Gutter Talk's 2nd Annual, Rather Quite Late, Year In Review Post

[Before we proceed any further, it is my bloggerly (like that word? I just made it up just now) duty to inform you that the sections of this post concerning Doctor Who contain spoilers pertaining to the recent fiftieth anniversary special.  If you've not yet seen it, proceed at your own peril.]
You might be wondering why my 2013 Year In Review post is so late, coming as it does nearly 1/26 of the way through the New Year.  The first and most important answer to that is quite simply that I am lazy and I tend to procrastinate.  

My lack of ambition notwithstanding, nonetheless I have always preferred, on my various blogs over the years, to put off doing my Year In Reviews until the year is actually over.  You never know when some earth shattering, game changing bit of news is going to occur on New Year's Eve, leaving all the other  bloggers who wrapped up their post mortem on the year the week before Christmas slapping their foreheads and making Homer Simpson noises.  To be sure, that didn't happen in  2013, but one of these years it will and I shall be hailed far and wide as prescient and a visionary.

Enough preamble, on, at last, to the business at hand:

On a personal note, I did somewhat better at keeping up the blog in the year past, with 88 posts compared to a mere 58 in the twelve months previous.  However, as is my typical pattern, I sort of slacked off in the latter half of the year.

Since September, my contributions to this blog have mostly been limited to my weekly reviews of Star Trek: The Animated Series.  These have turned out to be some of my most popular and well received posts, so you can rest assured that I shall, as promised, be resuming the series with the second season of six episodes come September.  Its perhaps worth noting that, other than my observance of it here, the fortieth anniversary of the debut of the animated version of Trek went largely unheralded by fandom.  On the other hand, I am fairly certain that such shall by no means be the case in two years when the original series reaches its fiftieth anniversary year.  

One anniversary that did not slip by unnoticed by fandom was the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who's debut on November 23, 1963.  I feel that the anniversary episode, "The Day of the Doctor," was one of the best Who episodes since Series 5, which I consider the best of Stephen Moffatt's term as show runner.  The only real flaw in the episode is that I feel that Moffatt dropped the Zygon invasion plot about five minutes too soon, just short of an actual satisfying resolution.  Of course, the Zygons were not the point of the episode.  The real point was to lay to rest once and for all the specter of the Time War and to absolve the Doctor of his guilt for the supposed destruction of Gallifrey.  Retroactively making it so that Gallifrey was never really destroyed may seem to some a bit of a cop-out, but Moffat pulled it off in an emotionally satisfying manner and without contradicting anything that the series has established in the eight years since its return to the airwaves in 2005.  

The year in Doctor Who not only saw the end of Matt Smith's reign as the Doctor, but gave not just one, but three regenerations, and all within the space of little more than a month.  The on-line short "The Night of the Doctor" brought back eighth Doctor Paul McGann to show his transformation into John Hurt's "War Doctor"; the anniversary special ended with Hurt turning into the ninth Doctor; and, of course, there was the the Christmas special, featuring Peter Capaldi's first appearance as the Doctor, or his second if count his brief cameo, in extremely extreme close up, in "The Day of the Doctor."

Turning, finally, to the ostensible niche of this blog, the world of comics, it would appear that my powers of prognostication are perhaps not as prodigioous as I pretend. That bit of somewhat strained alliteration refers to the fact that in my previous Year In Review post, I forecast that when I sat down to write the post that you are reading right now I would be reporting the demise, sometime during the previous year, of DC's creator owned, mature readers imprint Vertigo after two decades of existence.  Unheeding of how it my affect my self-esteem, it turns out that the venerable imprint is  still chugging along.  However, it was announced a few weeks ago that the line will soon be losing its latest flagship title.  Bill Willingham's popular and long running Fables is due to cease publication with its 150th issue, due to appear on comic store shelves in just over a year. 

Meanwhile, a prediction that I ventured to make back in 2012 has, indeed, proven accurate.  Dark Horse's license to produce comics based on the Star Wars franchise is set to  expire in the upcoming year, and it has recently been announced that Lucasfilm's new owners, the Walt Disney Corporation, which also, not coincidentally, happens to own its own comics publisher, will be, as I foretold at the time of Disney's aquisition of the Star Wars property,  shifting the Star Wars license back to its original home at Marvel Comics.  Of course, you don't have to be Nostrodamus to realize that it makes more sense for Disney to produce Star Wars comics in-house if they, as they, in fact, do, have the means.

