Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: May 2023

31 May 2023

Mistress of Chaos (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 47)

Mistress of Chaos: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, John Ross, Mike Collins, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2018-20
Acquired: January 2021
Read: March 2023

And here it is: I come, at long long last, to the end. I began way back in November 2020; two years and four months later, thirty-one collections later, five hundred and forty-eight strips later,* I am finally done! It's been quite a journey, but that's probably content for a separate post. First, we have to talk about this volume in particular.

The Warmonger, from Doctor Who Magazine #531-34 (Dec. 2018–Feb. 2019)
story by Scott Gray, art by John Ross, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

So the caveat to everything I am going to discuss here is that I am not really a fan of the Jodie Whittaker era on screen, as the writing and direction make what are—to me at least—frequently baffling choices that eliminate the possibility of drama and character development. I struggled with Titan's Thirteenth Doctor comics, which I felt emulated the parent show very well... by being sort of boring and aimless and not knowing how to handle having three companions.

Which is to say, that I like what Scott Gray does here and in the volume's subsequent stories, which is tell the same kind of entertaining strip stories he always tells, just with a new set of characters. I always liked the potential of the thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan, but the show rarely delivered on it. Gray, though, is always good at incorporating strong character beats into his writing, and as ever, we get that here, as the TARDIS delivers the four of them into a warzone. Yaz is strong-willed and idealistic; there's a great scene where she stares down some looters. Graham and Ryan are well-meaning but a bit comic; they get some fun material here when they're separate from the Doctor, especially when Ryan flirts with a robot news reporter. (Gray is good at splitting the fam up into different combinations across these stories.) The Doctor is impish, impulsive, steely, and radically compassionate. There was this idea nascent in early thirteenth Doctor stuff that she would be compassionate to the point of being dangerous but I'm not sure it always worked on screen; I actually reckon that aside from Gray, the two stories to capture the thirteenth Doctor best are Paul Cornell's lockdown tales "The Shadow Passes" and "The Shadow in the Mirror." In the latter, the Doctor extends a very dangerous but ultimately successful forgiveness, and we see something like that in her solution to this story's crisis.

from Doctor Who Magazine #533

The place where this story clearly diverges from its screen counterpart is in its use of a returning villain. While series 11 very much eschewed any returning elements at all, this brings back Berakka Dogbolter. While she only appeared for the first time back in The Stockbridge Showdown in #500, she's the daughter of long-running foe Josiah W. Dogbolter, taking us all the way back to DWM's 1980s "golden age." It's a nice move, I think: the Doctor may be different, the set-up may be different, the screen version may have a very different style, but the reader of the DWM comic knows that it's still the same story that began with The Iron Legion.

Of the new series Doctor, three were introduced by Mike Collins and a fourth by Martin Geraghty, both of whom have a very realistic style. Here, we get the dynamic John Ross on art, and he very much nails it: his likenesses are less direct but also very strong. He juggles a lot of elements in this story, and the reader is kept on top of all of them. I've liked his stuff all long, but his material in this volume is surely him at the top of his game.

So yeah, like a lot of Scott Gray's stories, there's not something I can point to that makes it a work of genius, but it is a well-executed piece of strong Doctor Who. Good characterization, neat worldbuilding, dynamic ideas.

from Doctor Who Magazine #535

Herald of Madness, from Doctor Who Magazine #535-39 (Mar.-July 2019)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is a fun historical story about the Doctor and fam crashing a gathering of astronomers and such, focusing on Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. I don't have a lot to say about it that I didn't about the previous story, but again, Gray does a great job of putting together an interesting story with good reversals that splits up the regulars to strong effect. Yaz gets a good bit, where she pretends to steal someone's soul with her phone, but really they all across strongly.

Mike Collins is always good, but after reading this I kind of wondered if they didn't give him Jodie's debut because his likenesses for women are not quite as good as his ones for me (he always kind of struggled with Amy in particular), and now the lead character is a woman.

from Doctor Who Magazine #540

The Power of the Mobox, from Doctor Who Magazine #540-42 (Aug.-Oct. 2019)
story & art by Scott Gray, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Scott Gray takes on his first multi-part story as an artist. The Mobox have appeared in a few previous DWM stories, most notably Ophidius and Uroboros, but they've never looked better than they look here, as somewhat Kirbyesque creations... but one of their strengths is they're not monsters, they're people; I came to really like R'Takk, the grumpy but well-meaning Mobox captain the fam encounters. The Kirby tone for all tech here really works; honestly, more Doctor Who artists should do this, because it's a good fit for the sensibilities of Doctor Who.

