Review: Doctor Who: Doctormania by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, et al.

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: September 2018
Read: April 2021

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 2: Doctormania

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artists: Adriana Melo & Cris Bolson [with Mariano Laclaustra]

Colorists: Matheus Lopes & Marco Lesko
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I didn't care for vol 1 of this series, and I feel much the same about this. In my review of that one, I wrote, "[t]he plot seemed to pile complication on complication and incident on incident for the sake of it." The same is true here. More specifically, the stories read like they were made up as they went along, with no attempt at unity of character or theme. The first one, "Doctormania," is about the Doctor, Jack, and Rose arriving on a planet where everyone is a big fan of the Doctor; it turns out that this is because a Slitheen is running around in Doctor skinsuit. But the story isn't really about this in any meaningful way, the implications and permutations of this concept aren't explored. Instead, they're discarded and it becomes a story about Rose being stuck on a jungle planet with a Slitheen, and the climax of the story is about negotiations between different factions in the Raxacoricofallapatorius solar system. There's a brief return to the original hook at the end, but the permutations of the story feel arbitrary and inorganic. I hate saying something doesn't follow "rules" for writing, but it really doesn't live up to the MICE Quotient. It's an event story, but the event that is solved at the ending isn't the one that was a problem at the beginning!

The second story, "The Hunted," wastes a good premise too for no readily apparent reason. The Doctor is summoned by Mickey-- only it's post-"Journey's End" Mickey who's married to Martha, not the useless "Mickey the idiot" that he knows. I think there's potential here for a story about how the Doctor has misjudged Mickey, but it's not used, it's just a random continuity detail, not a storytelling concept. Worse, Martha is there to just be a mute woman in distress for Mickey to worry about! Like, she's a protagonist in her own right, you shouldn't be treating her like this... except that, of course, she's a woman. The actual plot of the story (something something superpowers something something mutations something something a wormhole) is too dependent on techno-gubbins to be interesting. I think a lot of writers who try to imitate Russell T Davies-style Who don't get that, for all its flash and speed and color, his stories were about something, they were about people in real and meaningful ways rarely equaled on television. These stories have flash and speed and color, but aren't about anything at all.

This also contains what was originally published as a Free Comic Book Day story, "Hacked." There are no credits for it anywhere in the book: if I was artist Mariano Laclaustro, I'd be pretty hacked off.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: The Twist

Review: Doctor Who: The Turing Test by Paul Leonard

Published: 2000
Acquired: November 2009
Read: November 2020

Doctor Who: The Turing Test
by Paul Leonard

With this installment, my reading of the BBC's Eighth Doctor Adventures jumps ahead to the "trapped on Earth" story arc. This began with The Ancestor Cell and The Burning, which I read over fifteen years ago; an amnesiac Doctor is left on Earth in 1890 to make a rendezvous with his companion Fitz in 2001, giving him and the TARDIS over a century to recuperate. This story details what the Doctor was up to during World War II, as he becomes involved in the activities of a group of aliens trapped in Nazi Germany.

I remember finding what I read of the post-Burning novels a mixed bag: while the novels did have the freedom to be more inventive and weird in the new post-Time Lord universe, it wasn't really clear to me what purpose the Doctor's amnesia was meant to serve. He seemed to always know how to do things anyway, and always remembered what was necessary for the plot. The Turing Test, however, makes great use of this premise, possibly the greatest of any EDA I've read. This Doctor is among humans, but knows he is not of them-- yet does not know who he actually is. So while a "normal" Doctor might thwart some aliens, this Doctor genuinely does not know what his "side" is. This approach is amplified by having the story narrated from the outside in the first person; the narrators here know less of the Doctor than we do, so we can read between the lines, but in some ways, we know as little as they do of this new Doctor. When telling the story from, say, a companion role, I think it's impossible to really render the Doctor as unknowable, but Leonard does an excellent job here of using his narrators to create distance and danger. Overall, this is an effective and gripping story of WWII intrigue and violence. I don't think it's the best Doctor Who novel but it is in the top tier.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: Father Time

Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word

Son One identifies what kind of "gon" an oyster cracker is

Now that the pandemic seems to be winding down, everyone's lost postponed trips are finally happening, and we find ourselves being visited twice over. My brother Andy and his wife Jess are here in Florida at the same time Hayley's brother Shane and his wife Leah are! So we have had a busy week.

