Eruditorum Press

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This is Still Not a Review Blog

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But GallifreyBase finished off its Troughton stories and it’s a day off. Last War in Albion is back Thursday. For those just tuning in, TARDIS Eruditorum is not a review blog and what it says about a story is at times only obliquely related to its quality. It’s telling a story, and sometimes good stories have to have their flaws emphasized or bad ones have to be polished up a bit in order to make the story flow right. Which is to say that I’m often taking one of several critically defensible positions, and it may or may not be my favorite.

If I were to review Doctor Who stories, I’d say things like this:

Power of the Daleks: A story that is actually perfect. You could film this now and it would be gripping, which is probably why Rob Shearman did with Dalek. Everything – the writing, the characterization, the sheer unnervingness of the new Doctor – is absolutely on target and brilliant here. If you call this the greatest Doctor Who story ever then nobody is really in any place to argue with you. Track down a reconstruction – it’s good enough not to need images. But my God, how lovely would it be if we had this. 10/10.

The Highlanders: A strange little story that doesn’t work, but that pushes itself so far that this observation only barely matters. A demonstration that history and Troughton don’t quite mesh, or, at least, that history and the over the top Troughton they started with don’t quite mesh. And yet so much fun that it’s hard to complain. 5/10

The Underwater Menace: My God, fandom was in a u-turn once they had another part of this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story rise in reputation quite like this. And rightly so – what we had always assumed was a terribly naff runaround turns out to be the last gasp of Doctor Who as a portal to strangeness. The attention on Professor Zaroff has always distracted from how utterly weird the world of Atlantis is, and the end harkens back to the darkness of The Gunfighters or The Myth Makers, only more fittingly for this post-Power of the Daleks Doctor. Meanwhile, Troughton finds his legs when he learns to act Zaroff off the screen by underplaying the part instead of trying to ham it up opposite him, and in doing so finally cements the Doctor we all know. Not a masterpiece, but so much more than people thought. (Me, I always loved it for exactly what the second episode showed.) 7/10.

The Moonbase: It’s not that bases under siege are bad so much as that this is an attempt to redo The Tenth Planet, only in getting rid of that story’s obvious flaws it also gets rid of its manic genius and leaves something dreadfully banal. The Doctor’s speech about corners of the universe is great for clip shows, but paints a moral simplicity that’s contrary to everything that worked about the character in the past three stories.…

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Till We Meet Again, Sarah (School Reunion)

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Previously on TARDIS Eruditorum

No, no, darlings. I’m the tin dog.

It’s October 23rd, 1976. Pussycat are at number one with “Mississippi,” with Rod Stewart, Chicago, ABBA, and Rick Dees and his Cast of Idiots also charting, the latter with, well, the only song they ever chart with, “Disco Duck (Part One).” In the week prior copyright is extended by twenty years in the United States and Cearball Ó Dálaigh resigns as President of Ireland because the Minister of Defense insulted him. And, the day in question, Lis Sladen makes her final appearance on Doctor Who.

The show almost immediately collapses. Three weeks later, in the very next story, a particularly violent cliffhanger attracts the rage of moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, whose rantings are deemed sufficiently inconvenient as to necessitate a bureaucratic change. Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe is moved over to produce Target, whereas Target’s intended producer Graham Williams is put on Doctor Who with a mandate to tone down the violence. The Williams era has its moments, but is largely a brutal step down from the highs that Doctor Who reached with Lis Sladen around, and the show methodically circles the drain for a decade before finally falling through.

Thirty Years Later…

K-9 must live!

It’s April 29th, 2006. Gnarls Barkley remains crazy, while Rihanna, Fall Out Boy, and the Black Eyed Peas also chart. In the last week, Benedict XVI was reported to have agreed to a relaxation of rules on condoms (which are, for the record, a wildly more fascinating and unusual theological issue than anyone gives them credit for being), Tony Snow became White House Press Secretary, several years too early to be the victim of image macros involving government lies and the phrase “You know nothing, Tony Snow,” and Silvio Berlusconi announces that he’ll resign as Prime Minister of Italy, like he does every few years.