There's a great cliffhanger where it looks like the Mobox disintegrated Graham and Yaz, but long-time DWM readers will remember that Mobox store what they de-materialize inside them and can bring it back. When I first read this story in DWM in 2019, I did not remember that fact from the earlier Mobox stories almost two decades prior, but this time I did (having read the relevant stories less than a year ago), so nicely done, Scott. As always, each character gets a moment to shine, and Gray puts them in a different combination every time.

from Doctor Who Magazine #544

Mistress of Chaos, from Doctor Who Magazine #543-48 (Nov. 2019–Mar. 2020)
story by Scott Gray, art by John Ross, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The finale to this set of stories brings back Berakka from The Warmonger and the Herald of Madness from, well, you know... and finally brings us to the planet Segonus that gives this series of posts its alliterative title! The Doctor discovers that the Herald of Madness wasn't a reflection of her... but actually her.

Again, filled with strong moments; I like Gray's steely thirteenth Doctor, who goes after Berakka when she realizes Berakka is trying to ruin her reputation. There are creepy baddies and a good role for Graham and excellent art from John Ross once more. Clever stuff as always, and James Offredi is on fire here as a colourist. Of course, the realms of logic and chaos are distinguished from each other, but they're also very distinct from the real world too.

My main issue is that "evil Doctor" stories are always tricky: the bad Doctor has to convince as the Doctor, and this doesn't always happen. Gray gets closer than most, but one never really feels like the chaos Doctor and the logic Doctor are possible future Doctors. The idea that they reflect different key aspects of the Doctor's personality comes through better in the commentary than in the actual story, where it feels more abstract. I did really like the resolution, though, and the story's closing moments—a montage of people highlighting the good the Doctor does, complete with Sharon cameo—is a fitting one for this particular Doctor, who is often positioned as a source of hope in the darkness.

Like I said above, this set-up for Doctor Who never worked for me on screen, but Gray reveals the potential that was there all along and really makes it sing.

Stray Observations:

If you're the kind of person who cares about these things, note that The Warmonger, The Power of the Mobox, and Mistress of Chaos all take place during the same time period, which must be what Ahistory calls "the mazuma era," around the time of Dogbolter and Death's Head in the 82nd century. I don't think there was ever any kind of even loose dating given for Ophidius and Uroboros, but the presence of the Mobox empire here would seem to place them in the same era as well.
Surely it ought to have been The Power of the Mobox!, right?
Three different versions of Jodie Whittaker in a series finale? Whatever the tv show can come up with, Scott Gray always gets there first!
Three of the four stories feature a mysterious "Mother G," who knows the TARDIS; she tells the Doctor what the "G" stands for in Mistress of Chaos, but we don't get to hear that answer ourselves... and the Doctor doesn't believe it. Well, I look forward to seeing where Scott Gray goes with this in what will surely be a key thread to his long run on the thirteenth Doctor's comics for the next two-and-a-half years!
"JUST A TRACER" WATCH: David A Roach Appreciation Society triumphant! That's right, he finally garners cover credit for a volume where he is a "mere" inker. We did it!

Okay, Panini, where's my The Everlasting Summer collection? #549-52, 559-72, 574-77, and 578-83 would add up to about the right amount of content for a graphic novel. And then I think Monstrous Beauty would go well with Liberation of the Daleks.

* Well, kind of.

This post is the forty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers issues #215–18, 223–27, and 235–54 of Transformers UK. Previous installments are listed below:

29 May 2023

Batman/Wildcat by Chuck Dixon, Beau Smith, Sergio Cariello, et al.

Batman/Wildcat

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1970-98
Acquired: March 2023
Read: April 2023

Writers: Chuck Dixon, Beau Smith, Bob Haney

Pencillers: Sergio Cariello, Irv Novick, Bob Brown, Jim Aparo
Inkers: Art Thibert, Danny Miki, Jaime Mendoza, Tom Palmer, Mike Esposito, Nick Cardy, Jim Aparo

Colorists: Jason Wright, Pat Garrahy

Letterers: Kevin Cunningham, Clem Robins

As I said when writing up Catwoman: Her Sister's Keeper, the discovery of a preexisting Ted Grant–Selina Kyle relationship in JSA Classified had me curious as to its origins; one of the stories that lead me to was a 1998 miniseries called Catwoman/Wildcat by Chuck Dixon, Beau Smith, and Sergio Cariello. I discovered it had been collected along with a 1997 mini from the same team, Batman/Wildcat, and five issues of The Brave and the Bold from the 1970s where Batman teams up with Wildcat. So, I picked up the whole collection.