The past year saw the deaths of a trio of notable artists of the Silver Age of comics.  

Carmine Infantino's passing I noted when it occurred this April past.

Veteran Superman artist Al Plastino, who expired in November, had recently been in the news due to a legal conflict over some original artwork from a 1963 Superman story that he had wished, at the time, to be donated to the John F. Kennedy Library, but which, obviously, never ended up there.

To my mind, Plastino will always be the artist who was called in to "fix" Jack Kirby's Superman and Jimmy Olson faces during the King's run on Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen in order to bring them more in line with the look of the other Superman titles.  I also was somewhat surprised to learn when I read Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis' biography of the Charlie Brown's creator, that, back in 1978, Plastino had been in line to take over Peanuts if contract renewal negotiations between Schulz and his syndicate went sour.  It is my understanding that Plastino actually worked up about six weeks worth of Peanuts strips, just in case.  I've never seen them, but I've heard that they were fairly awful.

In November, the comics world also bade farewell to Nicholas Viscardy, better known to fans of his artwork on Aquaman, Teen Titans and The Brave and the Bold, among other titles, not to mention countless DC covers during the 1970's, as Nick Cardy.

Finally, speaking, as I was earlier, of anniversaries, I cannot believe that, being the huge fan of the Doom Patrol that I am, I failed to realize, and thus to mark the occasion on this blog, that 2013 had been the fiftieth anniversary of the team's debut in My Greatest Adventure #80, cover dated June 1963--which, of course, means it may have been on newsstands as early as March. In belated recognition of this milestone, I refer you now to this post from the very earliest days of this blog detailing the publication history of the Doom Patrol series around the time of the debut of the title's most recent incarnation, as well as all of the other posts I have composed about the team over the life of this blog.

"...Not the One You Were Expecting."

No one expects the Eight Doctor.  His chief weapons are...

As a self-styled writer, I care about words; about what they mean and how they are used.  One thing that has always bothered me is the misuse of the word "prequel" when the writer clearly meant to say "prologue" or "prelude."  This particular folly shows up quite a bit in comic book solicitations, with Valiant Comics back in the 1990's being a particularly egregious perpetrator.

I've got a whole rant on the subject that I could regale you with.  However, my "Grammar Cop" badge is a little rusty and my soapbox has a whole in the bottom.  Besides, this really is neither the time nor place for such a screed. 

My real purpose for composing this post is to present and briefly discuss "The Night of the Doctor," the seven minute mini-episode of Doctor Who that popped up on the Wild, Wild Web a couple of days back.

"The Night of the Doctor" is being touted as a "prequel" to Saturday's fiftieth anniversary special "The Day of the Doctor."  In this case, however, the usage is entirely correct.  Taking place, as it does, amidst the backdrop of the legendary Last Great Time War, and featuring actor Paul McGann in only his second on-screen appearance as the eight incarnation of the Doctor ( a development that has had hard core Whovians wetting their pants with fanboyish excitement for a couple of days now), the short is in a very real sense a prequel; not to the fiftieth anniversary episode so much, but to the entirety of the current incarnation of the Doctor Who franchise. 

It can also be seen as a sequel to the Tom Baker era serial "The Brain of Morbius," as it features a return appearance of the Sisterhood of Karn, about whom I know nothing other than that they first appeared in that earlier story and what is presented here, which really isn't much.  Such foreknowledge, however, really isn't really important to grasping the events of this mini-episode.

"The Night of the Doctor" is also, not incidentally, really good.  I would go so far as to say that this, along with the earlier mini-episode "Time Crash," featuring the meeting of the Tenth and Fifth doctors and the main reason that Peter Davison's version of the character makes my list of Top 5 favorite Doctors, are the finest things that Stephen Moffatt has written for Doctor Who.  Maybe he should stick to writing stories no more than eight minutes in length.

