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A Detective, A Man We Could Trust (The Last War in Albion Part 11: Roscoe Moscow)

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This is the first of seven installments of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. 
Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation have been posted online, for free, with the permission of Alan Moore by 4 Color Heroes. Maxwell the Magic Cat was reprinted in four volumes by Acme Press in the 1980s. It is out of print, but used copies are available. 
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Seventeen-year-old Grant Morrison made his professional comics debut in the Edinburgh-based Near Myths #2 with a new wave-inspired run of strips including two introducing his Gideon Stargrave character. This venture, along with his realist superhero newspaper strip Captain Clyde faltered, and aside from occasional work on DC Thompson’s sci-fi digest Starblazer, Morrison found himself unable to advance particularly in a comics career. But at the same time, 340 miles away, in Northampton, events were unfolding that would change Morrison’s life, and indeed the entire British comics industry forever… 
“A detective, a man we could trust, even with our children.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods


Figure 83: The first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who
Killed Rock n’ Roll (Alan Moore, 1979, as Curt Vile)

Grant Morrison is not a writer of near-misses and the merely competent. The depth of Morrison’s skill may not be obvious in his earliest material, but his ambition is. The conditions necessary for his ambitions to be realized were simply not yet present in the British comics industry of 1979, nor even of 1981. But everything began to change on March 31st, 1979 when Spotlight Publication’s national music weekly, Sounds published the first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock n’ Roll. Less than five months later, on the 25th of August, 1979 the local Northampton paper the Northants Post began a weekly comic strip entitled Maxwell the Magic Cat. Sounds was paying £35 a week, while the Nohants Post paid £10, making a combined weekly of £45 a week – £2.50 greater than the unemployment benefits Alan Moore had previously been drawing, and officially marking the beginning of his career as a full-time comics writer. 

Figure 84: The cartoonist cryptically
reveals his identity (Alan Moore,
1979, as Curt Vile)
The revolution that this event heralded was, at first, wholly invisible. Roscoe Moscow was published under the name of Curt Vile, an obvious parody of German composer Kurt Weill, best known for his work with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera, while Maxwell the Magic Cat featured the more obscurely punnish pen name Jill de Ray.
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Just One Of My Oldest Enemies (Utopia)

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Seriously? That’s how they drew me in Scream of the Shalka?

It’s June 16th, 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z remain at number one with “Umbrella,” with Calvin Harris, Enrique Iglesias, Timbaland, and Hellogoodbye also charting. In news, the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the government cannot actually detain people indefinitely as enemy combatants. Chinua Achebe wins the Man Brooker prize. Zimbabwe announces that it will take and redivide the land of all remaining white farmers in the country, and Bernie Ahem is reelected as Taoiseach of Ireland.

While on television The Sopranos ends. Oh, and Doctor Who airs Utopia, arguably the first part of its three-part season finale. Or it’s a standalone story before a two-part finale. There are debates to be had. For our purpose, obviously, we’re doing a separate entry on Utopia. But then, we did separate entries on An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC. The threshold for one entry or two is what makes the most sense from an essay-writing perspective. Utopia has a bunch of themes that are present but tangental in The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, and vice versa. So while talking about Utopia on its own requires referring forward more than sometimes, it still makes more essay sense, and really, I care a lot more about that than I do about the “what counts as a story” game. Though we may bring the “what counts as a story” game up later. Just for fun.

Utopia is possibly the bleakest number Davies ever wrote. It is, of course, not about Utopia – a concept we learn does not even exist. Rather it is about that most enduring feature of utopia: the snake in the garden. Or so it seems at first blush. But this is not merely about an individual snake. Yes, in amidst the apparently heartwarming story of indomitable is the Master, who seems at first blush to be the most sympathetic of characters. The Master is, in this rendition, treated as the image of the Bad Seed – the inherently evil figure for whom redemption is simply impossible. And so kind-hearted Professor Yana has, within him, a void. An evil heart that will someday inevitably be released, to the ruin of everyone around him. This is the vision of utopia – its absolute and horrific collapse in the face of the irreducible phenomenon of evil.

What makes this staggeringly pessimistic is its position at the end of the universe. It’s one thing to make bleak statements about how people screw everything up. That borders on the banal. It’s quite another to position this as the ultimate fate of humanity. Utopia sets up a choice between the joyously eternal nature of humanity and the idea of an inevitable moral rot, and ultimately embraces the latter. All of humanity’s dreams and hopes come crashing down, and there is only dark and cold and the cackling madness of the serpent. This final sting in the trap, confirmed in Last of the Time Lords, is horrific in a way Davies has never really managed before, nor will he ever again.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Bjo Trimble and “Save Star Trek!”