Batman/Wildcat is fine. Like many Wildcat stories, it has to contrive some way to be about boxing. In this case, it's that old standby: the forced fight. Criminals are kidnapping people, mostly supervillains, and forcing them to fight each other on a super-secret pay-per-view channel (hey, it was the '90s). A mentee of Wildcat's get scooped up in it, though, and is forced to duke it out in a Wildcat costume, and so Batman and Wildcat run parallel investigations, then get kidnapped and forced to fight, and of course team up to dismantle the entire operation. I could probably go the rest of my life without reading another story where superheroes are forced to fight so rich people can gamble on it, to be honest; there's nothing about that premise that's ever interesting. What beggars belief is the bad guys don't even take Batman's and Wildcat's masks off to find out who they are; indeed, they put extra masks on them so they can't see who they're fighting! I think the story would have also benefited from making Ted's status quo clearer; at the end, he comes out of retirement to go back to fighting crime as Wildcat, but that was the moment I learned he was in retirement to begin with! (This would be set after the Justice Society falls apart in Zero Hour, before it reunites in Justice Be Done.)

Oracle! Ah, 1990s Birds of Prey nostalgia...
from Batman/Wildcat #2 (script by Chuck Dixon & Beau Smith, art by Sergio Cariello and Art Thibert, Danny Miki, & Jaime Mendoza)

The follow-up, Catwoman/Wildcat, is a bit better. Catwoman travels to Las Vegas to carry out a heist where, coincidentally, Ted Grant is in some kind of exhibition match. The heist, honestly, was very confusing. Selina's competing with like two other groups of criminals and there's a lot of double-crossing, and a lot of characters I didn't care about. What was consistently fun was the flirting between Selina and Ted. Selina knows who she is dealing with right away, but it takes most of the story for Ted to figure out who she is (there's a brief flashback to Her Sister's Keeper, despite Catwoman: Year 2's implication it didn't count), and so he doesn't get why this attractive younger woman is coming on to him. Whenever the story focuses on the antics of the two of them it is fun; whenever it focuses on the other characters, I hoped it would get back to Ted and Selina. Thankfully boxing has little to do with it.

It's a very different Selina to the one who seemed shocked at what Ted Grant might ask of her for defense training!
from Catwoman/Wildcat #3 (script by Chuck Dixon & Beau Smith, art by Sergio Cariello & Tom Palmer)

Both stories are pencilled by Sergio Cariello who has a... I guess I would say perfectly adequate 1990s style. It's not my jam, and I think he draws Selina/Catwoman a bit weird, but it's a good artistic fit for Chuck Dixon's over-the-top action-focused style of writing.

Cats in heat.
from Catwoman/Wildcat #1 (script by Chuck Dixon & Beau Smith, art by Sergio Cariello & Tom Palmer)

The five stories from The Brave and the Bold run the gamut. Each has to have some weird reason for Batman to pull Wildcat into the case; some are more compelling than others. The first, "Count Ten... and Die!" is probably the best. Bruce Wayne is coaching the American team in the World Youth Games in fencing, while Ted Grant is coaching the boxing team. Ted is heckled by the coach of the Russian team, but then also there's a lot of stuff about a spy and needing to transfer a secret tape. Boxing is worked in pretty organically here, and it has its moments, even if it can get a bit contrived. (At one point, Ted Grant sneaks out of a boxing match he is participating in to track Batman to a river in the countryside, rescues Batman from kidnappers after a pitched battle, and returns, all while forcibly dragging his opponent with him... and no one notices this because the lights are out!) I thought the culmination of Ted being goaded was going to be him rising above it, but Batman points out that if Ted Grant doesn't wallop this Russian guy, America may as well give up the Cold War, so Ted punches his lights out for patriotism.

If your story is set in Cold War Vienna, it is mandatory to have a key scene set on the Wiener Riesenrad.
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #88 (script by Bob Haney, art by Irv Novick & Mike Esposito)

A couple feel like they could have been about any character, and Ted is barely even in them: in "The Smile of Choclotan!" he's mostly in a trance, in "A Very Special Spy!" Ted is for some reason an exec at an energy firm, and in "Dead Man's Quadrangle" he's running a health spa in the Caribbean. I guess post-JSA he made a run a lot of different businesses?

