Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

Flying Was The Best Bit (The Last War in Albion Part 42: The Origins of Captain Britain)

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Hello everyone. I’m currently running a Kickstarter to help fund the continuation of The Last War in Albion. Right now we’re funded through Book Two, which will focus on Watchmen, and are well on our way to the first stretch goal, which will guarantee Book Three. Please consider contributing to help this blog keep going and this blogger keep eating food.

This is the second 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: Marvel Comics traces its origins back to 1939, but in its modern incarnation dates to 1961 when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created The Fantastic Four and a string of further hits. By the 1970s, however, Marvel had largely moved on to its second generation of talent.

“Flying was the best bit. The rest of it was fraught with more misery and self pity than the entire recorded output of Les Smiths.” – Grant Morrison, “Captain Granbretan”

Figure 313: As was the norm for debuts
of British comics, the first issue of The
Mighty World of Marvel featured a free
and thoroughly lame gift.

As part of this corporate expansion, Marvel decided to look into foreign markets, specifically the United Kingdom. Short of Odhams’ Power Comics line that gave Steve Moore his comics industry breakthrough, Marvel comics had no official UK distribution, famously arriving as ballast on ships that was then sold off in an entirely unlicensed and functionally unregulated market that made following individual series difficult. In 1972, three years after Odhams was absorbed by IPC and dropped the Marvel license, Marvel decided to take matters into their own hands by creating a UK-based publisher that would distribute Marvel work for the UK comics market. Recognizing that the British and American comics markets were fundamentally different media, with the UK dominated by weekly black and white anthologies as opposed to the monthly color comics featuring a single story of the US market, Marvel UK kicked off its line at the end of September with The Mighty World of Marvel, an anthology that initially featured Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk. Five months later they added Spider-Man Comics Weekly to the line-up, bringing Thor and Iron Man to the UK market as well. 

The initial model of Marvel UK was straightforward – comics were printed in Europe, but were edited in New York alongside Marvel’s other fare. They consisted of black and white reprints of Marvel material, with stories that filled a single US monthly issue getting cut up over multiple UK weekly installments.
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Sarcasm and Chips

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Every time I read The Prince I become more convinced that it is a work of sarcasm.  Not conscious sarcasm perhaps, but sarcasm nonetheless. 

It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion.  This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings.  He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici… and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable. 

It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves.  In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince.  The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia’s most implacable enemies. 

Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying.  They just didn’t talk about it.  In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets.  If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible.  Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets. 

The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book’s implicit recognition of this.  Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips.  Money.  To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested.  The market is the basis of Medici power.  They make society a market in which people are the tokens.

Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don’t think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of ‘realpolitik’ people often take from the book.  On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel – a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.…

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The Last Kickstarter in Albion

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The Last War in Albion will post on Saturday this week.

I’m pleased to announce that the Kickstarter for The Last War in Albion is now up and running right here.

I’ll start with the most important thing here: please spread the word. Really. If you would be so kind as to go to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or whatever social media you use and tweet that link with some message about how you think it’s a really cool project, it will help massively. This sort of thing lives or dies by how well it’s promoted. Even if you have only a handful of followers, it adds up fast. So please. Spread the word.

OK – now for details.

This Kickstarter will back a couple of things – a book version of the first volume of The Last War in Albion, which will collect the seven existing chapters along with four more that will bring us to the edge of Watchmen. It’ll also fund the blog version of Book Two, which will cover Watchmen itself in an ambitiously elaborate format that explores the whole world around the comic, structured in careful and meticulous parallel to the comic itself. That’ll be the most madly ambitious thing I’ve ever written, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Finally, it’ll fund the oft mentioned Secret Doctor Who Project, which I’m serializing as I write it to Kickstarter backers. The first chapter is already available as a backer-exclusive update on the Kickstarter. I’m having a blast writing that, and I think it’s something pretty much everyone who reads this blog will enjoy. (And even if you don’t back the Kickstarter, don’t worry – the Doctor Who project will see the light of day in its own right. You’ll just get to see it sooner if you back.)

And that’s not counting the stretch goals – every $2500 over budget we go, I’ll commit to another volume of Last War in Albion being written and blogged. So if you like the project, this is an opportunity to make sure it has a good, long run.

