffhanger often distorts the storytelling.
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“Because the kids know where it’s at”: Do Lovely Angels Prefer Chest Hair?

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After the giddy heights of “How to Kill a Computer”, Dirty Pair dials things back significantly for its second outing. Don’t let the name deceive you, “Do Lovely Angels Prefer Chest Hair?” is a far more straightforward outing than its predecessor. It is by no means my favourite episode, and I have a hard time imagining that it would be anybody’s favourite episode-It is, in fact, stultifyingly mediocre. That said, it’s not utterly terrible, and in many ways it’s the episode this show needed to do at this point in time for the audience it has.

What’s interesting about this episode from the vantage point of someone who owns the complete series on DVD is how unlike the rest of the show it is. For one thing, it is a direct sequel, picking up in the aftermath of the explosion in the Leaning Tower of Damocles and pretty much the entire 3WA hating Kei and Yuri’s guts. Weirdly, in spite of its sci-fi magazine heritage, Dirty Pair has never been much of a serial, even on this show, usually preferring to make its stories largely standalone, although set against the backdrop of a unified constructed world (and yes, this is a storytelling structure I tend to be in strong support of, at least for television). This episode, however, is explicitly dealing with the fallout from last time, and Gooley even assigns the girls a supervisor in the form of consultant Graves because he no longer trusts them. Even the case is low-key; a bog-standard example of corporate rivalry where an starline company sends undercover agents to sabotage their rival’s ships by planting bombs designed to emulate engine failure-Certainly not the kind of thing that would put the fate of humanity at stake.

It’s extremely trivial to explain why this episode exists. It is obviously about explaining to viewers of the anime who might not be familiar with the book series why we should sympathize with Kei and Yuri even though utter destruction follows them everywhere, and it needs to get this across in twenty minutes. Graves starts out as an utterly contemptible character, lounging around in Gooley’s office, throwing his weight around and treating the Angels like spoiled children, even making it absolutely clear he only wants them on the mission so the can check the women’s restrooms onboard the starliner and that he thinks they never do their jobs. He is a a truly repugnant combination of the worst aspects of the Western film noir antihero and traditional, outmoded Japanese conceptions of masculinity and the inherent superiority of elders. This is what Kei is mocking when she tells Yuri that she’s sure Graves must have chest hair, and that she hates men who do: She’s saying she has no tolerance for men who literally wear their manliness on their chest and flaunt it in front of everyone.

Because of course Kei and Yuri are consummate professionals and figure out what’s going on long before Graves does, it’s just we have to get through an extended zero-G firefight on the exterior hull and have the whole ship almost crash into a major metropolitan area to prove that.…

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Without It, I Couldn’t Survive (The Doctor’s Wife)

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Cleavage is magic
It’s May 14th, 2011. LMFAO remain at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” with Jennifer Lopez, Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry, and Bruno Mars also charting. In news, Queen Elizabeth II becomes the second-longest reigning British monarch, Manchester United beat Liverpool’s record of eighteen top flight victories, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is charged with rape, and for only the second time ever the Morganza Spillway is opened. 
While on television, The Doctor’s Wife. To steal a phrase from Lawrence Miles’s review of City of Death in About Time, it is, of course, one of the best things ever. It’s also something I’m going to get to come back to, admittedly in a few years, since it’s by Neil Gaiman, one of the protagonists of The Last War in Albion. So the interesting question of how this fits into Gaiman’s larger career mostly belongs to that project. Still, a preview of the argument: after American Gods, Gaiman’s career kind of loses momentum, consisting mainly of things that feel safe and like what one would expect from Gaiman. It’s not that Gaiman is writing bad stuff in any meaningful sense, but it felt in many ways like he had become a predictable writer who was going to turn out subtle variations of the same basic thing. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, this changed and he entered a new and largely more interesting phase of his career, and while The Doctor’s Wife can’t reasonably be said to be singlehandedly responsible for that, it is nevertheless a significant transitional moment.
Much of this, one suspects, comes down to the fact that Neil Gaiman found himself with something he’d not really had to deal with since American Gods: someone who could edit him with real authority. This doesn’t happen to major writers late in their careers very often, but in this case Gaiman is working under someone who is every bit as good a writer as he is. There’s a palpable sense of Gaiman having to up his game here and push himself, and it pays off with an episode that’s not just one of the absolute best Doctor Who stories of all time, but a high point of Gaiman’s career.
It’s worth talking a bit about Moffat and writers. Moffat has generally avoided being terribly open about how he works with the writers he commissions, rejecting Davies’s approach of actively and openly rewriting people. This is, broadly speaking, a good thing, at least in terms of being fair to creators. But equally, it doesn’t mean that there’s no editorial oversight. Gaiman has talked about The Doctor’s Wife going through loads of drafts, including some very specific comments from Moffat. That doesn’t mean that Moffat wrote all or most of The Doctor’s Wife, but it does mean that he shaped it heavily. Many of these edits were matters of budget – Gaiman had a not entirely realistic sense of what could be accomplished on Doctor Who’s budget, and had to be revised downwards several times.
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SIGKILL: How to Kill a Computer