For some reason, everyone in Mexico calls him "Bat-Hombre." Not, say, "Murciélago Hombre"... or just, you know "Batman"!
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #97 (script by Bob Haney, art by Bob Brown & Nick Cardy)

I was able to embrace the goofiness in "May the Best Man ~~Win~~ Die!" In this, Wildcat does an exhibition boxing match at a Gotham prison... only the guy he fights is a potential witness against the Joker, and the Joker uses the opportunity to infect Wildcat's opponent with a rare tropical illness, and soon the whole prison is in danger. A biologist brings a dog in whose blood he's incubated antibodies to Gotham, but the dog is stolen by the Joker, then it escapes from the Joker, and so Batman, Wildcat, and the Joker are all searching Gotham for a dog who has the key to hundreds of lives. So wacky you've got to love it! I even didn't mind the obligatory Batman/Wildcat slugfest, because it's really just an opportunity for the Joker to infect them with the disease too.

Like, a page later, Batman admits that he has no idea if this is true or not.
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #118 (script by Bob Haney, art by Jim Aparo)

Bob Haney is certainly a wacky writer. In "May the Best Man Die!", Batman goes to the Gotham pound to pick up the dog, but is told someone claiming to be the dog's owner already picked it up... a weird guy with green hair! Like, how could you live in Gotham and see a guy with green hair and not think, "Hmmm... is that the Joker!?" In "Dead Man's Quadrangle," Batman travels to the Caribbean via a commercial flight... in costume! There he is just chilling in first class; the guy seated next to him just casually chatting him up. In the 1970s was airport security so lax? Or does Batman get an exemption? And is a Batsuit really comfortable clothing for a long flight?

Batman has the same annoyances on a flight as us regular folks.
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #127 (script by Bob Haney, art by Jim Aparo)

Some continuity notes: When these stories came out they were evidently controversial, because they feature the "regular" Batman of DC, i.e., the Earth-One Batman, but Wildcat is from Earth-Two! The explanation (given in letter columns, I guess, because it never appears in the stories themselves) was that this was the Wildcat of Earth-One, a character who only appeared in these five issues of The Brave and the Bold and one issue of Super-Team Family. Thus, we are left to infer most of his history: an older superhero, seemingly not active anymore... but in this world there was no JSA. Post-Crisis, I think we can just imagine that these events did happen (approximately) as depicted here, with the new post-Crisis Batman and the new post-Crisis Wildcat. By publication sequence these would go in the period after the JSA kind of came out of retirement for its JLA team-ups, before the JSA was revived full-time in the 1970s issues of All Star Comics, and I think this depiction of Wildcat fits well with that.

Lastly, there's a weird bit in "Dead Man's Quadrangle," where Ted thinks that on his second comeback tour he accidentally killed a man ("Kid O'Hare") in the ring, and thus gave up throwing punches ever again. He gets over it, of course, but this was never mentioned before and thus must have happened in the year since his previous Brave and the Bold appearance yet is just kind of tossed in as if we already know about it! As far as I know, it never comes up again either.

This post is forty-third in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers volume 3 of Justice Society of America. Previous installments are listed below:

The Enshittification of Netflix

Netflix's DVDs-by-mail service is coming to an end.

Many people out there have reacted to this news by going, "That still exists?" Well yes, it does. I am the last man alive with a Netflix DVD-by-mail account.

My roommate and I first subscribed to Netflix when we were in college. We went in on an account together, and because it was two-at-a-time, we alternated who put what in the queue. He was usually busy over the summer, so over the summer it was all mine: I would binge my way through shows like Veronica Mars and Jeeves and Wooster and The Last Detective and Seven Up. I think it came to an end when I moved in with my parents after college—and soon, of course, Netflix got into the streaming business.

A decade later, shortly after my wife and I moved to Florida, I picked up a subscription again. There's just lots of stuff that is hard to find streaming, or you have to pay money to stream it. Right now the next ten films on my queue are GoldenEye, Be Kind Rewind, the reboot Planet of the Apes trilogy, The Thin Man, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Mouse That Roared, TiMER, and Lady Bird. None of these are available on Netflix streaming. All but one are on Amazon Prime streaming, but all are movies you have to pay $3-4 to rent; we pay $5 per month to get two DVDs a month, so we come out ahead. TiMER doesn't seem to be on any streaming service at all!

Not sure where its red envelope is, to be honest...

Also I am honestly pretty bad about watching movies, so having a physical DVD sitting in front of my tv is a good spur to action. (That said, don't ask me how long my Netflix copy of Logan has been sitting there. I definitely would have saved money if I'd just bought it.)