But, of course, the real and important thing that the Kickstarter will do is let me keep doing what I do. As I often say, I love my job. I love writing what I do, I love interacting with all of you, I have a fantastic life, and I’m terribly lucky. But the bills maddeningly need paying, and that means that projects can’t just be fun – they have to earn some profit. A successful Kickstarter is what will allow me to keep blogging here, not just about British comics, but about other cool things and ideas I have. If you like this blog and want it to stick around with regularly updated free content, please consider heading over to the Kickstarter and tossing a few bucks at it. Last War in Albion is the marquee item on this Kickstarter, but the nature of a site like this is that all the different bits help support each other.…

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Myriad Universes: The Wristwatch Plantation

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The Wristwatch Plantation

My initial plan here was to follow up both iterations of Star Trek Phase II with a look at the Star Trek comic strip that ran in US newspapers from 1979 to 1983. There are a number of reasons why I wanted to do this, chief among them was that, given its time frame, it would have given me a very nice “third season” of Phase II, putting that show on about equal footing with the Original Series in terms of episode count (or at least episodes *worth* counting) and neatly providing a gap between the first Star Trek movie (which wasn’t actually a movie) and the next two (which were).

Also though, I was really intrigued to learn that, for the majority of its existence, the strip was handled by none other than Sharman DiVono, a television and animation veteran who, along with creator Mark Evanier, was the head writer and co-showrunner of Garfield and Friends, which happens to be one of my favourite television shows of all time. I was genuinely excited by the prospect of a Star Trek overseen by DiVono, and I fully expected to see and be delighted by how she’d apply her wry postmodern humour to the Star Trek universe. But, once I started to prep for this section by reading a few of the strip’s story arcs, I quickly discovered they weren’t actually anything to write home about. They all seemed like quite bog standard and uninspiring pulp action serials set in the Star Trek setting, nothing I had come to expect of DiVono’s work on Garfield was present and, most worrying of all, the first two arcs were beginning to give “Savage Syndrome” a run for its money in terms of offensive depictions of teleological evolution and “primitivism”. Maybe I can blame that on DiVono’s co-writers.

So, because I was nearing the end of my patience as it was (in hindsight, it was a bad sign that I couldn’t come up with anything terribly interesting to say about the actually quite solid and enjoyable “World Enough and Time” and “Enemy: Starfleet”, I decided to scrap that plan, and none of you *really* want to read about mediocre tie-in comics for another month any more than I want to write about them. But, there was one arc I knew I had to cover regardless of what I did with the rest of the strip, because between January and July, 1982, DiVono teamed up with Larry Niven to give us an epic, sprawling return to the Kzinti and the Known Universe with “The Wristwatch Plantation”. Perhaps predictably, judging by how “The Slaver Weapon” turned out, this is just as much of a pulp serial as the rest of the strip’s arcs were, but this is a good one.

But before I leap into the story, I want to take a little time to talk about the strip itself, as this is probably the only time we’re going to engage with it and there are several noteworthy things about it apart from DiVono herself and the rather changeable quality: First of all, I was very, very impressed with Ron Harris’ artwork: Star Trek looks extremely good for a newspaper comic strip, with detailed.…

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Thursday Breakfast Leftovers

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So, I was going to launch a Kickstarter today, but unfortunately I guessed wrong on how long it would take Kickstarter to approve my Kickstarter, resulting in there being no content for today. I could image up the next section of Last War in Albion and put it up a day early, but honestly, it’s 1am and I’m fighting off the last of a sinus infection and I just don’t have the energy, so I figure I’ll just have the content over the next few days be in random and surprising order.

How dreadful for you! Your counted on blog content, absent! Because of my grotty sinuses! Whatever shall you read instead? What other blogs and websites do you consume when trawling the Internet in your morning “I should probably be doing actual work” crawl? Tell me these things, and then on a day that is not today I’ll post actual content.

But for now there’s at least some good news – the omnibus of Last War in Albion Chapter Seven is ready, with a brand new and beautiful cover from James Taylor.

I’ve decided to cut the price of the omnibi to $1.99, which makes them ill-suited to Amazon (who cut your royalty rate in half if you go below $2.99), and so future single chapter omnibi will only be available via Smashwords. You can still get them for your Kindle and transfer them there – it’s just that it’s the difference between me making $1.40 a book and $.70 a book.

So, Chapter Seven is here.