On television, Lis Sladen returns to Doctor Who in Toby Whithouse’s School Reunion. A big episode by any measure, deserving of a big post. No fancy formatting – let’s just take a wander. The good old-fashioned way, like we used to do.

One line of criticism regarding this episode is the idea that Sarah Jane is somehow cheapened by being put into a “romance” plot – that her character is lessened somehow by becoming “the ex,” as Mickey puts it. But let’s be careful here. Yes, Sarah’s relationship with the Doctor is clearly one that plays a role in her life that for other people are filled by romantic partners. But there’s no suggestion that it was romantic as such. In fact, there’s an explicit hedge against it – what devastates Sarah Jane is explicitly the fact that nothing earthly, romance included, can possibly compare to adventures in the TARDIS.

On the other hand, one can’t deny that the question of romance is present in the episode. But what’s interesting is that there is a clear distinction here between the frame and the content, so to speak. Yes, the relationship among the Doctor, Rose, and Sarah Jane is presented in the televisual terms of a love triangle, but nothing whatsoever in the past of Doctor Who supports the idea that just because you present something in the frame of a genre it is entirely a part of that genre.…

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“The best techniques are passed on by the survivors…”: Arena

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“IF WE FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS, WE DIE LIKE ANIMALS!”

Arguably the most memorable episode of the Original Series’ first season, there’s an awful lot going on with “Arena”, and all of it is deserving of our attention: This is the first episode actually written by Gene Coon, it boasts one of the most iconic extraterrestrial designs in the show’s history in the Gorn and three of the most iconic setpieces as well: Kirk’s brutal, drawn-out fistfight with the Gorn captain, his improvised tree-trunk cannon (which recently, as of this writing, saw an entire segment dedicated to it on MythBusters) and his climactic confrontation with the Metron where he refuses to kill his opponent after beating him. Also, for good measure, “Arena” also sees the debut of a little thing called the Federation. So, kind of a big story then.

Let’s get that last one out of the way first, as it’s by far the most interesting from the perspective of the future. Like the debut of Starfleet and Starfleet Command in “Court Martial”, this is primarily a nomenclature change at this point. Furthermore, the Federation is even less important to “Arena” then Starfleet was to “Court Martial”: In that episode at least the organisational structure of Starfleet Command was important to the main plot, here, the Federation is introduced with a single throwaway comment from Kirk and then never mentioned again. Nevertheless, the word choice here is interesting, to say the least. A “Federation” is by definition an alliance of self-governing political states with partial autonomy brought together by shared mutual interest. What it’s not is a colonial empire; at least not by default: An empire grows through colonization and militaristic conquest. Calling a centralized power a “federation” would at least *imply* a more co-operative arrangement.

In the past the world of Star Trek has been pretty clearly a galactic empire based on Earth: The overwhelming majority of places we’ve visited have been Earth colonies, and we’ve seen no other significant political power in the galaxy aside from the Romulan Star Empire, and they’re tucked safely away behind the Neutral Zone. That’s all changed as of “Arena”, however: The central twist of the episode is that the Gorn, who are introduced as an aggressive, warlike Other who cannot be reasoned with, turn out to be a highly sophisticated civilization in their own right who feel threatened by Federation expansion into their area of space. The Metrons’ lesson to both crews seems to be about stressing the importance of communication and diplomacy, it would seem that this might be what distinguishes the Federation from the former Earth Empire.

This is of course not to say a federation is incapable of being imperialistic. The oldest and most influential federation on *our* Earth is the United States, which is known nowadays primarily for its policies of economic and political imperialism built around manipulating diplomacy and trade sanctions and the fetishistic focus on neoliberal privatization resulting in a capitalistic tyranny that rewards only those who are already in an extremely privileged position while absolutely crushing and dehumanizing everyone else, not to mention being a general fascistic police state towards its citizenry.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 22, 2013)

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I’ve taken the Wonder Woman book back in house, and will be self publishing it. More news on that as it develops – I have to figure some things out there because I have too many books in too short a period and don’t want to flood the market.