Last Friday, Shane and Leah came and spent the afternoon and did dinner with us after flying in, before driving out to their condo on St. Pete Beach. Sunday, we drove out to see them and spent the afternoon on the beach, and then went up to Clearwater to celebrate Father's Day by eating Skyline Chili and Rita's. Monday, we drove down to Lido Beach where Andy and Jess were staying; we played on the beach that afternoon, went to dinner with them, spent the night in the hotel, and did more with them the next day before driving back home. I'm typing this up on Thursday, but it will post on Friday, when we plan to go to the Florida Aquarium here in Tampa with Shane and Leah.

All of this is a lot if you are a toddler, as Son One is, and unfortunately losses in emotional control tend to be matched by losses in bodily control. He is potty training, and for a while it seemed like we had a total backslide. (We are using the Oh Crap! method, and he is in stage two/three, where he goes commando.)

On Tuesday especially we were all tuckered out. Son One had clearly been tired Monday night (he asked to go to bed!) but also has trouble going to sleep in a new environment. He bounced around a lot in his hotel bed, so I had to lay down next to him and gently restrain him while singing, "Hush little baby, don't say a word, Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird..." For a while, I improvised new verses ("If that clown doesn't make you laugh, Daddy's gonna buy you a wizard staff...") but then he requested the song be about Momma, so I sang him the traditional verses over again with Momma. Then, to his request, himself, the baby, Oracle (our cat), Bluesies (our fish), Uncle Andy, Aunt Jess, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Duckie, and Erin and Josh (family friends) before he finally fell asleep. We had started bedtime a little after 7pm, and I think he finally fell asleep around 9. I had thought I might sneak out of the room once both kids fell asleep and either hang out with Andy and Jess or read in the lobby, but I was actually drifting off faster than he was! I woke up around midnight, though, and actually got ready for bed, and then had trouble getting back to sleep.

"I don't build things, I only mash things."

But of course I was woken up by Son One at 5:30am. "Daddy, you don't go in my bed!" The baby had a fever Monday night, so he and Hayley stayed inside at the hotel that morning while Son One and I went to the beach. (If you go out to the beach at 8:30am, you will have it to yourself!) Then we packed up and checked out and ate lunch, and then Son One and I went swimming in the hotel pool, and then we hit the road. With Hayley tending to the baby, it was all me with Son One, who was beginning to need a lot of ushering and prodding with all the back and forthing of loading the car and getting ready. Plus he is afraid of vacuum cleaners, and housekeeping parked their vacuum outside of our door and we had to keep going past it. Son One slept on the drive home, but that's just an hour, and his usual nap length is around two.

Son One's bedtime was early and went smoothly, and I was planning on an early bedtime myself, crawling into bed at 9pm. But even though the baby's fever was gone, he was unhappy, and he couldn't fall asleep. Every time Hayley would get him to sleep in the rocker or walking him around, he would wake up on being transferred to the bassinet, or shortly thereafter. Often he will nurse to sleep (less often these days, though), but he was totally uninterested in it. Eventually Hayley asked me to take over, and alternating between walking and rocking, while blasting pink noise at him and singing "Hush Little Baby," I finally got him to go to sleep around 11:15pm. I played it safe, though, and did not move from the rocker until 11:45, when I successfully transferred him to the bassinet and finally went to bed myself.

So of course Son One woke up during the night at 2am and 5am, and then permanently at 5:30am. He wandered around while I dozed on the couch, but soon made his way into our bedroom, where he wanted to get into bed with Hayley and the baby. The problem is that he is a very physically active snuggler, and the baby needed his rest! When he disregarded Hayley's admonition to stay away from the baby, I picked him up, and he-- who has always struggled with emotional control-- totally lost it. As I carried him out, he managed to grab the baby monitor from the dresser and clamped down on its power cord in his teeth. So in trying to get him out of the bedroom to stop him from bothering the sleeping baby, I ended up having a contest of extracting a power cord from his mouth just a few feet away from the baby.