I listened to an episode of WNYC's podcast On the Media last week where they interviewed Cory Doctorow about a process he calls "enshittification." It's worth a listen, or if you prefer to read, Doctorow explains it in detail in a blog post. Basically it goes like this:

A new platform debuts on the Internet and does something no one else does, and does it really well and gives the user something they needs.
Having locked people in, the new platform then makes things worse for users by selling access to the platform to other businesses. Those businesses have to come because it's where the users are, and the user experience gets worse but the businesses benefit.
Then once the businesses are all there, they get locked in, and now all the benefit accrues to the platform itself... but the thing that initially attracted the user is much worse than it once was.

It's a process Doctorow and host Brooke Gladstone trace across a number of platforms: Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter. At first Amazon is great, but now it's not... but where else will you go? Facebook was once an essential part of our social lives, but I have basically given up on. Like, I read it everyday still, but there's not much to read, and I've stopped posting because it's clear to me no one else reads what I post. Is that because the algorithm hides it from them or because there's just no one there to read it? Either way, what's the point?

I've been mulling over enshittification a lot since first hearing about it, because it really speaks to my experience as an adult Millennial. It seems to me everything has gotten worse and has made everything else worse. I miss LiveJournal, you know? Where on the Internet of 2023 can you get that sense of community and intimacy? But there was no way to make money from it. LJ gave way to FB which gave way to Twitter which is turning into a platform for white nationalists and contributed directly to the erosion of American democracy. But we were all complicit in this, we all left LiveJournal. Well, or rather as Doctorow explains, Facebook made things easy for us to encourage transition, and then got us all on board, made itself worse.

It dawned on me that the end of Netflix was a clear example of enshittification, and indeed, Doctorow actually discusses this in a Twitter thread. Netflix gave us something no one else has: easy renting, unlimited access to anything that was on DVD. You could easily watch any movie or tv show you wanted on Netflix in the 2000s. But because we all went to Netflix, the video store died, and because we were all on Netflix, they came up with streaming, and because streaming worked out for them, everyone went in on it. And now you can't easily watch any movie or tv show you want: there's no video store, there all on different streaming services, many of them aren't ever even released on DVD anymore, and now as the streaming market collapses, many of them are vanishing from streaming as well. We as consumers made a series of fairly rational choices, and probably the businesses did too in their own way, but I would argue that now we are all worse off.

Enshittification.

24 May 2023

Skywatch-7 (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 46)

I am procrastinating the end of the strip by incorporating some bonus content I haven't got to yet. In this case, a back-up strip that received a modern reprint, albeit not from Panini. Issue #13 of IDW's reprint series Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 includes parts 2-3 of The Moderator, but also Skywatch-7, a Doctor-less story about the Zygons. I actually read both stories, but here I'll just focus on the one I haven't read before.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981

This is a standalone Zygon story: a group of UNIT soldiers at an Arctic base are menaced by a Zygon using its shapeshifting powers to cause problems. At first, I was like, "This is all a bit The Thing, isn't it?" Then I registered that one of the soldiers is named Campbell—presumably after John W. Campbell who wrote "Who Goes There?", the story upon which the film is based. Anyway, it's only eight pages so there can't be a lot of twists or tension, but it's a good little action story with a pretty dark turn at the end. You can always count on DWM in the 1980s to lift one's spirits!

Stray Observations:

The story is credited to "Maxwell Stockbridge," a pseudonym that was used on a number of Marvel UK strips, not just Doctor Who ones. The Tardis wiki attributes it to a number of writers and says it was used from 1981 to 1984, while the Grand Comics Database credits all its uses to Alan McKenzie, and indexes stories from 1980 to 1984 using it; its first recorded use was actually in Marvel UK's Savage Action. The name, since it clearly inspired Steve Parkhouse's choice to make recurring DWM character Maxwell come from Stockbridge, feels so very DWM that it's weird to think it actually preceded it.
Both the Tardis wiki and the GCD credit Elitta Fell as letterer, but she doesn't have a credit in the actual comic (at least not the version I read). For some reason, IDW re-lettered the recap at the beginning of Part Two.

Skywatch-7 originally appeared in two parts, in Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #58 (Nov. 1981) and Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special (1981). The story was written by Maxwell Stockbridge, illustrated by Mick Austin, [lettered by Elitta Fell,] and edited by Alan McKenzie. The story was reprinted in issue #13 of Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 (Dec. 2009), which was colored by Charlie Kirchoff and edited by Denton J. Tipton.

This post is the forty-sixth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Mistress of Chaos. Previous installments are listed below:

22 May 2023

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance
by Naomi Novik

Published: 2022
Acquired and read: November 2022

Reading them because they were Lodestar Award finalists, I enjoyed the first two Scholomance books, especially the second, that I picked up the third when it came out. I enjoyed it, but I do think the second book, with its emphasis on working together as a team to overcome a dangerous situation, remains my favorite. This takes El out of the world of the Scholomance, into the actual world where she has to deal with the consequences of her actions in book two, what has happened to her boyfriend Orion, and the secrets that underpin her universe.