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That Dirty Pair would eventually make the leap to animation is a total no-brainer.

Although clearly indebted to Golden Age science fiction, this is a series that has always placed deliberately over-the-top, staged action sequences high on its list of priorities. Haruka Takachiho may be a master at prosaic imagery, but the fact is Dirty Pair has always been an intensely visual series. After all, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s illustrations are just as iconic to the look and feel of the novels as Takachicho’s own writing is, and you can’t inherit as much from professional wrestling as Dirty Pair does and not end up tackling visual media in some form. The question was not if there would be a Dirty Pair anime, but precisely how the series would bring its unique spin to the medium because, perhaps counterintuitively, there are also some things about it that make it somewhat hard to adapt.

Chief among these is the fact the the novels are told in the first person from Kei’s perspective (or rather, what she wants us to think her perspective is), and this ties into their use of extremely clever postmodern and self-aware literary techniques. Kei being an unreliable narrator and an oral storyteller firmly working within the conventions of serialized sci-fi, light novels and fanfiction means that a great deal of Dirty Pair’s uniqueness comes from being a book series in the first place. For the anime to succeed on any level other than a purely superficial one, it’s going to have to translate this sense of knowing and pointed structural playfulness into some equivalent visual media form.

Which, thankfully for everyone, it does. But to get an understanding of how, we once again have to take an extremely fine-toothed comb to the proceedings here, as this is another case where a lot of meaning is deliberately left to be conveyed through subtext and subconscious association. First of all, fans of the novels will likely immediately notice that everything looks a lot different in “How to Kill a Computer” than it did in The Dirty Pair Strike Again, which was, if you’re playing along at home, just last year. Kei and Yuri now look quite a bit more cartoony (as does Mughi), though not in a bad way, and their outfits have been slightly tweaked to make them brighter so they stand out on 1980s TV sets. The girls’ starship, the namesake Lovely Angel, is a completely different vehicle. In the novels, Kei describes something that sounds like a cross between a rocketship, a flying saucer and a fighter jet, but the anime’s Lovely Angel looks like a pink, superdeformed Star Trek Phase II USS Enterprise (Andy Probert and Matt Jeffries version, not James Cawley version).

(This was by no means unintentional. The show’s director was a massive, massive Star Trek fan and would slip in references at every opportunity. Trekkers may also want to take note of the readout on the computer monitor Yuri is looking at during the episode’s opening moments.)…

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Saturday Waffling (June 14th, 2014)

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Finishing off the initial set of revisions on Baker 2 today (which is to say Friday), although there’s still new essays to add, and at the time of queuing this it’s an open question whether I’ll actually get through the Logopolis post tonight. I’m cursed with a morning appointment and may actually need to sleep. How ghastly.

In any case, extra essays. Currently thinking a brand new Pop Between Realities entry, Tomb of Valdemar, probably Romance of Crime… is there a good Tom Baker/Mary Tamm Big Finish? One of those could be neat. Also an essay to be called “The Shada Variations” that will do what you’d expect, an essay on the nature of the Guardians and the Key to Time… might see if I can dig up those K-9/The Mistress audios that existed at one point. Open to suggestions on other content.

Other projects – the next Last War in Albion chapter has been idle for a week or so, and I’m itching to get back to it, not least because I only have three weeks to finish it and it’s still monstrously nowhere near done. And Secret Doctor Who Project is in the very end of Chapter Three and will probably be done when I can direct a solid day’s work on it, which I’m hoping to do next week sometime. I am still behind where I want to be on that, and this is a source of stress, although I’m hoping that what are likely a pair of mega-chapters

In other news, Jill and I have been watching The Time Meddler, which led me to remark that the episode three cliffhanger is one of Doctor Who’s best ever, which in turn made me want to do a Top Ten Cliffhangers list before I realized that would be work and I should just ask you all for your favorites.