I did win, and I got him out of the bedroom and locked the door. He proceeded to cry at the door. We have been trying to practice the How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen method on him, which defuses outbursts by naming and acknowledging the feeling... but I can honestly never get this to work. When I say, "You feel sad/mad/upset right now," he just gets upset at me and tells me to go way or stop talking. Eventually he hit me, so I put him in his room. How to Talk says not to use time outs, but I was on too short a tether myself to do anything else; I didn't want him hitting me. I did let him out pretty quickly, but he cried in his room for a while before coming out and returning to crying at the master bedroom door.

I decided at that point the best thing to do was let him be and hope that the pink noise in the bedroom was enough to stop the baby from hearing him. So I began preparing my coffee and breakfast and would periodically offer him breakfast. Eventually, he took up one of my offers of oatmeal and came over and ate half a bowl and then asked for a bagel with "chocolate butter." I think it was around 7am by this time, so there had been a solid hour of meltdown at least.

"I am going to startle my brother. EXTERMINATE!"

So, we decided to not really go anywhere Wednesday or Thursday, to allow him to glom back on to his usual routine and get some rest and thus emotional stability. He slept until 6:45am Thursday morning! Thus allowing me to sleep until 7am.

Anyway, I have no big parenting insight here except to say managing someone else's emotions is more draining than managing your own!

Review: Doctor Who: Gaze of the Medusa by Gordon Rennie & Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: September 2018
Read: April 2021

Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor, Vol 1: Gaze of the Medusa

Writers: Gordon Rennie & Emma Beeby
Artist: Brian Williamson
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

The first and only volume of Titan's Fourth Doctor comic is very much a Hinchcliffe-era pastiche: this is sort of The Talons of Weng-Chiang crossed with Pyramids of Mars. Unfortunately, it feels very plodding: lots of wandering around in caves, and not very interesting guest characters, and the by-now-usual kind of time paradoxes. This pure pastiche might do it for someone else, but it feels like a particularly banal Big Finish fourth Doctor adventure, like one of those Philip Hinchcliffe/Marc Platt collaborations.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Ninth Doctor: Doctormania

Review: Doctor Who: The One by Si Spurrier, Rob Williams, Simon Fraser, Warren Pleece, Leandro Casco, Leonardo Romero, et al.

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: March 2020
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor, Vol 5: The One

Writers: Si Spurrier & Rob Williams
Artists: Simon Fraser, Warren Pleece, Leandro Casco, Leonardo Romero

Ink Assists: Adriano Vicente, Wellington Dias & Raphael Lobosco
Colorists: Gary Caldwell, Rod Fernandes, Ariana Florean, Nicola Righi, with Azzurra Florean
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

The out-thereness of Titan's Eleventh Doctor series continues: in this one they visit River Song and go to Shada, the prison planet of the Time Lords. We begin to learn more about the role of the Master in these events, and the Squire struggles to prove herself-- as does Alice. All this plus Abslom Daak is hilarious but also tragic. It's hard to judge any of this on its own terms, as each issue works on its own but also propels you into the next: what is going to be the pay-off to all of this in the final volume of The Eleventh Doctor: Year Two? But the ride is enjoyable, human, and creepy, and I continue to be all in on it. Still far and away the best of Titan's Doctor Who ongoings. My only complain is that Simon Fraser somehow manages to make River Song look ugly!

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Fourth Doctor: Gaze of the Medusa

Was Spock the First Vulcan in Starfleet? (Betteridge's Law Says No, So What Is the Real Question?)

Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet.

Well, many people say this, including the official Star Trek web site, but if you actually look at the "canon," there's no evidence for it. It's never said on screen, and though it can't be disproven, there's some evidence against it: The USS Intrepid has a crew of four hundred Vulcans, and did they all join after Spock? Would a founding member of the Federation really not send a single student to the Academy in a century? Discovery has provided further evidence against by showing us a Vulcan admiral in the 2250s, when Spock was a lieutenant; if Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, Terral had an exceptional career.

But lots of people are happy to explain that your fanon misconceptions are wrong. I am not going to do that today.

A conversation on the TrekBBS led me to a somewhat more interesting question: why do people think this?