That said, in celebration of the new cover I’ve compiled the whole shebang so far, including Chapter Seven, into a single ebook. That’s price at $3.99 and so is still available on Amazon (and Amazon UK), as well as being available on Smashwords.…

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Plain Ketchup

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I’ve been playing catch-up on SF/Fantasy films/TV that passed me by.  (Here be spoilers.)

Enders’ Game

Did you ever see a movie so bad you genuinely start to think you licked a toad at some point?  If not, look no further.  Not quite as offensive as the book, but only because it seems to have been drained of any ideas at all… in the same way that you drain butchered farm animals of their blood.  Which is a fate you start to long for after more than half an hour of looking at Asa Butterfield’s sullen, gormless face.  Harrison Ford makes it worth watching for his open, blatant boredom.  One empathises.

Pacific Rim

The level of disregard shown for plot logic – even their own heavily-established plot points – is so brazen as to be almost admirable.  Beautifully made.  But making this story beautifully is a bit like taking ages to weave a tapestry for your grandma out of the finest silks with a message on the front that gets her name wrong.  The little girl who plays young-Mako is a better actor than most of the main adult cast.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

(Yes, I know it’s ancient.  There were reasons for me seeing it now.  In fact, I think it goes to my credibility that I can honestly say I never watched it at the time.)  I see one of the guys who ended up doing Game of Thrones co-wrote this.  So he never needed George R. R. Martin’s influence to get him interested in heavy-duty misogynistic woman-fridging and needless rapeyness.

The Wolverine

(Okay, so I kind of like the Wolverine.)  I should’ve mentioned the weepy Asian woman stereotype under Pacific Rim.  So I’ll mention it here instead.  There’s a fight scene on top of a bullet train that is exactly the sort of thing that the character of Wolverine should be doing.  It’s the sort of thing that he, and only he, could do.  Trouble is, there has to be someone on top of the train with him… someone who, in this case, isn’t a guy with an adamantium skeleton, the reflexes of a wild animal, and claws that can help him defy gravity and inertia… so… umm…

The Machine

Seriously?  An ‘is the A.I. alive’ storyline?  A naked fembot?  Again?  In 2014?  By the way… the main character has a little girl who is sick, and he puts her brainwaves in his fembot, who speaks in little-girl-voice, and who walks around naked, and with whom he has obvious sexual tension.  So, creepy much?

Believe

Psychic/telekinetic little girl and her Dad on the run from sinister government types.  Just go and watch Firestarter instead.  The story is essentially the same, and even if you don’t like it, at least it’ll be over quicker.

Gravity

A bravura exercise in saying absolutely nothing.  Virtuoso silence.  Like space itself, spectacular nothingness.

By the way, Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity is in mourning for a dead little girl.  Hey, SF writers… could we just leave the little girls alone for a bit? …

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Outside the Government: A Study in Pink

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It’s July 25th, 2010. Yolanda Be Cool vs D Cup are at number one with “We No Speak Americano,” with a duet between Eminem featuring Rihanna, Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg, Professor Green featuring Lily Allen, and 3OH3 featuring Ke$ha also charting – in fact, only two songs in the top ten are not collaborative: Eliza Doolittle’s “Pack Up” and JLS’s “The Club is Alive.” In news, the World Cup wound down with England eliminated the day after The Big Bang following a pathetic showing against Germany, and Spain ultimately winning in a scrappy final against the Netherlands. Also, Wikileaks releases over 90,000 internal logs of the US Military to a variety of news sources. 
While on television Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s massive hit Sherlock debuts with A Study in Pink. Why do Sherlock episode by episode? For one thing, because its production is bound up in Doctor Who’s. The shows respond to each other and learn from each other, and are, as countless critics have noted, a bit similar in some key ways. Yes, they’re also different. Hence “Outside the Government” at all. But to be perfectly honest, you learn more about the Moffat era watching Sherlock than you ever did about the Davies era by watching Torchwood. So here we are. Sherlock from the ground floor: A Study in Pink.
The more one thinks about A Study in Pink the more it becomes evident that it is quite a strange thing. What does it mean, after all, to create an introduction to a show featuring one of the best-known and most iconic fictional characters in existence? One cannot meaningfully introduce Sherlock Holmes as a character, as any introduction one makes is going to be immediately subsumed by the impossibly large paratext of a century of Sherlock Holmes. In its own way, it’s the same problem Moffat faced with The Eleventh Hour – how do you launch a program that’s already massively familiar to viewers and where everything you introduce is going to be read in context with years of existing material. 
With The Eleventh Hour, Moffat solved the problem by simply putting the program’s best foot forward and playing to all of its strengths as much as possible – an unapologetic charm offensive that worked. In effect he did everything he wanted to do differently, but in an episode that highlighted only the most superficial of his changes while mostly stressing what had remained consistent. But this was a solution for a program that had been on the air just a few months earlier. The solution isn’t quite going to work here. Nevertheless, A Study in Pink is, like The Eleventh Hour, an exercise in saying “here’s how it is.” It is at times almost television as FAQ – a narratively sequenced list of answers to questions beginning “how are you going to handle…” 
That it works is in some ways remarkable. More than almost anything else Moffat has ever written, this is an episode that relies on nothing save for his gifts at humor and exposition.
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“I don’t bother/To live my life as if I’m another”: Kitumba