Anyway, we have now come to the bottom of this post, wherein I have embedded the video of "The Night of the Doctor" for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!

TV News

First off, I'd like to thank Bronze Age Babies for posting about this.  If they hadn't, I'd have never known about it, at least not in time to write about it in advance. 

Tomorrow night at 8 p.m., the three part documentary Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle airs, as they say, on most PBS stations.   The film traces the history of the superhero genre from 1938 until the present.
You know, being a cynical sort, when I first learned of this show, my first thought was, "Oh, is it pledge drive time again?"  NPR just wrapped up their fall membership drive, and its obviously PBS' turn.   Superheroes seems like the kind of show you only see during pledge drives, and one obviously aimed at attracting new viewers, and thus new members.  All cynicism aside, let's hope the effort is a success, as I just couldn't live without Washington Week.
Actually, the subject matter of Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle isn't all that far afield for PBS.  Public broadcasting has always been geek friendly.  It was, after all, local public television stations who first aired Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus here in the States back in the 1970's.
Speaking of Dr. Who, I suppose you've heard by now about the nine missing episodes recently discovered at a TV relay station in Nigeria.   All are from the reign of Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor, which makes sense as that's where most of the missing episodes occur.  I've just recently discovered Doctor Who, but Troughton has quickly become one of my favorite Doctors (I think I'd rank him third, behind David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston, with Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison rounding out a top five list) and its a pity that only seven (six, until this discovery) of his twenty-one serials exist complete with no missing episodes, and many are missing in their entirety.
Of the two serials recovered or partially recovered ("The Enemy of the World" is now complete, while "The Web of Fear" is missing but one episode) the one that I most want to see is "The Enemy of the World."  This one sounds utterly awesome!  It features Patrick Troughton in a dual role, portraying not only, obviously, the Doctor, but the villain, Salamander (and isn't that a great name for a villain?) as well.
Check out this trailer to see for yourself what I'm talking about:

The Stolen Crisis (or Crisis On Infinite Whos)

As I mentioned yesterday, I spent a good chunk of the past weekend listening to the commentaries on the DVDs of Doctor Who Series Four.  Listening to then Executive Producer Russel T. Davies talking over the two part series finale "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End", I was struck by the parallels between that apocalyptic storyline and DC Comics' seminal company wide crossover Crisis On Infinite Earths.  

Davies talks repeatedly about how the story unifies the so-called "Doctor Who Universe," consisting of characters from the core seres, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, in much the way that Crisis brought together all the characters in DC's comic book universe in one big story.  The parallels go beyond that, however.  There are references in the Who finale to the destruction of multiple alternate universes, similar to the destruction of the Multiverse in Crisis.  Davros' master plan in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" to destroy all of reality, leaving only himself and the Daleks, bears a great deal of resemblance to main Crisis villain The Anti-Monitor's plan to destroy every parallel universe except his own.   The Anti-Monitor even "steals" the Earth in the final issue of Crisis, dragging it into Qward, the anti-matter universe, in much the same way that Davros and the Daleks spirit the planet away to the Medusa Cascade.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

After all, by his own admission, Russell T. Davies, who wrote the episodes in question, is not unfamiliar with American super-hero comics.  In the commentary for "The Stolen Earth," he reveals that Captain Jack's last name was inspired by Agatha Harkness, the aged sorceress who was nanny to Franklin Richards in The Fantastic Four and mentor to the Scarlet Witch.  She is, he claims, one of his favorite characters.

If Davies is enough of a geek to even know who Agatha Harkness is, much less to claim her as a favorite character, then it is perfectly reasonable to assume that he is at least aware of the existence of Crisis On Infinite Earths.  From there, its not a huge leap of logic to surmise that he may have actually read the series and been so impressed by it that he wanted to write his own version of it. 

The Rings of Akhaten

In this post, I'm going to stick to giving my opinions of last Saturday's episode of Doctor Who.  For a summary of the episode, click here.
Saturday before last at the blog Bronze Age Babies, authors Doug and Karen, as they occasionally do, left the days topic up to their readers.  The first commenter, who happened to be me, decided that he wanted to talk about Doctor Who, as the seventh series was resuming that evening.  One of the later commenters criticized the current incarnation of the series as being "awash in sentiment."  While I wouldn't say this applies to the first four seasons under Russell T. Davies, I would agree that for the Matt Smith era with Steven Moffat in the center seat (yes, I know--wrong SF franchise) it certainly holds true. 