Speaking of Flood, Bloomsbury Academic has an interview with me and my co-author Alex Reed on that book, which is out in November. Which is also the rough estimate for nearly everything else – Hartnell version two (no earlier, since I’ve got An Adventure in Time and Space and The Beginning to do for it, though those really can be dropped in a week before release – it’s what I did with Wheel of Ice), Baker Volume one (revised all the existing essays, still need to write new ones), and, as I said, Wonder Woman.

Last War in Albion will run on the next four Thursdays, then take a hiatus. I’m terribly proud of it, but also rather nervous – especially early on when the shape of the project isn’t clear yet.

I’ve got a pile of stuff I owe other people, most of it terribly interesting stuff that you’ll get to enjoy some day.

Tell me what the future will be like.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 64 (No Angels)

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Call it a hunch – the sense that maybe having an essay like this written will eventually make sense in the same way covering Dark Season and Press Gang did.

Even without that hunch, though, its relevance would be easy to argue for. Though it might require some consideration of a general theory of how television shows relate that extends beyond the limited notion of “other shows by” and spin-offs that provide the limited but canonical list of shows “related” to Doctor Who. In practice the process is trickier. Life on Mars, for instance, predated Doctor Who in its conception, but aired in its wake, out of BBC Wales, and with at least one documentable inspiration from Doctor Who. It’s not a spin-off so much as it’s an allied program.

But what do we make of No Angels? Like Life on Mars, two of its writers got poached for Doctor Who-related work in this period. Unlike Life on Mars, it’s not even remotely a genre program, wasn’t for the BBC, and predated Doctor Who (The last episode of its third and final season aired four days before New Earth). It would be going too far to suggest that it’s an influence on Doctor Who – it’s clearly a show from a younger generation of writers than Davies belonged to, and Davies’s style for Doctor Who can be entirely accounted for within his other work without need for looking at No Angels.

Instead what we have is an instance of Doctor Who reaching three channels down the digital programming guide (ah for the days of more romantic television metaphors) and plucking up a modestly successful comedy-drama about nurses and saying, “this is the sort of show we’re like.” It’s not a case akin to Bad Wolf in which Doctor Who literally absorbed Big Brother into its narrative. Rather it’s a strange note of respect. There’s the sense, in hiring both Whithouse and MacRae (both of whom turned out to be phenomenal choices, even if MacRae took a bit longer to ripen fully) that Doctor Who is giving a stamp of approval to another show, or, at least, that Russell T Davies is.

Nevertheless, there’s something more than a bit odd about it, perhaps that a comedy-drama about nurses does not seem like an obvious choice for something that Doctor Who should be loudly endorsing. I actually don’t want to make this next bit into a debate about the critic in question, so I’m going to go ahead and offer a quote without naming the critic. Google it if you must – it won’t surprise anyone, but it’s really not relevant. In any case, one famous-in-fandom critic proclaimed, “a quick look at the credentials of Toby Whitehouse [sic] will tell you that this is a man with a background in demographically-engineered, easy-sell television. This is the man who created Channel 4’s nurses-are-gagging-for-it series No Angels, the only redeeming feature of which was the opportunity to see Lynda Moss having oral sex performed on her while wearing a nurse’s outfit.…

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“It is said that the first sport, the original main event that thrilled the masses, considered the greatest spectacle of all, was the fight.”: The Squire of Gothos

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I got your gun…

We’ve finally found the weird at long last.

The opening salvo of “The Squire of Gothos” is simply put the most mental thing yet. We’ve got a planet that instantaneously materializes out of nowhere, Kirk and Sulu jump-cutting off the bridge and foppish Victorian gentle-alien holding the Enterprise hostage due to his fascination with warmaking. Each one of these concepts individually would be enough to throw viewers for a complete loop; dumping all of them on us at once requires us to take a few steps back, a deep breath, and take them one at a time.