Like the first, I feel like this one had to do a lot of explaining—now that we've left the environment of the first two books, there's a lot of exposition we need. So sometimes I got lost in the thaumababble about how enclaves work; it's definitely all thought through, but sometimes I felt like the book shows its work a bit too much, like reading a Brando Sando novel. There's also a lot of politics in this one. Again, it's kind of the anti–Harry Potter; Rowling's books never really reckon with how Hogwarts fits into a lot of quite awful structures in the larger context of wizard society, but Novik does. I enjoyed it, and I see why the story had to engage with the broader world, but I did miss the clear focus of book two.

19 May 2023

How I Deal with Late Papers—and Why

There is allegedly a group of people out there who think you don't need due dates. I say "allegedly" because they are all on "Academic Twitter" I guess, and I am not, so I mostly just hear about them. I much prefer Academic Reddit, which is more curmudgeonly.

If it's not in on time... trash canned!

There was recently some conversation on one of the academic subreddits I frequent about due dates. Someone relayed something they had heard from somewhere else, that it was unfair to enforce due dates in education because due dates don't exist in the real world. Some people took exception to this... but they were kind of right? I wouldn't say that due dates absolutely don't matter in the real world, but they often don't really function as hard lines. If an academic job says materials are due on the 15th, but I submit them on the 16th before anyone actually goes into the application portal, they'll probably make it into the pool for consideration. If my novel manuscript is due on the 1st of the month, but I turn it in on the 5th, the novel will probably still get published.

On the other hand, if I turn in my job materials a week later, the hiring committee might have already met. If I turn my novel manuscript in five months late, I've probably ruined the publishing schedule and no editor will ever want to work with me again. Some deadlines are soft at first, but become increasingly hard the further you get past them.

If I work as an administrative assistant at a paint colorants factory and turn in my part of the monthly report a day late once, my boss is probably annoyed at me, but I don't get fired. Especially if I am good about communication. When I did write my novel, it was clear the manuscript would not be ready on time; we asked for an extra two weeks and the editor granted our request. They, surely, had other things to do, and exactly when our manuscript was one of them wasn't really a big deal.

Actual photo of the author at work.

So in a class, I think there's a couple reasons due dates matter, and any due date policy should be responsive to them:

The Students Need a Date To Aim For. Few people work well with completely open-ended tasks. Give them a date to aim for, and they will meet it.
The Students Need to Work through Things in Order. Some assignments lead to other assignments, some skills expand on other skills. The three-page paper emphasizes the teaching of skills that the four-page paper assumes students already know. The Literature Review draws on sources they should have found when doing their Annotated Bibliography.
Sometimes Work in Class Builds on an Assignment. I might have students discuss a reading in class, using writing they did about that reading as a basis. In that case, the writing needs to be due such that I can depend on students having done it.
The Instructor Needs a Day to Begin Grading. If I am to structure my time in a healthy, productive way, there needs to be a point in time where I have enough papers that I can begin grading.
The Instructor Needs a Point Where Grading Stops. Similarly, grading can't go on forever. I need to be able to draw a line under an assignment and be done with it for my own sake.

When the grading never ends.

Put all these things together and this is the set of policies I've come up with:

Students Can Ask for Extensions with No Reason... So Long as It's in Advance and to a Specific Time. I will always grant a requested extension if I am approached in advance, and if a new due date is attached to it. If I am supposed to get forty-four papers on a Tuesday, I am clearly not going to grade all forty-four of them on Wednesday. So it doesn't matter to me if I only have forty of them on time, or even twenty. But on the other hand, I think the deadlines need to have consequences otherwise they cease to become deadlines, so students can't just blow by them without asking. I also think the extension can't be open ended. So if a student asks me on Monday if they can turn the paper in on Friday, I am apt to say yes. I won't agree to extensions that go beyond the point where I want to be done grading something. I made it a "no reason" policy because I don't want to be in the business of excuse adjudication, and anyway sometimes students (just like instructors, to be honest) don't really have a good reason they're running late, and I don't want to incentivize lying. Some students get very anxious about asking for extensions—I think they think I am judging them—but I have had students ask for extensions on every single major assignment in a class, and I really don't care.
There Is a Small Penalty if Something Isn't Present When I Begin Grading. My courses are worth about 1,000 points, and I make this penalty 10 points—no matter the point value of the assignment. So if it was a 4-point assignment, they get no credit, if it was their 300-point Final Research Paper, they lose just 3% of their possible points. 10 points is 1% of their final grade. Not the end of the world, but also something you wouldn't want to lose every time. Note that I say the problem is that it's not present "when I begin grading." Like many professors, I often make things due at 11:59pm... but does it really matter to me if it's there at midnight or not? I am not going to start grading at 12:01am. So students get a bit of a grace period. If I start grading at 8am the next day, it's not a very long grace period; if life gets in my way and I don't start grading for a few days... well, great, they got away with it. Why do I care? It was there when I needed it to be.
There Is a Larger Penalty if Something Isn't Present When I Finish Grading. I make this penalty 30 points, so 3% of their final grade. Going back to something I'm done grading is probably my least favorite thing ever, so I am trying to prevent it. On top of that, it's it's this late, the students almost certainly should be working on the next assignment by now, not sinking time and energy into this one. Cut your losses before things get to this point. I used to do the (pretty common) increased penalty per day thing. Say, 10 points off per day late up to a maximum of 50 points. But what I came to realize is that if something was late, it didn't really make a difference to me if it was two days late or four days late, so long as it was turned in so that I could grade it. And a 50-point penalty is pretty steep! So I switched to this policy.
I Don't Accept Work Once the Next Assignment in Sequence Is Due. Once the next major assignment is due, students get a 0 on the previous one. So if the final draft of paper #2 is due, you get a 0 on paper #1. I also have a policy that if you get a 0 on any major assignment, you fail the course automatically. My experience is that if a student gets this far behind, they are never going to catch up—or they will turn in a bunch of really bad work which turns out to be wasted effort on their part and yours. Like, a paper from a student who is three weeks behind is almost always an F paper, so they are still going to fail the class but just wasted their time writing a paper for a class they are going to fail. So once we get to there, it's game over. This is not a very fun one to enforce, but on the occasions I have allowed an exception I have almost always regretted it.

I am pretty happy with these policies on the whole; I think they are effective but reasonably humane, and I highly recommend something like this to other instructors. Not my specific policies per se, but thinking through why you need late penalties to begin with, and building your policies around that rationale.

17 May 2023

Death's Head: Clone Drive / Revolutionary War (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 45)

Death's Head: Clone Drive

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1988-2019
Acquired: January 2023
Read: February 2023

Writers: Tini Howard, Simon Furman

Artists: Kei Zama, Bryan Hitch & Mark Farmer

Colours: Felipe Sobreiro, Nick Abadzis

Lettering: Alessandra Gozzi, [Annie Parkhouse]

In the 2010s, the original Death's Head has experienced a bit of a resurgence at Marvel; one assumes this is because the 1980s kids who grew up on him are now in positions of creative authority themselves. Kieron Gillen, for example, used the character in his run on S.W.O.R.D., where he was still giant-sized and first adopted the designation of "freelance peacekeeping agent," indicating this was a prequel to Death's Head's Transformers appearances.

The one I decided to pick up, however, was Death's Head's first self-titled comic series since the 1980s. Death's Head vol. 2 was a four-issue miniseries by Tini Howard and Kei Zama from 2019 where the original Death's Head meets the Young Avengers and the new Death's Head V. It was collected under the title "Clone Drive" by Panini, along with a reprint of Death's Head vol. 1 #1.

Death's Head may have been killed off and absorbed into Death's Head II back in the 1990s, but he's still alive and well here. My understanding—such as it is—is that this is because originally Death's Head died in comics set in 2020. Back in the 1990s, Marvel UK's 2020-set comics were supposed to be the "real" future of the Marvel universe... but now we're up to 2020, so they're clearly an alternate timeline, and thus Death's Head died in this alternate timeline, but not in the real timeline, meaning he is alive and well and carrying on as normal. Evelyn Necker of AIM was responsible for the original Death's Head's death, and Clone Drive gives us the Evelyn Necker of "our" reality, who has become obsessed with finding and creating different versions of Death's Head.

I am not sure Death's Head really understands it... but maybe I do, yes?
from Death's Head vol. 2 #2

So anyway, this was pretty enjoyable. Death's Head is a fun character, but he is difficult to get right as a lead character; even his creator Simon Furman has struggled with that. What made Death's Head enjoyable in Transformers was the sense that he's outside it all, kind of. The Transformers may invest great significance in the was between Autobots and Decepticons, in their battles against Unicron, in the time-travelling antics of Galvatron... but Death's Head doesn't care about any of that, he just wants to get paid. But also Death's Head is at his best when he's a bit put-upon, when things get away from him and don't go as planned. So he's a great foil, but it's hard to make him a main character because how can you give your lead a vibe that what's going on around him doesn't actually matter? Furman occasionally managed this with the original Death's Head series; my favorite issue of this is the one where he gets involved in some guy's squabble over a treasure map with his wife, and it's clear Death's Head doesn't give a shit about any of this backstory or even who lives and who dies, he just wants the money.