A lot of fanon can be traced back to some kind of semi-official origin, even if it was never said on screen. For example, some people assert that Kirk was the youngest ever captain in Starfleet. This was never stated on screen, but it was part of Kirk's bio in The Making of Star Trek (1968) by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. Lots of random pieces of Star Trek fanon have their roots in speculation by Michael and Denise Okuda, authors of the Star Trek Encyclopedia (1994) and Star Trek Chronology (1993). But as author Chistopher L. Bennett pointed out on that thread, the idea of Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet has no such clear origin: "People always talk about it as if it were a documented fact, part of the unquestioned conventional wisdom of Trek lore. Somewhere, somehow, it must have gotten written down and propagated. The question is, what's the earliest verifiable published statement of the myth?"

Well, there is the kind of question I like to solve!

Of course, there's no clear answer. But with Google Books, the Internet Archive, the Fanlore wiki, and the help of some other TrekBBS posters, this is what I can piece together:

• 1982: William Rotsler's Star Trek II Biographies (the book that gave us "Nyota" as Uhura's first name, not canonized until 2009) calls him "the only Vulcan attending" the Academy and states "that Vulcans were a rarity in Starfleet in his time," implying he is not the first.
  
• 1986: The novel Dreadnought! by Diane Carey calls Spock "the first Vulcan computer expert in Starfleet." 
• 1988: Carey's novel Final Frontier calls Spock "first of his kind in Starfleet"; the novel Memory Prime by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens calls Spock "[f]irst Vulcan through the Academy."
• 1989: The unauthorized reference work The Trek Crew Book by James Van Hise includes a detailed biography of Spock; it seems to indicate that he is the first Vulcan in Starfleet Academy Command School, but not necessarily the Academy itself.
  
• 1994: The first edition of The Star Trek Encyclopedia calls Spock the "first Vulcan to enlist in the Federation Starfleet."
• 1995: The third edition of the Star Trek Concordance calls Spock the first Vulcan in Starfleet, citing it to the episode "Whom Gods Destroy." (This "fact" isn't in the 1969 or 1976 editions.)
  
• 1996: By this point, the "first Vulcan" fact seems to be all over the novels, particularly ones by Diane Carey, but it's worth highlighting that the timeline in the Starfleet Academy middle-grade novels calls Spock "the first Vulcan student" at the Academy. (This timeline is adapted from the Star Trek Chronology, but as far as I can tell, the idea doesn't appear there.) The first of those novels is all about Spock deciding to attend the Academy, and draws on the first-in-Starfleet concept.
  
• 1996: The fanzine Star Born is published, about Spock's Academy days, where he was its first Vulcan student.
  

I think partially what's notable are the omissions. It doesn't appear in books or novels until 1988, which makes me think it wasn't widespread in fandom prior to that. The Internet Archive includes a number of fanworks-- and you would think that fan writers would be all over, "Spock, first Vulcan in Starfleet." But when I search "first Vulcan," what I usually come up with is that he's the first Vulcan/human hybrid. Surely some fan writer in the 1980s would have wrote about how sad it was for Spock to be the only Vulcan at the Academy. Script editor D. C. Fontana is sometime a source of fanon lore, but in fact her 1989 novel Vulcan's Glory has a number of Vulcans on the Enterprise in addition to Spock during the Pike era, so she didn't think he was first in Starfleet either.

The idea doesn't even make it into Star Trek (2009), which seems like the exact kind of place you might expect it, given its emphasis on making everyone involved super-exceptional.

Edgar Governo looked at the fanzine articles collected in the Best of Trek book series, and noted, "There are many, many extrapolative/speculative pieces about Spock's life and Vulcans in general throughout The Best of Trek, but a cursory search hasn't so far revealed any asserting that he was the first Vulcan in Starfleet." TrekBBS poster Daddy Todd adds that "Gerrold doesn’t mention it in WoST [1973's The World of Star Trek]. Neither Asherman’s first edition Compendium [1981] or the 1967 Writer’s Guide make the claim." These are all places I would expect to see a widely quoted piece of fanon lore originate, or at least be cited-- many other ones originate in these texts.

