Toy Story The Doctor’s Wife
I’ve often half-seriously wondered if Steven Moffat has just decided to make this entire series of Doctor Who as an elaborate means of winding Lawrence Miles up. The riffs on Alien Bodies in the opening two-parter were blatant enough, but this might as well have been labeled as an adaptation of Miles’ short story Toy Story. Except of course it’s written by Miles’ least-favourite writer in the world, Neil Gaiman.
Truth be told, I doubt Gaiman’s read Miles’ story, but both have such similar ideas as their basis (the TARDIS takes on the form of a human woman, and amongst other things reveals that she had as much choice in who her pilot was as he had in his ship, and it’s also made clear that the interior of the TARDIS is more software than hardware) that Moffat at least must have noticed. People on the Faction Paradox forums have been pointing out other, more tenuous, similarities too, but I suspect these are more down to Gaiman and Miles having common influences than anything else. (I strongly suspect one of the reasons Miles loathes Gaiman so much is that he sees him as a warped mirror reflection of himself).
The result is easily the best Doctor Who TV story since Dalek, and feels more like Doctor Who than anything on TV since the McCoy era, but is a strange collision of at least four separate styles.
First, we have the standard Gaimanisms – the TARDIS is written as, to all intents and purposes, Delirium of the Endless. Auntie and Uncle could easily have stepped out of Neverwhere. And the whole cosmic junkyard thing felt very, very Gaiman. Even the production design felt this way – it looked all steampunk-goth – though the whole series since Moffat took over has had that feel.
On top of that, we had the Big Idea stuff – the stuff that felt like Miles, the living planet that eats TARDIS energy and creates puppet people to play with out of the parts of dead Time Lords, the possessed woman with the mind of a TARDIS, the space-time twisting inside the TARDIS itself, and so on. This is a side of Gaiman we don’t often see, but which seems to owe a lot to Alan Moore in horror mode.
Then we have a few bits which seem to be Gaiman deliberately trying to write like Russel Davies – the tearful goodbye to the embodiment of the TARDIS felt exactly like the kind of tearful goodbye-forever speech Davies wrote about four times a series (usually before bringing the same character back two episodes later).
And there are a few bits which seem to be either Moffat’s direct input or Gaiman trying to sound like Moffat (the “be afraid of me, I killed *all* the Time Lords” bit seemed very like Moffat’s usual macho action-hero posturing). I suspect the Ood was also just dumped in in order to have a visible ‘monster’, as it had little part to play in the proceedings.
But all this hangs together, thanks to Gaiman being a good enough writer to make it work. He even manages to take a joke about running down corridors (and having the corridors looking all the same to save on expense) and turn it into something quite scary and effective. Though it would have been more scary had they not killed Rory and brought him back to life AGAIN – the South Park jokes are getting more appropriate all the time.
I have serious problems with the episode – mostly that the TARDIS in human form is just Gaiman-mad-woman-by-numbers rather than the truly strange and awesome (in the literal sense of the word) character she should be. People have been comparing this to things like Edge Of Destruction, and the comparison really does it no favours – in Edge Of Destruction, it’s all about the characters, whereas here there really *were* no characters – a majority of the characters are really just puppets played with by an omnipotent disembodied entity.
But this had a plot that made sense, a few good lines, a couple of scary bits, and the Doctor didn’t commit any genocides (though he did cause the death of at least two intelligent entities, one accidentally and the other in self-defence). By the low standards of 21st-century Doctor Who, that’s as good as it gets.
Whatever Happened To All Of The Heroes, All The Shakespearos?
There appear to be two schools of thought regarding Neil Gaiman among comics critics. One, popular ten years or so ago, is that he’s the greatest writer ever to have worked in the medium, and brings a new level of literacy and intelligence to the medium that no-one else can match up to. The other, which is increasingly popular at the moment, is that he’s a poseur – a one-trick-pony who’s mostly good at dressing in black and getting women who like Tori Amos records to swoon after him.