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Yes, Star Trek did in fact come back for a third season. Barely.

Critically however, this wasn’t a renewal in the traditional sense either. What happened in March of 1968 was something the likes of which had really never been seen before in US television, and about which there is a considerable amount of myth and contradictory lore, most of which seems to have been deliberate. Central to these events is a woman name Betty JoAnne Trimble, better known as Bjo. So, in the first entry of the “Ship’s Log, Supplemental” series, which looks at miscellaneous aspects of the Star Trek pop culture phenomenon, in particular the history and historiography of its fandom, I’m going to try and piece together as best I can the extent of her influence and connection to the franchise and the series of events leading up to Star Trek‘s unexpected renewal…And inevitable, if postponed, cancellation.

Although Star Trek never commanded acceptable, let alone impressive, ratings in its original run, what fans it did have were notoriously passionate and vocal. Throughout the duration of the first season, NBC got close to 29,000 letters from fans gushing about the show, which was the most amount of mail they got for any of their shows save The Monkees. Although a comprehensive cross-section of Star Trek fandom in the 1960s is difficult to establish, it is clear a great many of these early fans were women. Numerous producers, executives and other creative figures associated with the franchise for decades have pointed this out, despite their tendency to make spectacularly unfounded inferences from this fact, mostly in regards to how all those women were apparently just lusting after Spock (Ron Moore is particularly egregious in this regard, having made a somewhat thoughtless comment in the context of one of his early Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts but we’ll get to that). Although there were most certainly more then a few women who fixated on Spock and who turned him into a sex symbol for one reason or another, the sexism implicit in assuming the *only* reason women watched Star Trek was because of this should be self-evident. In truth there is a long tradition of a feminist Star Trek fandom which goes all-but-ignored thanks to the unbelievably patriarchal nature of science fiction culture, and which will start to become more of a theme once we reach the 1970s. This outpouring of fan mail is the first manifestation of it.

It’s not terribly difficult to see why women would feel inspired and empowered by Star Trek in 1968. Gene Roddenberry may have had a tendency to act like a misogynistic bastard, but in the two years since the series has been on the air people who aren’t him have used the show to make considerable strides for more egalitarian representation: We’ve had characters like Ann Mulhall and Charlene Masters being depicted as colleagues in equal standing with their male shipmates, not to mention Uhura, who’s become a strong and capable character in her own right over the course of the last season.…

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Bat Anti-Review Blog

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Credit to Anton B for the title. Only the ones I’ve read in recent memory here, which is to say, ones I covered on the blog. And thus a self-selecting set that avoided the canonically crap ones.

Timewyrm: Genesys: Everybody involved should be ashamed for putting out a book in which the Doctor, in all seriousness, tells Ace not to be so upset over being sexually assaulted. (I am in no way exaggerating this scene for dramatic effect, to be clear. This actually happened.) If this were a bizarre and dissonant note in an otherwise well-written book, it would still be enough to virtually disqualify the book from praise. But on top of that, the book sucks too. 1/10

Timewyrm: Exodus: Those who say this is the greatest New Adventure are simply wrong, and very probably lack souls. However, it is a stunning novel in which Dicks applies his ruthlessly and gloriously functional prose style to a truly disturbing story that captures the horror of the Nazis. Not of what the Nazis did, but of the Nazis themselves. It’s a strange artifact from the point before Paul Cornell showed the Virgin books what they wanted to be. But it’s a marvelous one. 10/10

Timewyrm: Apocalypse: I will never understand the sheer loathing for this book, which runs through perfectly traditional Doctor Who, only with one or two genuinely novel and laudatory conceptual leaps towards adulthood. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s nothing particularly grating either. 5/10

Timewyrm: Revelation: There are a handful of stories that changed Doctor Who – stories that single-handedly draw a line where you can say “everything before this was one way, and everything after was another.” And more to the point, that did so just by being so brilliant that nobody did things the old way again. Power of the Daleks, The Ark in Space, Remembrance of the Daleks… and this. The story that created emotional, character-based Doctor Who. So many great moments and lines and images in this, both Ace and the Doctor are portrayed better than they ever have been. If you’ve never read this, you don’t understand the history of Doctor Who. Astonishing. 10/10

Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible: It’s understandable why everyone fell into the trap of thinking people would care about dark secrets in Gallifrey’s ancient past on their own merits. Equally, however, it was a trap. Several iterations of Gallifrey past, where these secrets are just revelations about a particular version of Gallifrey that was popular in the early 90s, it’s tough to care, and the book lacks enough oomph elsewhere to justify the fuss. On the other hand, you can still see how and why people convinced themselves that this was a good idea, and you can just about get swept up in the mystery and strangeness. If you really, really try. 4/10

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead: There is a line of thought that Cartmel didn’t want to be writing Doctor Who, and so just wrote generic cyberpunk novels featuring cameos by the Doctor.…

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The Image Of An Angel (Blink)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a bit of crown
moulding. 