(By contrast, if I search the Internet Archive for references to Kirk being the youngest captain in Starfleet history, another piece of fanon never stated on screen, I get hits in fanzines going back to 1980, and pro novels from the mid-1980s.)

Star Trek: The First Adventure concept art, c. Mar. 1989
(courtesy Memory Alpha)

One of my most noteworthy discoveries is that Spock being the first Vulcan at the Academy was central to the proposed but unmade film Starfleet Academy, also called The First Adventure. This was the brainchild of Harve Bennett and Ralph Winter (both producers on most of the original films); it would have been a prequel "about this young cocky character on a farm who goes to flight school and meets up with the first alien that comes from Vulcan" (Cinefantastique, vol. 22, no. 5, p. 28). A summary of the script at Ain't It Cool News confirms that it calls Spock the first Vulcan in Starfleet.

They came up with the idea while making Star Trek IV, and Bennett and David Loughery got the go-ahead for a script while making Star Trek V; it was pitched as Star Trek VI, but ultimately didn't go anywhere. (Well, until J. J. Abrams came along!) That would mean the script was being written in 1989, or possibly late 1988, right around the same time the Spock-as-first-Vulcan meme begins manifesting. Did discussions of the in-development script leak out into fandom and get picked up by writers? It's a tempting idea, but the timing is wrong, given Final Frontier came out in January 1988. Maybe Loughery and/or Bennett read Final Frontier? It's actually not a focal point of Final Frontier, though, just a small aside by Kirk in free indirect discourse when thinking about Spock.

What is surprising here is how late this concept seems to emerge. If you poke around, you find a lot of people asserting it came out of fandom in the 1970s... but this has as little justification as the idea of Spock being the first does!

I mean, it's not impossible. Maybe it's written down somewhere not digitized and where no one I've asked has looked, or maybe it wasn't written down at all... If someone has a pre-1988 citation for the concept, I would be hyped to see it, but it really does seem like the meme comes out of nowhere in 1988 and cements itself pretty fast, probably thanks to the Encyclopedia.

If this is true, it's an interesting case study in how an idea can take root so quickly that it seems like it's been there all along, when in fact, it hasn't... even if it's an idea you don't believe in!

Review: Doctor Who: The School of Death by Robbie Morrison, Rachael Stott, et al.

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: September 2018
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor, Vol 4: The School of Death

Writer: Robbie Morrison
Artists: Rachael Stott, Simon Fraser
Colorists: Ivan Nunes, Marcio Menys
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

Previously, I have claimed to be of two minds about Titan's Twelfth Doctor ongoing. Well, I may be of two minds about the series overall, but I am of one mind about this installment! This is its best volume yet; most of the book is given over to a four-part story about the Doctor and Clara investigating strange goings-on in an exclusive boarding school. Morrison just gets the regulars; his Doctor is acerbic but also goofy, as seen by his attempts to go undercover here. His Clara is witty and attractive. Rachael Stott is a strong complement on art, also capturing the vibes of the two leads, and making a very action-heavy script perfectly accessible. Yes, it's got the Sea Devils in, but it's not overly nostalgic, and it's just fun. This is a daft plan carried out in enjoyable fashion; the twelfth Doctor with kids is always entertaining, and you can imagine Capaldi pulling off everything here with style. Big moments, good characters-- everything you might want from a tie-in comic to an ongoing show.

(I will say the inclusion of a character based on Christel Dee is bizarrely distracting. Like, she's a well-known official personality. She can't also be a cute cameo; it'd be like Rary Gussell turning up.)

from Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor: Year Two #1
(art by Rachael Stott)

The Boneless of "Flatline" fame turn up here in an interesting one-issue story about comic books. Neat idea that felt to me like it didn't quite come off; needed to be more playful with the form of the book itself, and to have more to say. I also found the "people have been vanishing for weeks but the authorities are ignoring it" aspect pretty contrived. Like, close your comic shop if it's started killing people off! But I still enjoyed it. The short story about the K-2 robot and Osgood is decent enough, too. Hopefully the series going forward is more Robbie Morrison and Rachael Stott, and less George Mann!

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Eleventh Doctor: The One

Review: Doctor Who: Arena of Fear by Nick Abadzis, Eleonora Carlini, Elena Casagrande, Iolanda Zanfardino, et al.