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The original “Kitumba” was the very best submission made to the unproduced Star Trek Phase II. The episode adapted from it for the fan series that shares its name isn’t quite its own pinnacle, but it’s definitely the best episode since “To Serve All My Days” and a fitting closure for era of Star Trek.

It’s also fitting that this episode be penned by John Meredyth Lucas, one of the great unsung heroes of the franchise. Hand-picked by Gene Coon as his successor following the latter’s dispute with Gene Roddenberry over the ending to “Bread and Circuses”, which led Coon to furiously turn his back on Star Trek never to return, Lucas oversaw the one true Golden Age of the Original Series, from “The Immunity Syndrome” to “The Ultimate Computer”. Though he was a frankly bloody amazing producer, as a writer Lucas always seemed a bit more changeable: His first story was “The Changeling” which, well, wasn’t brilliant, to be perfectly honest, but it did provide the impetus for “In Thy Image” and by association this whole show and, arguably, the whole rest of Star Trek, so that has to count for something. Lucas also wrote the script for “Patterns of Force”, which I loved despite nobody agreeing with me (but nobody ever agrees with me, so it doesn’t matter), but he had help from Paul Schneider there. He also collaborated with D.C. Fontana on “That Which Survives” which was also a miniature classic, no surprises there.

But in spite of all of this, Lucas also has “Elaan of Troyius” to his name, which was a racist and misogynistic trainwreck and cast a bit of a shadow over the rest of his tenure. It was never clear whether the failings of that episode could be safely laid at the feet of Arthur Singer and Fred Freiberger, who between them were responsible for much of what was memorable about the Original Series’ third season, or if they were really the fault of Lucas himself. “Kitumba” gives us our answer and thankfully it’s a resounding “no”, because this story is properly outstanding and marks the first time Star Trek Phase II hits actual brilliance. Today it wouldn’t seem like anything special, it’s a two-part epic about cloak-and-dagger political machinations in the Klingon Empire that threaten to plunge the galaxy into a bloody war and the Enterprise has to get involved to keep the peace. Hell, the Dominion War era did this story at least twelve times: Manufactured Civil War in the Klingon Empire was just another Tuesday.

But “Kitumba” would have been the first time Star Trek did this kind of story, at least for the Klingons. D.C. Fontana had of course tried to introduce political intrigue to the Original Series via the Romulan/Federation Cold War in “The Enterprise Incident”, but that didn’t go over so well because it was a third season episode. And actually, “Kitumba” is a very different sort of political story anyway: “The Enterprise Incident” was about diplomatic tensions and covert intelligence, or at least used that as a backdrop to examine the characters of Kirk and Spock.…

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Make Me a Warrior Now (A Good Man Goes to War)

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In this image, Clara is not cleverly disguised as a light, but
rather as a restoration field.

It’s June 4th, 2011. Pitbull and several other people are at number one with “Give Me Everything,” with Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, LMFAO, and Bruno Mars also charting. In news, the Arab Spring rolls on through its increasingly grim summer as civil war breaks out in Libya and grows progressively closer in Syria, with NATO forces helping out in Libya. Congressman Anthony Weiner finds himself embroiled in exactly the sort of scandal you should avoid with that surname. And World IPv6 day takes place. Rock on.