The first thing to note is that we’re back in “Miri” territory. Actually, a case could be made this is the structure of “Miri” done right: The Enterprise is on space patrol as always, en route to deliver some more supplies. Just like in the earlier episode, however, they are swiftly interrupted by the thoroughly inexplicable. This time though, the show takes its time unfolding the mystery: The phantom planetoid, disappearing crewmembers and bizarre antiquarian message of “Tallyho!” showing up on Spock’s monitor is enough, but the show gradually builds on this, first with the reveal of Trelane’s oasis-within-an-oasis and then well into the third and fourth acts as each answer does nothing but open up a new question. Unlike the earlier episode, which promptly resolved all of its mystery in the first act, this one clearly takes the time to relish it, taking gleeful pride in constantly getting its audience to wonder what the heck is going on.

“The Squire of Gothos” is of course nowhere near as mind-bogglingly weird as something like the roughly contemporaneous Verity Lambert era of Doctor Who, best exemplified by the Georges Méliès-inspired spacescapes, giant ants and man-butterflies of the serial “The Web Planet”: This is something that’s absolutely not in Star Trek’s wheelhouse at this point, if it can in fact be argued it ever will be. But this is still a very stark break from what we’ve come to expect from Star Trek, especially under Gene Coon and in particular after the past three episodes. The precedent is, naturally, “Shore Leave”, and the effect of that episode’s traumatically altered state of consciousness is very clear here, as is it’s ultimate reluctance and hesitation. From the very beginning Trelane operates completely and utterly above and beyond the crew’s level of comprehension, and the very first thing they set about doing (and continue to do for the remainder of the story) is to try and explain him a way using rationality language they understand. It is simply inconceivable for Kirk and his crew to accept the possibility there may exist things which do not fit neatly into their currently established knowledge systems.

And Trelane is definitely unlike anything we’ve seen before: He’s the first genuinely “alien” character in all of Star Trek, for one. Spock, and by extension the Vulcans, were originally at heart just Number One’s human personality turned into the defining trait of a culture (they of course quickly become much more than this, thanks almost exclusively to the combined efforts of Leonard Nimoy, Theodore Sturgeon and D.C.…

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To Leap From One Universe To Another, Unafraid! That’s Sorcerer’s Work! (The Last War in Albion Part 1: Near Myths, Gideon Stargrave)

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“To leap from one universe to another, unafraid! That’s sorcerer’s work!” – Grant Morrison, Zatanna #1, 2005
Figure 5: A particular story from the slush pile, from
Watchmen #12, 1987
[previously] The remaining nature of the war will be revealed in the telling. All that remains is the task of selecting a beginning point and commencing the narrative proper. By virtue of one of the major figures being extremely invested in it, that beginning point will be the publication of Grant Morrison’s first paid comics work, a five-page story entitled “Time is a Four Letter Word.” This is a decision with consequences. The nature of the war, as previously stated, is that its effects span much of history. “Time is a Four Letter Word” is akin to an outcrop of rock. In truth it stands upon tens of miles of buried rock – a geologic strata spanning in every direction. The visible layer is a mere fraction of the whole, apparent only due to chance events: the scouring of a glacier, the cleaving of a river valley, the picking of a particular story from the slush pile. These fleeting circumstances determine how the underlying tectonics of history and ideology are transmuted into surface terrain and material culture, defining the very world itself. 
This is not the beginning so much as the first visible stone. Still, there is a level of arbitrariness to it. Both Morrison and Moore had previous publications that were not paid jobs. Either could go first. However, starting with Morrison has two advantages. First, it is something Morrison is passionate about. In his extended commentary on Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s “Alan Moore and Superfolks Part 3: The Strange Case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore,” Grant Morrison insists, “In October 1978, Alan Moore had sold one illustration – a drawing of Elvis Costello to NME – and had not yet achieved any recognition in the comics business. In 1979, he was doing unpaid humour cartoons for the underground paper The Back Street Bugle. I didn’t read his name in a byline until 1982, by which time I’d been a professional writer for almost five years. Using the miracle of computer technology, you can verify any of these dates right now, if you choose to.” This all being true, it would be unduly partisan to start the story anywhere else.
Second, however, any alternate ordering would remove Grant Morrison from the story for too long. While Morrison is correct to note that his first professional comic sale predated Moore’s, the truth is that Morrison’s early comics work consists of four short stories in an Edinburgh-based anthology that only lasted five issues before folding, a four year run of a newspaper strip in local Scottish papers, and five issues in DC Thomson’s Starblazer. Other than that, Morrison has no professional comics credits prior to 1985, and it’s not until 1986 that he began producing comics work at anything resembling a high volume, by which time Moore was writing Watchmen.
…