Ignoring the implicit sexism in the latter criticism (and a lot of the criticism of Gaiman boils down to ‘he makes comics that GIRLS like! Ewww…’) there’s a lot of truth in it – especially in his novels, Gaiman is an incredibly patchy writer, who does have a tendency to write the same storyline over and over (Coraline, Stardust, Mirrormask, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere are all so similar that I honestly think *I* could write a ‘Neil Gaiman novel’ now, and probably convince Gaiman himself he’d written it and forgotten about it), so I often tend towards the latter consensus. But then I read his *good* stuff (and some of those in the list above are actually good, but I’m thinking here especially of things like the short story collection Smoke And Mirrors) and I think that no, when he’s actually trying Gaiman is almost as good a writer as his reputation suggests. Not the very best, but up there in the top tier – around Dave Sim level, below Moore and Morrison but above Ennis and Ellis, probably around Peter Milligan level in the “British writers who became typecast as Vertigo writers” list.
The first part of Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? was very much Gaiman-by-numbers, which meant there was a certain minimal level of quality which is far ahead of most superhero comics (and certainly ahead of any Batbook not written by Grant Morrison in the last decade or more), but it was still the kind of thing that someone trying to write like Neil Gaiman would have come up with – a group of characters gather for a wake and tell stories about the departed, and none of those stories ever quite match up. The stories of Batman are more important than the man. And so on.
But what it did do, quite effectively, was match up with Morrison’s work on the title – Morrison and Gaiman actually being more alike as writers than their surface dissimilarities would suggest, both having based much of their work on the idea that ‘all stories are true’, for example, which turns up as an ordering principle in both Morrison’s run on the title and Gaiman’s two issues.
This issue, the story takes a different turn – we see a few of the many possible deaths of Batman, done in the styles of different periods of comics history, so we see an alternate ending to The Killing Joke with Batman dying of Joker venom, a Neal Adams-esque Ra’s Al Ghul, and so on. Kubert actually excels himself here, turning in pretty good Dick Sprang, Neal Adams and Brian Bolland swipes/pastiches. Unfortunately, the inking by Scott Williams treats all these pages like they were Jim Lee, and the colouring similarly doesn’t vary at all. This really, really, needed a more sympathetic inker, rather than someone who treats every page as an opportunity to show how good he is at cross-hatching.
What works surprisingly well is the big reveal, which is that all this is taking place as a conversation between Batman and his mother, in his mind, as he dies, and that for Batman, rather than an afterlife or reincarnation, he goes back and is born again as himself, to repeat the whole thing over again. It’s really the only way that the story set up in the first half could sensibly end, and the only way you could really create an ending to ‘the Batman story’.
It’s also refreshing to see Batman’s mother playing such a prominent part – for the last couple of decades, writers wanting to work out ‘daddy issues’ have concentrated on Thomas Wayne almost exclusively, barely mentioning her (if nothing else you’d think that the fact that Superman’s mother has the same first name as her would make for a Geoff Johns ten-issue cryfest). Actually, for a small boy, it would probably hurt more seeing his mother die than his father – though of course either would be horrific – and the obsession with Thomas Wayne probably has a lot to do with the sexism of the comic industry. It also makes sense narratively that it be Martha Wayne Batman talks to as he dies, since it is her he gets handed to as a baby at the end.
(Incidentally, this reminds me of a pet hypothesis of mine – nowhere in Sandman is Death ever actually named, and it’s said that you see her twice in your life, once at the beginning and once at the end. My idea is that she’s ‘really’ called Delivery/ance…)
My main problem with this is the characterisation of Batman, who comes across as trapped in his childhood, trapped in the moment his parents died. Which is a valid interpretation of the character, and one that a lot of people have used, but it doesn’t work for me – to my mind Batman has to be characterised as someone who got over his parents’ death – if nothing else because the sentence spoken by Martha Wayne in this story – “You can’t bring us back” – isn’t true in the context of the DCU, in which Batman operates. Pretty much everyone Batman knows – Superman (who appears in this story), Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Metamorpho, Jason Todd, Ra’s Al-Ghul – has died and come back to life multiple times. A Bruce Wayne who was driven to become Batman solely because he couldn’t get his parents back wouldn’t make sense in that context.
That doesn’t matter in a two-issue ‘semi-continuity’ story of course – and I can’t believe I’m complaining about ‘continuity’ at all – but this story is explicitly trying to be the story that comes at the end of every interpretation of Batman’s life, from Bob Kane to Frank Miller to Adam West to Christopher Nolan to Alan Grant to Denny O’Neil. But the decision to make Batman a viewpoint character in the story at all means that of necessity it has to be one interpretation of Batman – an actual character rather than the idea of Batman – even though the story is about the idea rather than the man (or rather, it’s about the man becoming the idea).