So. What’s your favorite Doctor Who cliffhanger?…

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Manholes and Lots of Other Gritty Stuff (The Last War in Albion Part 48: Frank Miller, The Mighty World of Marvel)

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This is the eighth 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: After his initial forrays into the characters past, Moore’s Captain Britain strips took a turn towards the psychedelic in the later issues of The Daredevils.
“Noo Yawk is grim, and gritty, and realistic. There are big black buildings with little white squares on, and water towers, and manholes and lots of other gritty stuff.” – Alan Moore, “Grit”

In this regard it is perhaps easiest to think of The Daredevils as Marvel UK’s conscious response to Dez Skinn’s success with Warrior. While Warrior was always a mess in terms of its finances, the buzz and attention it drew turned plenty of heads. The problem was that Warrior made its name off of original content, whereas Marvel UK was still first and foremost a company that existed to publish reprints of American comic books. And so for all that The Daredevils was Marvel’s attempt to create a magazine for adult comic fans who liked Warrior, it had to do so without actually having the budget to publish original British material like Warrior. All it could afford for original comics content was Moore and Davis’s Captain Britain strip.
Figure 354: Two of Alan Davis’s major
characters on the cover of Arkensword,
a major UK fanzine.
And so it focused on its non-comics text pieces, taking a cue from the fanzine culture that existed within the UK. Fanzines – a portmanteau of “fan” and “magazine” – are fan produced publications discussing popular media, often though not always within the broad auspices of “geek culture,” with comics being a particularly common focus, although fanzines focusing on all sorts of popular culture exist. Ostensibly distributed at cost with no profit being involved, fanzines were typically distributed either by mail order or at conventions, and proved a training ground for numerous creators: Dez Skinn, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, and Grant Morrison all did work for or on fanzines early in their career. Featuring a mix of original cartoons, fan fiction, interviews, historical features, reviews, criticism, and outright whimsy, fanzine culture was at once vibrant and strange.
Figure 355: Brother Power the Geek,
written and drawn by Joe Simon,
lasted only two issues.
And, perhaps more to the point, was something The Daredevils actively kept track of with its Fanzine Reviews column. Indeed, that column gives a sense of the broad inventiveness of fanzines as it describes their contents: interviews with war comic artist Joe Colquhoun and Kevin O’Neill, fan fiction, reviews of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, comics by Eddie Campbell, a retrospective on Steve Ditko’s Hawk and Dove comic for DC, trivia quizzes,  satirical comics about Doctor Who, an episode guide to the 1960s Batman series, a compendium of ludicrous dialogue from the same series, an article on DC’s 1968 Brother Power the Geek (‘one oft he most brain-blisteringly awful comic books ever produced by human beings,” Moore explains), reprints of iconically dumb comic book panels,  a review of Zippy the Pinhead, a cover by Bryan Talbot, and a one page strip by Savage Pencil are all specific features mentioned among the reviews of dozens of fanzines.
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“All Aboard the Express Kundalini!”: The Dirty Pair Strike Again

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I trust we all have a pretty solid understanding of how Dirty Pair works by now, so there’s no need to go into quite the same amount of detail as we did last time. Especially since The Dirty Pair Strike Again has a great deal of complex and head-spinning twists, turns, themes and motifs all its own. If you thought the first book was an overabundance of mad brilliance, this one will disintegrate your brain. In a good way.

First of all, I just want to say this book has possibly the most amazing opening chapter in the history of literature. Four years have passed between the first Dirty Pair book and this one, and, as if sensing that we’d missed the girls when they’d been away, Haruka Takachiho tosses us one of the most captivating, over-the-top action scenes I at least have ever read. Kei and Yuri are sitting in the 3WA headquarters with their testy chief after their latest successful, yet disastrous, mission. The chief chews them out for destroying an entire planet (which of course wasn’t their fault) and the Angels play along with exasperation. Yuri goes through an elabourate routine of mock-grovelling while Kei openly rolls her eyes at her idiotic superior and tries not to break out giggling at Yuri’s masterful performance. Then, out of nowhere, the entire freaking front side of the building explodes and in fly a bunch of flying shadow ninjas in jetpacks firing indiscriminately at everything in sight.