Our friend at BAB seems to think that this is a universally bad thing.  For me, it depends on whether its appropriate within each individual episode.  the sentimental ending of " The Angels Take Manhattan", for instance, would have been totally fine if the rest of the episode had made on damn bit of sense.  In the case of the latest installment, "The Rings of Akhaten", on the other, the sentiment totally works. Its not overpowering or overwhelming and is totally appropriate in the context of the story.
Just now, I condemned "The Angels Take Manhattan" for not making sense, and I'll admit that the leaf of infinite possibilities device upon which the conclusion of this episode's crisis rests does not, in the real world, make much sense, either.  However, it makes sense within the context of the story and the universe of Doctor Who in a way that much of "Angels", especially the Statue of Liberty as giant Weeping Angel bit, did not.  There Steven Moffat sacrificed story sense for the sake of a cool visual.  "Rings of Akhaten" has plenty of cool visuals, especially the view of the Akhaten system and the Doctor and Clara riding a space-tobaggon to the rescue, but these effects serve to enhance the story rather than leave the viewer scratching his head trying to make sense of it all.
As I mentioned last week, I was sort of expecting this episode to be the new Neil Gaiman written story featuring the Cybermen.  According to my sources, that episode is scheduled for sometime in mid-May.  This week we were treated to the writing of a different Neil.  This is Neil Cross' first work for Doctor Who, and the first thing I've ever seen from him.  He turns out to be a fine writer in his own right.  This is, in my opinion, the best episode so far of the seventh series and probably the best Doctor Who story since Gaiman's "The Doctor's Wife" early in series six.  Apparently, Cross has another episode coming up later in the series and I look forward to seeing it.
This Saturday--Ice Warriors.  On a submarine.  A Russian Submarine.  In 1983.  Sounds like it could be cool.

Movellan On Up

The 7th series of Doctor Who resumed last night.  In the upcoming seven episodes, in addition to the much anticipated Neil Gaiman penned Cybermen episode, scheduled, I believe, for next Saturday, we have been promised the return of the Doctor's old foes the Ice Warriors, last seen sometime during the Jon Pertwee era.   Those malevolent Martians, I am given to understand, being somewhat new to Doctor Who fandom, are the only major recurring enemy from the original series yet to make a reappearance in the new version.  So, with all the major alien races revived, perhaps its time to resurrect some of the minor ones who only appeared for one serial.

As you may have surmised, I have a specific suggestion for just such an opponent I would like to see return.  

A four part story from 1979, "Destiny of the Daleks" kicked off the show's seventeenth season and introduced Lalla Ward as the Doctor's "new" companion, the freshly regenerated Time Lady Romana.  This serial also marks the last Dalek story, indeed the final Doctor Who work overall, by Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks.  I've read that Nation was upset with script editor Douglas Adams' near total rewriting of the script.  Although I've also seen where Adams claimed the "script" he received from Nation was little more than a plot outline and he basically had to write the story from scratch. If you're familiar at all with Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, you will certainly be able to see his fingerprints all over this one.  His distinctive sense of humor is much in evidence, especially in the early scene where Romana tries out several new looks.  Also, in one scene the Doctor is shown reading a book by Oolon Coluphid, mentioned throughout the Hitchhiker's series as the author of such books as Where God Went Wrong, More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.

The story finds the Doctor returning once again to the Daleks' home planet of Skaro to become caught in the middle of a conflict between his oldest enemies and a robotic race known as the Movellans.  We are told that the two races have been at war for centuries and now find themselves at an impasse.  The Daleks have returned to their old stomping grounds to dig up their creator Davros in hopes that he will help them end the stand off.  The Movellans seek to prevent this, and at the same time seek to recruit the Doctor to aid them in their efforts against the Daleks.