So, I think I have to consider this two-parter a failure overall – the parts that worked were the parts where Gaiman was on auto-pilot, and the parts that didn’t were the ones where he was trying. But Gaiman on auto-pilot is still in the top 10% or so of comic writers, and the bits that didn’t work at least didn’t work interestingly. There’s stuff to say about this comic, which is more than I can say about the vast majority of superhero comics at present, and it makes me look forward even more to the upcoming Wednesday Comics series to which Gaiman will be contributing.
I’m also looking forward to the changes in the Bat-books – Morrison & Quitely on one, J.H. Williams illustrating another, and a third with Ed Benes and Judd Winick on the same title (so they can both be quarantined away from any comics I might want to read). This summer might be a fun one for comics after all…
(BTW I will be posting something about the ‘Newniverse’ idea tomorrow evening, when my migraine’s cleared up – I’ll probably post a review of the Zombies gig from Friday tonight though, as that’s the kind of thing I can write with my brain only half-on, as is this post).
ETA I stupidly posted the link to this on twitter and used Neil Gaiman’s Twitter alias rather than his real name to save space in the description, and he only *READ IT*… his response:
@stealthmunchkin the review itself was written OK but 1st two paras read like sophomore snark, and the “ooh icky girls” stuff was just bad.
Well, I suppose that’s fair…
Best of the Year post
I always have difficulty when it comes to thinking about ‘best of the year’ lists, which most people seem to have no trouble at all with. With the exception of monthly comics, I don’t tend to keep track of what’s ‘now’ and what isn’t, and I often end up discovering things five or ten years after they came out (I bought my first Cerebus phonebook on the day issue 300 came out, though I didn’t realise that til later). So while I’m constantly acquiring new music, it’s for a rather flexible definition of ‘new’ that can include this year (the Passing Strange soundtrack album, That Lucky Old Sun) a couple of years ago (L.E.O.’s Alpacas Orgling, one of my favourite albums of ‘this year’), or decades ago (a compilation of banjo tracks by Uncle Dave Macon), and I don’t really pay attention to which is which. Same goes for books.
So I’m going to do top 5 lists only (because to do a top 10 would be scraping the barrel) for gigs and comics – everything else I can’t be sure what year it came out.
Best Comics Of The Year:
1 All Star Superman #10 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant.
This may well be the best single issue of a superhero comic ever produced, and it’s certainly the best Superman single issue since Alan Moore’s couple of issues in the mid-80s (and may be better even than them). It encapsulates all the themes not only of this series but of everything Grant Morrison has been working towards in his career, and the script is complemented perfectly by Quitely’s art.
2 Judenhaas by Dave Sim
Sim is my pick for ‘greatest comic creator of all time’. I can think of people who are his equals – but not his betters – at the individual talents he has (Alan Moore as a writer, J.H. Williams as an artist, Todd Klein as a letterer), but nobody who can combine do everything as well as he could – to my mind he even beats both Eisner and Kirby in terms of quality of work.Judenhaas is only a minor work by him, in comparison with, say, Jaka’s Story or Melmoth, but minor Sim beats major everybody else most of the time. I’m uncomfortable with this work, it seems to be ‘Oscar-bait’ – the message that the Holocaust is bad is not a particularly original or insightful one – but it’s executed so well… it also seems completely at odds with Sim’s own expressed views on women, which again brings up the fascinating (in a train-wreck kind of way) question of how *that* artist could also be *that* person.
3 The Amazing Fantastic Mr Leotard by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best
Eddie Campbell, like Sim, is another comic creator whose work I will always buy sight-unseen, because he’s never let me down (though I still don’t have a lot of his early material). The Fate Of The Artist and his collaborations with Alan Moore are among my very favourite comics of all time. This one is a lovely Munchausen-esque, vaguely Fortean story about the nephew of the inventor of the leotard.
4 Achewood – The Great Outdoor Fight by Chris Onstad
A slim volume, but a good representation of a great period in the most artistically interesting webcomic out there.
5 Sandman – Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell
Not for Gaiman’s story, which, while competent, has been published before and is also the kind of stuff he can knock off in his sleep. But Russell’s artwork is just gorgeous – I don’t usually buy comics for the art, being more orally/aurally oriented than visually, but this stuff is stunning.