What happens next is nothing short of sheer poetry. Kei and Yuri fall back to the roof of the 3WA building where they take off in single pilot needle-nosed rocketship jet fighters and pursue the shadow ninjas throughout the entire city, as Kei naturally gives us a truly riveting play-by-play commentary. Power plants and chemical refineries are utterly razed by the firefight, causing gigantic explosions that reach into the upper atmosphere and level whole city blocks in a single blow. The Angels dogfight with the shadow ninjas in the skies above major metropolitan centres, weaving in between Blade Runner skyscrapers before straight shooting out of city limits and soaring over expansive fields and rolling meadows. And then, best of all, Mughi (who, need I remind you, is a giant sentient alien cat beast who is also chief engineer of the girls’ starship) charges headfirst into the fray, leaps fifty feat into the air, snatches said shadow ninjas out of the sky in mid-flight and then field pitches them straight into said skyscrapers, toppling them like bowling pins made out of Jenga. It is a breathtaking, awe-inspiring scene of inconceivable carnage and indescribable beauty.

And on top of that, it’s an utter jaunt to read, keeping you smiling every step of the way. Kei is as sassy, snarky, sharp and whip-smart as she’s ever been, and her comic timing is dead on. Her storytelling is a spectacle unto itself. Not only is it absolutely hilarious, it effortlessly and vividly evokes the kind of cinematic splendour I didn’t think was even possible to convey through prose, and it goes on like this for fifty-four whole pages.…

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This Week in Comics (And Other Tales)

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First off, some things that aren’t comics.

Matt Smith (not that one) is running a Kickstarter for his short film, Amigone. I asked him to write up a few paragraphs about it for the blog. He sent along the following:

Hello Philip Sandiferites!
I’m writing because Mr. Sandifer offered me a space to talk about this short film I’m producing and trying to get off the ground. It’s called “Amigone” and I wrote it with my good friend John Scherer who had this delicious idea about a world in which everyone knows the date of their death (as an expiration date, not a hit-by-a-bus date). In it, we have a main character (Mark) who’s known his day for the past nine years and is coming up on his last forty days on this planet. He’s got everything figured out, everything planned, no stresses, but first he has to spend a weekend with his father.

It’s a project John and I are incredibly proud of. John is a marvelous (and award-winning!) director and I’m producing all the various bits and kibbles. We have an awesome team (our cinematographer is fantastic and our assistant director has a great head on his shoulders) and a script we really believe in. It’s looking to be about 17-20 minutes long and will feature bungee jumping! Who doesn’t love bungee jumping? 

We’re kickstarting it because it’s looking to be more expensive than either John and I can afford, but we’re making it for as dirt cheap as we possibly can without sacrificing any quality. Hopefully it looks like the sorta thing you would like to support, and if times are tight then just spreading the word is a wonderful gift. You can find it here. 

(And of course thanks to Phil for being wonderful and giving me this space and being so supportive. He’s an awesome person.)

It’s a neat looking project, and I hope you’ll consider backing it.

On to comics reviews, now with some non-Marvel things because it was a better week for that. And next week I know there’s non-Marvel stuff because the first issue of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s The Wicked and the Divine hits, and it’s going to be awesome. All titles link to Comixology pages for the books.

All-New X-Men #28

Hm. For a while, Brian Michael Bendis’s X-Men comics have been the first thing I read in a given week. Not because they’re my favorite comics, but because they’re usually quick and fun reads, and while his X-Men runs are in no way perfect, they have a sort of vintage X-Men feel that’s usually quite satisfying. Unfortunately, with this issue I find myself hitting the problem I usually have with monthly comics, and, historically, with the X-Men in particular, which is that I apparently can’t remember what happened last time. There’s a mess of future X-Men I only sort of remember the individual backgrounds of, and they apparently attacked last issue and… yeah. This will presumably be better next arc.…

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Avery the Pirate (The Curse of the Black Spot)