It’s June 9th, 2007. Rihanna (and Jay-Z) are at number one with “Umbrella,” while Beyonce and Shakira, Maroon 5, Timbaland, Akon, and Twang also chart. In news, Scooter Libby is sentenced to thirty months in prison, although the sentence will be commuted by President Bush, and immigration reform fails in the US Senate due to failing to pass a cloture vote.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Blink. As we’ve already discussed, Blink is not the reason that Steven Moffat is now showrunner of Doctor Who. Just writing good episodes is insufficient, or else Paul Cornell, who in 2007 had almost as many and as brilliant Doctor Who episodes under his belt as Moffat did, would have been a sincere contender. And he wasn’t, not because he’s not one of the most brilliant and influential Doctor Who writers ever (Moffat’s been open about how much his take on Doctor Who owes to Cornell), but because he’s not a television showrunner and entrusting him a brand as big of Doctor Who would be absurdly risky. Moffat was the heir apparent because he was the only safe choice.

This is distinct from why he was the popular choice, though, which did mostly have to do with the fact that he wrote very, very good episodes of Doctor Who. And Blink was very good – good enough that the period in which Human Nature/Family of Blood was the obvious Hugo contender for Doctor Who lasted about a week. Its general reputation is as the holy grail of Doctor Who episodes. And fair play, as everything about it is, in fact, absolutely brilliant. It belongs on lists of the best Doctor Who episodes ever, its reputation is wholly deserved, and it’s one of those rare pieces that are so good that the hype of their reputation doesn’t actually diminish their impact. Jekyll may be why Moffat got the job, but Blink is the story that defined expectations of the job. And so it is worth looking at in that context – as the fantasy of what the Moffat era could achieve if (as was always impossible) he could hit these heights with rock-solid reliability.

First, of course, are the Weeping Angels. With two more stories featuring them, I’ll minimize my comments here, since later stories embrace the alchemical/mystical themes involving them more readily. For now let’s look at them as what they are within the context of Blink, which is a terribly clever monster. All monsters, of course, are systems of rules. This is why the Daleks, with their absolute and single-minded fixity, are the ur-monsters of Doctor Who – because they represent a single and absolute rule. But it’s true of any monster – they’re defined by the narrative role that they can never move past. The Silurians are defined by presenting a reasonable moral case for their own villainy. The Cybermen by their unrelenting nature. When the new series has revamped monsters, it’s often as much about revamping their rules as anything; the Sontarans are now eternally conquering warriors, the Ice Warriors are caught in the subtle distinction between honor and morality.…

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“Creators of history”: Assignment: Earth

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“Assignment: Earth” aired on March 29, 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4. Synchromysticism is the study of “happenings” and reoccurring patterns and synchronicity in human behaviour and world events, and the end of April is regarded in synchromystic circles as a “red zone” with a high concentration of violent activity. Sixty-nine days after King’s death, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated. June 5, the date of Kennedy’s death, also has synchromystic connections, being the date of the Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbouring countries. June is a major month on the whole with Midsummer (around the 24th) being a particularly important date. The flying saucer era began on June 24, 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing unidentified flying objects flying in formation at supersonic speed over Mount Rainier in Washington. The date has also marked several occasions when mysterious objects fell from the sky.

Looking back on the pilot of any long-running television series can be a strange experience. The reoccurring motifs we’re accustomed to aren’t there, or are at least present in forms different to the ones we’re accustomed to. A pilot is by definition a first draft, and the one for Assignment: Earth is no different in this regard. What’s especially strange about this pilot though (simply and uninspiringly titled “Assignment: Earth”, though I suppose it gets the point across), at least for someone used to what the show eventually becomes, is that it opens up not with Supervisor 194 Gary Seven in his swanky apartment, but with an oddly-shaped spaceship in orbit around Earth. The ship’s captain, played by Canadian Royal Shakespearean actor William Shatner, exposits that he and his crew come from the far future and have travelled back in time to 1968 for historical research. Gary then transports aboard the ship, looks around in confusion and we cut to the intro credits…of an entirely different show.