Meanwhile, on television, it’s Doctor Who’s first midseason finale. As we said, in his last season finale, Moffat took the structure of narrative collapse to its breaking point. Instead of averting the collapse, he let it happen in its entirety: the Doctor was locked in an inescapable prison, the TARDIS exploded, Amy was dead, and the universe ended. And then he built up a new story in its place. With A Good Man Goes to War, he fully realizes this approach, creating the definitive narrative technique of his tenure – what I will call narrative substitution. 
Where narrative collapse is based on threatening the basic functioning of a narrative structure so that further storytelling becomes impossible and then averting the collapse and reaffirming the structure, narrative substitution works by initially appearing to tell one type of story, and then rejecting that story, typically on ethical or ideological grounds, generally by revealing that the story was in fact an entirely different type of story all along. In hindsight The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang is an example of narrative substitution where the first narrative is rejected via an unaverted narrative collapse. But with A Good Man Goes to War we get a much more straightforward and pure example of narrative substitution – in many ways, in fact, the definitive one.
This is, in one sense, the big problem with it. In reality, A Good Man Goes to War is a savagely, furiously angry story. It indulges audience expectations for nearly its entire length before not only frustrating them, but damning them. Moffat will use the structure of narrative substitution again, but he will never again do it with quite this gusto. His future narrative substitutions are textual games that assume an audience who is on the lookout for the substitution and carefully watching the shells as they are cycled about the table. But this one is a trap – one that baldly tries to lure the audience into a specific misreading of the story just to turn around and punish them for doing so. It is angry and cynical in a way that not even Robert Holmes ever quite managed. Holmes could be masterfully petulant, yes, but when he wrote a story out of spite it was always a case of following the brief perfectly so as to expose the stupidity of it, audience be damned. But this is a story about satisfying supposed audience expectations, giving people exactly what they say they want, only to rip it away and condemn them for wanting it.
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“The Immaculate Misconception”: The Child

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There are a number of different ways to go about discussing “The Child”. None of them, it should be stressed, posit in any way that this was anything resembling a good idea: It wasn’t in 1978, and it flatly isn’t in 1988 or 2012 either. But in spite of it ultimately not working in the slightest, this is also something of a deceptive episode: It’s not as bad as as its reputation amongst at least the segment of science fiction fandom that I presume reads my blog would suggest (especially this version of it), though it remains so to such an extent the fact nobody at any point over the past thirty-odd years seemed to notice this is considerably worrying. More to the point though, it’s also bad in other areas.

It’s really not worth going into a lengthy bit of structural experimentalism with this episode as I have with previous Star Trek Phase II stories that have multiple versions: Unlike “In Thy Image” or “Devil’s Due” (or, I’m going to hazard a guess, the upcoming “Kitumba”), the 1978 and 2012 versions of “The Child” are essentially identical. There are a few differences: A couple random one-off redshirts are replaced by Peter and Sulu and keeping Star Trek: The Motion Picture canon necessitated swapping Ilia out with a new Deltan character named Icel, but this basically amounts to a name change. Kirk initially had a lot of scenes where he angrily lashed out at people, hurting Ilia and Irska, and these were thankfully cut or toned down considerably to match James Cawley’s interpretation. Also, Will Decker was dropped entirely, but what can you do? Other than that this is essentially a word-for-word, shot-for-shot loyal translation, which does make sense as it’s written and directed by the original author.

It’s the Star Trek: The Next Generation version that’s the most different, being more of a separate story loosely based on this one. It does tackle some similar themes to the original story, but they come across as significantly simplified and watered-down. I’ll briefly take a look at this a little later on, but the bottom line is the Next Generation version is without question the inferior one and this is the best of the three, in case any of you were really chomping at the bit to learn which version of “The Child” was the definitive one. One thing the 1988 version does get right, however, is the awkward tension between the mother and her co-worker ex: Jonathan Frakes plays his character very terse and uncomfortable, and while this doesn’t at all fit the Riker and Troi relationship thanks to Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s staunch idealism when it comes to interpersonal matters, it definitely fits the Decker and Ilia one, and the original script bewilderingly drops the ball on this: It barely has Decker interact with Ilia or Irska at all, and never once brings up their prior romance.

We must, I suppose, now talk about “The Child” itself. Well, if I have to…

This is an episode that’s actually rather important in the history of my association with Star Trek.…

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