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I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU
It’s May 7th, 2011. LMFAO is at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” with Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Bruno Mars, and domestic abuser Chris Brown also charting. In news, Osama bin Laden has been killed, as has the Liberal Democrat proposal for the alternative vote. While on television, it’s The Curse of the Black Spot. 
Let’s start by raining on people’s parade, shall we? This is not a prequel to The Smugglers. Really, it’s not. The Smugglers specifies Avery’s ship as being the Black Albatross. The prequel to Curse of the Black Spot, meanwhile, sets it on the correct historical ship for Henry Avery (more properly Henry Every, it appears) to have been on, the Fancy. More broadly, Curse of the Black Spot depicts all of Avery’s treasure being thrown into the sea, which would make it difficult for it to then be found in Cornwall. And since Curse of the Black Spot is universally recognized as a Doctor Who story that contains no plot holes or errors whatsoever and is indeed a beloved story that is universally praised in much the same way that Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks is, these are clearly conclusive proof that it is not in fact a prequel to The Smugglers.
In addition to embodying narrative consistency, The Curse of the Black Spot marks the moment where Doctor Who makes a direct response to Downton Abbey, in this case by casting its lead actor. The analogy is not entirely straightforward, to be certain. Downton Abbey is set, at least at this point in its history, at an Edwardian manor. Curse of the Black Spot is set on a 17th century pirate ship. 
And yet both texts ultimately focus on the intersection of noble duty and money within the context of British identity. When Hugh Bonneville is playing Robert, Earl of Grantham, he plays the noble patrician whose paternal sense of duty is presented as the last beautiful glimmer of a fading light. Here, as Henry Avery, he inverts it straightforwardly: he is the noble man gone wrong – an officer and a gentleman who has turned pirate. 
What this is not, at least, is a commentary on the particular era or history that Downton Abbey explores. This is obvious, really – it’s not as though Stephen Thompson was writing the part for Bonneville. He was given the brief “pirates” and picked a specific historical figure because he was intrigued by the broad strokes of his biography. Short of the specific casting decision that took place, there’s not really a way to spin that as a commentary on Downton Abbey. But after the decision, when it became Doctor Who casting the star of the new biggest show on television, the connection became inevitable.
So what we have is in effect a visibly authorless text. Nobody consciously made The Curse of the Black Spot as a response to Downton Abbey, and yet the aggregate of individual decisions made it impossible for Curse of the Black Spot o be anything other than a commentary on Downton Abbey.
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Sensor Scan: Coast to Coast AM

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The Long 1980s are usually seen as the era when the sweeping hegemonic counter-revolution came in and tore down all the radical mainstream institutions and media artefacts people had spent the Long 1960s putting into place. And there is an extent to which this is true, and indisputable. However, by virtue of being in many ways the high water mark of what we now call “traditional” or “old” media, the Long 1980s were also the period where people working in those structures pushed them to their limits and beyond. People have something to say in every era, and there will always be those who call for positive change, and they will make their voices heard in one way or another.

So, put another way, even though the Long 1980s can be argued to be the point where large-scale media consolidated itself to be firmly and inexorably a part of the authoritarian establishment, there were just as many people who freely acknowledged this, yet continued to use their master’s tools against them. Television may have become the boot of the oppressor, but, whether you think it was successful or not, Star Trek: The Next Generation certainly strove to be a force for material social progress, as did its sci-fi colleague across the pond at the BBC (but we’ll get to that soon enough). You can say the cinema of the 1980s swept away the auteur, experimentalist cinema of the 1970s, but there were still films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Thanks to Nintendo, the video game industry was as energized, inspired and full of life as it would ever be. And, the Long 1980s were really the last time pop music was allowed to be openly radical and critical of the status quo without making a ton of concessions, with people like Siouxsie Sioux, Laurie Anderson and Nena topping the pop charts.

And on the airwaves, on the one hand you had most of the medium being co-opted into the neoconservative revolution leading to a profound shift in the essence of talk radio. On the other, you had Coast to Coast AM.

Though the pioneer of paranormal radio is widely accepted to be Long John Nebel, who for years ran a wildly successful talk show out of New York that dabbled in the supernatural and conspiracy theories, the archetypical, definitive example of the genre really can only be Coast to Coast AM hosted by Art Bell, and later George Noory. Like Nebel before him, Bell was a tremendous showman, bringing a fire and zeal to his performance and quickly gained fame and recognition for his dogged pursuit of a huge swath of different topics, from the expected paranormal gossip and hypothesizing to quantum physics, theology, philosophy, science fiction and flagrantly radical political topics from all angles of the spectrum (which was an early indication of both the strengths and weaknesses of Coast‘s overall impact in my opinion).…

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