Knowing a little background about how United States TV worked in the late-1960s would probably be beneficial. Back then it was customary for new pilots to be not-so-subtly disguised as regular episodes in currently-airing shows, so that the new show could piggyback off of the existing one, hopefully inheriting its audience. This still happens on occasion today, but not with the same kind of regularity as it used to. In this case, Assignment: Earth actually began life as a spin-off of an earlier, lesser-known series of Gene Roddenberry’s called Star Trek, which followed the adventures of Captain Kirk (Shatner’s character) and the crew of the USS Enterprise, which patrolled and explored the galaxy in the far future as part of an interstellar conglomerate called the United Federation of Planets. Star Trek was indebted to the Pulp and Golden Age science fiction genres of the 1950s and early 1960s, in much the same way as Assignment: Earth was to the “spy-fi” fad of the late-1960s and 1970s, at least at first.

Part of the reason Star Trek isn’t as well remembered as its successor is today is that it never scored particularly good ratings, partially due to the fact that it largely wasn’t any good, and it ultimately burnt itself out after two seasons.…

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Saturday Waffling (September 21st, 2013)

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Chapter 3 of Last War in Albion is 9824 words long. This is not a bad length – the first two chapters are  11,577 and 12,54. So it’s in range.
Which would be comforting if I weren’t aware of how much there was to finish. Thankfully the first 2000 words are solid, so I can slice a post off the top and make Thursday’s deadline, but having the ebook together… ooh, that’s dicier. 
Once I stagger past the finish line on that, it’s time for some focus on Wonder Woman for a bit.
Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of stuff about academia whizzing about the blogonet this week. Some of you have surely seen this story, but I figured I’d repost it for those who haven’t. Death of an Adjunct
tl;dr – a part-time professor at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, died in crushing poverty after twenty-five years of service to the University. Which is citing a religious objection to unionizing its adjuncts (curious, given the historical links between the Catholic church and the American labor movement). The university asserts that it gave the late Margaret Mary Vojtko a dorm room to stay in when she could not afford to heat her house, and that priests visited with her frequently as she battled cancer (which bankrupted her). Because nothing says supporting someone who’s worked for you for a quarter-century like a dorm room and a pat on the shoulder as they’re dying.
No active question for discussion this Waffling. Just a shuddering anger at the ruins of a once proud profession.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 69 (Jekyll)

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Over the course of 2007, the future of Doctor Who became clear. It was to nobody’s particular surprise that Tennant and Davies walked away from the program they did; it was about the length of time people spend in jobs like that. But what was going to happen to Doctor Who after Davies left was always a question mark, and cancellation was always a viable answer. Until 2007, at which point everybody on the planet knew what was going to happen. The next showrunner became self-evident. Of course it was going to be Steven Moffat. There was no real decision making process. It’s just that everybody realized the same obvious fact around the same time. There were two basic causes for this. The first, of course, is Blink, which we’ll deal with on Monday. But Blink merely demonstrated what we already knew: that Moffat could write really good Doctor Who scripts. Sure, it demonstrated it more emphatically than it had ever been demonstrated before, but it was nothing new. No, the real game changer was Jekyll.

In many ways what is most striking about Jekyll is what it isn’t. If it were made today, it would almost certainly be produced out of Cardiff with numerous names familiar to Doctor Who. Instead we have a production done in relative isolation from Doctor Who, in England, whose major interaction with Doctor Who was that it forced Moffat to drop out of writing the opening two-parter in favor of taking the Doctor-lite slot later in the season, where he apparently handed in his script dreadfully late and they basically shot the second draft. Sure, Douglas Mackinnon, who directed the first three, went on to direct for Doctor Who, and assorted actors (Meera Syal, Michelle Ryan, and Fenella Woolgar) worked their way over, but other than Moffat and a brief acting cameo from Mark Gatiss, this is very much something going on in its own corner of the world.

Which is not to say that its existence doesn’t owe much to Doctor Who. It clearly does, at least inasmuch as Steven Moffat only got handed this project on the strength of having done a successful episode of Doctor Who – something he’s admitted opened doors for him. But what we have here is in most regards Moffat trying to establish himself as a credible producer of genre material on his own, separate from Doctor Who. This process is obscured by the fact that Moffat was announced as the next showrunner of Doctor Who within a year of this, and by the fact that BBC Cymru Wales came to devour all the oxygen in terms of drama production in the UK. Nevertheless, that’s clearly what Jekyll is meant to be – the show with which Moffat establishes himself as a viable showrunner for genre material.

In that regard it succeeded. Jekyll, in point of fact, is quite good. But in many ways what’s most interesting about it in hindsight are its hesitancies and shortcomings. It’s a very good piece of television.…

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“When the wayfarer whistles in the dark…”: The Omega Glory

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“I’ll see you…in two and two.”

It’s bad.