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I’ll Bite Your Nose (Tooth and Claw)

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Awooooo! (Werewolves of Glasgow)

It’s April 22nd, 2006. Gnarls Barkley continues to hold the number one slot with “Crazy.” Rihanna also charts, along with holdovers from the previous week: the Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat Dolls, and Mary J Blige. Streets’ The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living tops the album charts, which also feature Massive Attack, Pink, and Morrissey, the latter with Ringleader of the Tormentors, which is at least an album I’m terribly sentimental about, since I saw him tour for it. In news, the first military parade through Dublin since 1970 commemorates the 1916 Easter Rising. Floods break out in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia along the Danube, and Queen Elizabeth II turns 80.

Speaking of old queens, we have Queen Victoria as our requisite “famous person from history in the first three episodes.” But perhaps more interestingly, we have Russell T Davies’s sixth consecutive episode of Doctor Who. In many ways it mirrors the first story of that run of six (which is, I am fairly certain, the longest single-writer block of consecutive minutes of Doctor Who ever), in that it is a script born of production crisis. Davies’s original brief for the story was famously “werewolves, kung fu monks, and Queen Victoria.” This setup was given to another writer (whose name hasn’t, to my knowledge, leaked) for development. The story came back without monks or a werewolf, and instead featured an alien living in Queen Victoria’s eye. The writer was apparently frustrated with the process and decided Doctor Who was not really for him, and thus Davies stepped in to write a script to his original brief.

But let’s pause to consider what his original brief was. After all, it’s a bewildering set of images with no inherent links. The werewolves and Queen Victoria are at least vaguely adjacent, but the kung fu monks really come out of nowhere, conceptually speaking. It resembles nothing so much as the kitchen sink approach that, in the 1980s, led to such inspiring ideas as “a Concorde, the Master, Tegan’s departure, and a cameo from dead Adric,” “the Master, Kamelion, a new companion, Turlough’s backstory, and Lanzarote,” and, of course, the memorable “the Second Doctor, Sontarans, and New Orleans, sorry, wait, we mean Seville.”

But underneath this is the fact that if there was one thing John Nathan-Turner really was fantastic at it was remembering that it was helpful to have Doctor Who generate excitement every week of its run. This is notably different from most shows, which are only capable of becoming event television for their premieres and finales, or, perhaps, if they do some major mid-season plot twist. Big Brother has a tough time generating anything like the impact of launch night or the finale, hence its needing to rely on an endless succession of format-breaking tricks in the middle to maintain the tone of reverential obsession the series trades on. But Doctor Who, when it’s functioning well, just generates an event unto itself every week.

There’s a general trend here that Doctor Who is a part of.…

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“There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!”: Shore Leave

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“How Beautiful You Are That You Do Not Join Us.”

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters…”

The three sisters lived together, all by themselves, on a small island. To this day no-one is quite sure where that island lay: Some have claimed it was somewhere among the modern-day Marquesas, while other swear it was much further out, an outlier island far off to the west. Then there are those mythologizer-poets who swear by the stars themselves that this island was impossible to place on a map, for any cartographer foolish enough to attempt to chart its location on parchment would find it to be forever out of reach, just beyond the edges of the paper. Most who claim to have reached it never return, and those who have are unable to find it again, even if they retrace their path down to the exact last nautical mile. And yet this island did exist, as alive and real as any of us. It presumably still does today.