Writer Tini Howard recreates that vibe here by combining Death's Head with the Young Avengers. Flung back in time from the future era of the original Guardians of the Galaxy (the 31st century), Death's Head takes refuge in the apartment of Wiccan and Hulkling. They are having relationship drama... and Death's Head just does not care at all. He just wants to get back to the future and stay alive. The teen angst of the Young Avengers is the perfect counterpart to Death's Head, because it's very clear he doesn't want to know about any of it, but they keep trying to explain it to him, and it keeps having an effect on him whether he likes it or not... plus, here's Death's Head V with his own existential angst!

The one thing that can give Death's Head angst is learning he's been rebooted as a millennial, yes?
from Death's Head vol. 2 #2

Howard is a fun writer, and does fun stuff with the characters here; in addition to Hulkling and Wiccan, we also get Hawkeye, who was my favorite in the original Young Avengers run. There's good jokes and good angst and good twists. Artist Kei Zama, appropriately enough, got her start on Transformers, and she's adept here with human and robot alike, capturing Death's Head expressiveness. There are some neat layouts.

Someday I need to get around to picking up Kate's solo series, yes?
from Death's Head vol. 2 #2

If there's a fault here, it's that I think the series wants the reader to care about the Hulkling/Wiccan drama more than I actually do. I'd rather be like Death's Head and be a bit above it all! The series ends with new, potentially set-ups for both Death's Head (with Evelyn Necker) and Death's Head V (with Hulkling and Wiccan). Alas, though, I don't think either character has had any subsequent appearances; specifically, Hulkling and Wiccan have returned but without any indication that "Vee" is still living with them.

I didn't mean for all of my scans to come from the same issue. It just happened, yes?
from Death's Head vol. 2 #2

My Panini trade paperback includes, as I said, a reprint of Death's Head vol. 1 #1, but since I've read that twice before in recent months (it was reprinted in Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent and The Incomplete Death's Head #2), I skipped it. It also has an introduction by Brady Webb, which gives background on Death's Head that unfortunately repeats the apocryphal, untrue story about Death's Head's supposed original appearance in "High Noon Tex."

After finishing Clone Drive, I took the opportunity to pick up one other modern return appearance for the original Death's Head, which was omitted from the Freelance Peacekeeping Agent trade paperback. Revolutionary War was a 2014 Marvel event which brought back a bunch of mediocre 1990s Marvel UK characters, among them Death's Head II. But in the Death's Head II–focused issue, DHII's friend Tuck hires the original Death's Head to help save his future self. This story was clearly working on the assumption that the 2020 future still was the future of the regular Marvel universe; here, Evelyn Necker thinks that the 2020 Necker is her future self, not an alternate self. But it definitely also sets up how Necker becomes obsessed with Death's Head in Clone Drive, so Howard picked up on it despite tweaking its details.

Death's Head II is still boring and I don't care about the broader premise of Revolutionary War at all, but this is fun enough because despite being the writer who killed him off, Andy Lanning clearly has an affinity for the original Death's Head, and like Clone Drive, this plays to the character's strengths: he is confused by the time travel and grumpy about having to work with his replacement, but happy to come in swinging with acts of gratuitous violence. Thankfully, it's illustrated by Nick Roche, who like Kei Zama, cut his teeth as an artist on Transformers, and thus is eminently suited to Death's Head. Thankfully, Roche is a lot better at drawing humans now than back when he did a fill-in for IDW's Doctor Who comic.

Unfortunately, it ends on a cliffhanger that leads into Revolutionary War: Supersoldiers #1, which I have never and will never read, but on its own, it's fun enough and I'm glad I spent the time reading it.

"Synchronicity II" originally appeared in issue #1 of Revolutionary War: Death's Head II (Apr. 2014). The story was written by Andy Lanning & Alan Cowsill, illustrated by Nick Roche, colored by Veronica Gandini, lettered by Clayton Cowles, and edited by Devis Lewis & Stephen Wacker.

This post is the forty-fifth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Skywatch-7. Previous installments are listed below:

Science's Less Accurate Grandmother

Hugo Reading Progress