What more do you want me to say? It’s terrible. Everyone knows it’s terrible. You don’t need me to tell you that. The plot is literally nothing more then capture and escape sequence after capture and escape sequence liberally peppered with intolerably drawn out and boring fight scenes in between. It is so chest-thumpingly, simperingly jingoistic it practically loops back around to parody (at least William Shatner is playing it that way). It is racist on some kind of transcendental level, depicting the Yangs as noble savages while portraying the supposedly technologically-advanced Cohms as identical, mute, smiling Chinese stereotypes and it even has Kirk literally call them yellow. It is the picture-perfect case study of the ugly racism, sexism and unreconstructed United States neo-imperialism that always lurks just below the surface of Star Trek, threatening to eclipse everything that makes the franchise actually worthwhile. It was also one of the leading contenders, along with “Mudd’s Women”, to be the second pilot. Bob Justman was so appalled by the script Gene Roddenberry turned in, he drafted a multi-page memo savaging it; railing into it from every possible angle before throwing it away at the last second and delivering a few comments in person because he thought he was being too brutal. A shame he didn’t save it: I’dve loved to reprint it. Not that this phased Roddenberry in the slightest: He was was so proud of his work on this one he personally submitted it to be considered for an Emmy Award.

I’m not going to go into a lengthy critique of “The Omega Glory” to point out what’s wrong with it. It’s far easier (and more accurate) to just say “everything” and that it commits an unforgivable sin simply by existing. No-I’m much more interested in the question of “why now?” and looking at how Star Trek, which had been on such a terrific streak since “The Immunity Syndrome”, suddenly turned out a story so irredeemably awful even Trekkers can’t defend it, and this is a group of fans so loyal and dedicated they’ll make apologies for “The Enemy Within” and “Who Mourns for Adonais?”. Tell someone unfamiliar with Star Trek that this episode and “Patterns of Force” are from the same season, let alone the same series, and they’ll laugh in your face. That this was produced directly after “The Ultimate Computer” is unthinkable. But there are, sadly, easily discernible reasons that explain “The Omega Glory”, and it’s also depressingly telling that this episode, along with “Spock’s Brain”, are the ones that stick out to fans as the bad ones amongst five years of television that are about half excellent and half intolerant, bigoted garbage if we’re being charitable. There’s also the matter of Gene Roddenberry: For all intents and purposes this is his final significant contribution to the Original Series. He’s behind “Assignment: Earth” next week of course, but there’s a lot going on there that’s not to do with him.…

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The Real Problem With Stories (The Last War in Albion Part 10: Starblazer, Aristotle)

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This is the final installment of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of Chapters One and Two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. Barring a deadline catastrophe, Chapter Three will begin next week.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s action-packed work for Starblazer evoked both the legacy of pulp magazines and the steady rise in popularity of the “fantastic” genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including superheroes. This, in turn, raised the question of genre fusion, and what genre means in the first place…
“She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman #6
So in the late 1970s, as this tide began in film with things like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, major filmmakers in the genre like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott were inspired by the pulp fiction of their childhoods – 1950s America for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and late 40s/early 50s Britain for Ridley Scott. All of this took place in the context of other historical shifts, of course, but it was the trend that Moore and Morrison were swept up in, and, eventually, came to find themselves appearing to steer. Film and serialized print, after all, had always been bedfellows. Film adapted popular serialized print stories and genres – the films that were popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were still action-adventure stories derived from the pulps, but they were war stories and westerns that lacked sci-fi/fantasy elements.
Figure 77: The more or less realist Luck of the Legion shared space in
Eagle with the sci-fi adventures of Dan Dare.
But the lines between these pulp genres often blur, much as the line between superheroes and the pulps blurs. Starblazer was the sci-fi/fantasy sister title to the straight war digest Commando, also published by DC Thomson. The American comics industry of the 40s-60s had superheroes, but also had westerns, crime comics, horror, and other genres. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote sci-fi when he did the Barsoom stories, but more straight adventure when he did Tarzan. Grant Morrison can feature a noirish private eye in what is essentially a Flash Gordon story. Eagle ran Dan Dare alongside stories of the French Foreign Legion. Adventure stories taken from the pulps have always been a subset of film, and sci-fi/fantasy has always been a subset of adventure stories. It is both crucial and obvious to point out that the pulps and film are, however, very different media. Further, it is important to point out that they have very different narrative forms. 
Figure 78: Ancient Greece has numerous subtle treatments
in comics, the bulk of which are impeccably researched.
This is best explained in terms of ancient Greece.
Virtually all thought about narrative structure is a reaction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and, to a lesser extent, his Rhetoric.
…

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