“What did they live on?”

Mostly coconuts and the splendid gifts of the sea, but they were very well provided for on the island. I am told it is a place where scarcity and want does not exist, for the island and its inhabitants live together in balance and harmony. But that is not this story.

On the beach, the sisters sat in a circle facing each other, each with legs crossed in the lotus position.

“I vote one of us tells a story,” Tertia suddenly exclaimed “Would either of you happen to know one?”

“Here’s one,” Hedda responded with a smile “Once upon a time there were three little sisters…” she began, but was quickly interrupted before she could continue.

“Very funny,” Tertia drolly responded with her hands on her hips, “We’ve all heard that one, you know…”

Then, Alice spoke up: “Have I ever told you the story of the spacemen, my dear sisters?” she inquired.

“I believe I know it, if that’s what you mean,” Hedda answered, “I have seen it thus invoked.”

“Oh please do tell it anyway!” Tertia implored, “As the dawn rises over the eastern waters each night, the future shall be known to us again and again and again.”

“It was in the days before you, dearest star-sisters,” Alice began, “My counsel is sought on one of the multiplex planar realms of invocation. These are the lands where Is and What Is exist together in their death-dance. These are truths we know.”

“Yes, I have seen many such places,” Tertia remarked, “The world-stage and World-In-Itself in cohabitation”.

Alice nodded, then said “And this world-stage was Thought, which is the child of thought yet not an heir to its throne. As I passed through this realm, I met the first of the spacemen, who had come seeking my guidance. They adorned themselves in the visage of a summer’s day, but did not yet know its meaning.”

“They do not see the Day, for some are not attuned to seeing it.”…

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This is Not a Dream (The Last War in Albion: Introduction)

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“This is not a dream.” – Alan Moore, “Shadowplay,” in Brought to Light, 1988.

Figure 1: The Great Bearded Wizard of Northampton

The Last War in Albion is a history of British comics. More specifically, it is a history of the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, a war that is on the one hand entirely of its own invention and on the other a war fought in the realm of the fictional, rendering its actual existence almost but not entirely irrelevant. The war in question is not the scant material residue of their verbal feud in various interviews over the years. This exists and will be picked over, but it is not the meat of the discussion.

Rather it is a more fundamental issue: how is it that two comics writers of nearly the same generation, with such a clear overlap in interests, who grew up a mere three-hundred-and-forty miles apart – no greater than the distance from New York to DC – a mere seven years in age difference (no larger than the age difference between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) are not friends and have not a hint of warmth in their relationship? This is almost as improbable as Morrissey and Robert Smith hating each other’s guts.
And yet it is the case. Underneath this fact is a story: one of how the British comics industry unexpectedly produced a small generation of some of the most important writers of the 1980s and 90s, and in turn had a huge cultural legacy in both the US and UK. So much so that the number three grossing movie of all time, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is massively and documentably indebted to what was, prior to the arrival of people like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and a constellation of significant (and at times better) but less influential writers, the minor backwater of the lowest order of the British comics industry.
Figure 2: The Thrice-Named Warrior Monk of Glasgow

Within that story there are two figures that appear almost identical to an even casual observer. One, Alan Moore, is a heavily bearded self-proclaimed magician who made his name with DC Comics in 1984 writing Swamp Thing, an envrionmental-themed superhero-horror comic. The other, Grant Morrison, is a bald self-proclaimed magician who made his name with DC Comics in 1988 writing Animal Man, an environmental-themed superhero-horror comic. These two men are not friends. There are sensible reasons for this. Despite their intense similarities, there are fundamental aesthetic differences between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore that place them at diametric opposites of a host of issues with profound social, political, historical, and magical implications. 

This latter adjective is worth remarking upon, as it is central to their differences. Both men believe in a system by which the manipulation of symbols creates material change in the real world. Both explicitly use their creative work in multiple media as an attempt to cause such change. Their comics are magic spells hurled into the culture wars, trying in their own way to reshape reality.
…

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