Bubbling under – Comic Book Comics, Batman, Final Crisis, and Glamourpuss
Best gigs of the year
1 Mike Love’s “Beach Boys” – Manchester Apollo
The touring ‘Beach Boys’ have come in for a lot of stick from a lot of people, not least myself , over the years, for doing boring ‘touring jukebox’ sets, often with shoddy musicianship. However, over the last few years they’ve got much better. Their tour in 2004 was superb, but this was phenomenal. Having replaced Mike Kowalski (the worst drummer I’ve ever seen live) with John Cowsill (who had formerly been the band’s second keyboardist) , and added in for the UK tour only Dave Marks (the rhythm guitarist with the Beach Boys on their first three albums) they sounded better and fuller than ever, and did a fifty-two song set, including not only all the hits, but tracks like Forever, Kiss Me Baby, Sail On Sailor and ‘Til I Die. The highlight of the set was a three-song mini acoustic set about Transcendental Meditation, believe it or not. Simply superb.
2 Leonard Cohen – Manchester Opera House
I’ve seen Laughing Len twice this year (once last week at the MEN arena and this one in July). This gig was a very odd experience – a friend of the family had just died, my in-laws (whose tastes run more to Peter, Paul and Mary and contemporary country radio) were visiting and came with us (as did my parents, but they’re both Cohen fans) and the whole thing felt very dreamlike. When my Dad said “Here’s someone you know” and I turned around and Jeremy Paxman was stood behind me in the queue for the bar, I felt like the next thing to happen would be my primary school headmaster riding in on a unicycle or something.
Cohen, surprisingly, has an immense stage presence, owing more to the crooners than to the folkie image he still has to an extent, and his voice has aged very well – huskier and mellower. It was more like watching Tony Bennett than any rock-era musician I’ve seen, and it was quite shocking to think he hadn’t toured in 15 years before that show. If you get a chance, go and see him, but I wish he’d stayed in the smaller venues – the arena gig was just as good, musically, but the MEN is a horrible venue.
3 Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick – The Lowry
Not much to say about this one. Either you like traditional folk music, in which case you know how special a gig this was, or you don’t, in which case you won’t care.
4 Mercy & Grand: The Tom Waits Project – The Lowry
This was a production put on by Opera North, with Gavin Bryars (the composer of Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Wait’s favourite record, and frequent Brian Eno collaborator) leading a ‘circus band’ (guitar, harmonium, tuba, double bass, woodwinds, accordion, violin, soprano singer if I recall) in a performance of Waits classics along with a couple of pieces by Kurt Weill, some Fellini film music and a couple of old English folk songs. To an extent it was Bryars remaking Waits in his own image – the song selection and choice of other music was clearly chosen to present Waits as part of a particular line of songwriters, and one could have done a very different but equally ‘true’ re-contextualising of Waits’ music by using songs by, say, Ray Charles, Captain Beefheart and Bruce Springsteen. Bryars clearly thinks of Waits in ‘art music’ terms, and that misses a lot of what makes Waits great. But having said that, the musicianship was superlative, Bryars’ arrangements were gorgeous and inventive, and you can’t go wrong with Tom Waits and a bit of Weill, can you?
5 Brian Wilson – Royal Albert Hall
It seems odd to be placing Brian Wilson at number five when Mike Love is at number one, but Wilson’s performance was more expensive, at a worse venue, shorter and had a much less interesting setlist. Since 2002, the interesting material has been steadily removed from Wilson’s sets, replaced by more and more of the earlier surf ‘n’ girls ‘n’ sun music. This isn’t so bad when (as in 2004 and 2007) he’s been premiering full albums of new material in order in the second set – the lighter, frothier, fun stuff sets off more difficult music like Smile very well – but it makes for a show which, while still excellent, is not as good as Brian and his band are clearly capable of.
Brian’s band are still the best I’ve ever seen, and it’s still BRIAN WILSON, and he’s still performing songs like God Only Knows and Heroes And Villains, and if I hadn’t seen this band do some of the very best shows I’ve ever seen in my life I’d have thought this was excellent. But it was like Brian and Mike had swapped setlists.
(Note for Americans – Brian’s US shows this year have been to promote That Lucky Old Sun and have included full performances of that album. None of the criticisms above apply to any show where that is the case…)
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