After this serial ended, the Movellans were never seen again, though they were mentioned in the Doctor's next encounter with the Daleks, "Resurrection of the Daleks", which aired in 1984 and was the fifth Doctor's one and only meeting with the Daleks.  In that episode, its revealed that the Movellans had won the war by creating a virus that affected the mutants who lived inside the Daleks' robotic shells.  Once again, the Daleks seek out the aid of Davros, this time to devise a cure for the virus.

In "Destiny of the Daleks", the Movellans are really little more than a plot device.  We learn next to nothing about them other than the bare bones facts that they are a race of shiny robots who don't much like the Daleks.  This leaves a lot of questions hanging in the air.  Since the Movellans are robots, someone had to build them, right?  Who these builders were, what happened to them and why they created a race of robots, not to mention why the Movellans were at war with the Daleks in the first place, are all questions that go not only unanswered, but totally unaddressed. 

Those mysteries are why I would like to the Movellans return to the Doctor Who universe. Of course, I have my own ideas.  They involve Davros, who in the episodes I have seen with him in them always seemed to have his own agenda separate from the plans of the Daleks, creating the Movellans himself and sending them backwards in time to destroy the Daleks.  

If you've got any theories of your own about the origins of the Movellans, or if there's any obscure aliens or monsters from the original Doctor Who you'd like to see brought back for a curtain call, let me know in a comment.

Book Review: Doctor Who and the Keeper of Traken

In his introduction to the unofficial fan-published novelization of the Doctor Who serial "Revelation of the Daleks", author Jon Preddle states, "There are only two ways to write a Doctor Who novelisation - the proper way and the Terrance Dicks way."   I really don't know what he means by that.  After reading Dicks' official adaptation of the Fourth Doctor adventure "The Keeper of Traken," I can't tell you what exactly Preddle sees as wrong about Dicks' approach.
The story begins as the Doctor and his young companion Adric are returning to "N-Space"; the "N", I shall assume, standing for "normal"; from a parallel dimension called "E-Space"; with no indication given here just what the "E" is for; where one of the Doctor's companion's, Romana, along with the robotic dog K-9, had chosen to remain.  Immediately upon their return, the pair are diverted from their planned journey to the Doctor's homeworld of Gallifrey to the Union of Traken, a planet with a reputation as one of the most peaceful and serene in the universe, by the Keeper, the centuries old ruler of Traken. He warns the Doctor that a great evil has come to Traken in the form of an alien presence the Trakens have named the Melkur, but which is in reality an old enemy of the Doctor's, who seeks to influence the passage of power as the  ancient Keeper prepares to step down and pass on the mantle of Keeper to one of the members of the planet's ruling council.  This old enemy, who is near death, seeks to use the power of the "Source", which is, as the name implies, the source of the Keeper's power and longevity, to renew, or (big SPOILER), "regenerate", himself.
"The Keeper of Traken" was the penultimate serial in Tom Baker's seven year tenure as the Fourth Doctor.  From a continuity standpoint, it is important for the introduction of Nyssa, the daughter of one of the Traken council members, who would begin traversing time and space alongside the Doctor and Adric in the very next story,  and Tom Baker's last, "Logopolis", thus being, I suppose, more associated with the Fifth Doctor, as well re-introducing the aforementioned old foe (OK--I'll just come out and say it, spoilers be damned.  It's the Master), who would figure prominently in the next couple of story arcs.
At 124 pages; and I've read that the publisher of the Doctor Who novelizations was at the time imposing a limit of 128 pages on the length of the books; Doctor Who and the Keeper of Traken appears, although I admit that I've never seen the original serial, to be a straightforward, no-frills accounting of the events of the TV episodes.  Little time is spent introducing the reader to the main characters, although with this being, as the title page tells us, the 37th in a series of novelizations of a TV show that had by time of the book's publication in 1982 been running for nearly two decades, it can reasonably be assumed that the target audience for the novel was no doubt quite intimately familiar with the Doctor and needed no such exposition.
Keeper of Traken is a quick--you could probably devour it in a single afternoon if you weren't distracted---yet entertaining read.  I still don't know what Mr. Preddle, as quoted above, sees as deficient about Terrance Dicks style or approach. In fact, I wouldn't mind reading more Doctor Who novelizations by him--and he did write quite a few I understand.