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: March 2020
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 5: Arena of Fear

Writer: Nick Abadzis
Artists: Eleonora Carlini, Elena Casagrande, Iolanda Zanfardino, with Simone De Meo & Luca Maresca
Colorists: Arianna Florean & Rod Fernandes, with Azzurra Florean
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

When I read this, it had been four months since I read the previous volume of The Tenth Doctor. I guess that volume ended on a cliffhanger? I didn't remember, but this volume begins with our main characters (now including Captain Jack for some reason) in an alien arena without their memories. I guess I should read the "Previously..." notes more carefully, but usually they seem to only contain pretty vague information. Even if I had, I still wouldn't have realized I was supposed to remember the Terileptil from the previous story arc.

This volume continues the downward trajectory of this title. I just don't care about the large cast of recurring characters writer Nick Abadzis insists on bringing to the fore so often. What is up with the evil tech guy? Who cares! Reading about a group of people regain their memories is particularly dull; it's a common sf tv trope, and sometime shows do interesting things with it... but none are to be found here. Really, this arena plotline needed to stick to its two issues in the previous volume, and stay there; it was not a four-issue idea. This series is at its best when it does Russell T Davies pastiche... not whatever this is supposed to be. It actually reads like Chris Chibnall pastiche, a couple years early: a huge cast that mostly just stands there because there's too many of them for most of them to do anything.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor: Year Two #10
(art by Elena Casagrande)

There are two other stories here: an okay short about Cindy getting lost inside the TARDIS (she's a companion now, I guess), and one about a witch in a country village. This has its moments, but Iolanda Zanfardino is not among Titan's great art finds. At least we get a few issues by Elena Casagrande.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: The School of Death

How I Accidentally Became Associate Editor of an Academic Journal

When I interviewed at UT way back in January 2017, one of the things I talked with our then-department head, David Reamer, about was possibly becoming involved with Studies in the Fantastic, the University of Tampa Press's academic journal devoted to the fantastic. It was originally founded back in 2008 by renowned Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi as a venue for articles on Weird fiction, and two issues came out; in 2016, Reamer and another professor in our department, Dan Dooghan, revived it with a focus on the fantastic more broadly.

Once hired, I actually didn't have much to do with it. Quite honestly, if you are teaching a 3/4 and having a kid, you don't seek out extra work! I did do a blind peer review for Reamer, but that was it.

In 2019, though, another professor in our department, Sarah Juliet Lauro, took over as editor, and one of the first things she did was expand the editorial board, recruiting anyone in our department (as well as some other within the college) that had an interest in the fantastic. This meant me, of course, though being on an editorial board is not a lot of work-- typically I attended meetings where SJL told us what she wanted to do, and we all said that sounded good, and I was now on the hook to do first reads of things.

Late last year, as SJL was finalizing the Winter 2020/Spring 2021 issue, I volunteered to take a look at the citations. If you know me, you will know that citation in general, and MLA particular, is something I am enthusiastic about; I think it's the engineer in me. Unlike many other aspects of writing, citations have correct answers, and I get some pleasure when I put together a particularly complicated citation. I ended up editing the citations on all the articles in the issue, as well as doing some other editorial work where needed.

SJL asked me how I wanted to be credited, but I really had no idea. Was a "citations editor" a thing? (It is in law journals, apparently.) To my surprise, I was credit as assistant editor when the issue came out. (You can see the page for the issue on the UT Press site here, and if you have access to Project MUSE via your library, the page for the issue is here.) Well, that was cool.

It turned out to be a trap.

A good trap, but a trap nonetheless, because now that I had a job title, SJL could ask me to do all kinds of work and I couldn't refuse! She of course handles the majority of the editorial work (going through submissions, organizing peer review, and so on), but I have been doing multiple editorial passes, as well as organizing things like book reviews. At some point, she started calling me "associate editor" in her e-mails... I am not sure how I got promoted!

I do enjoy it, though, and I think it's a good opportunity. I think it will be an even better opportunity when academic conferences come back; one thing I had promised to do as a member of the Editorial Board was shill for the journal at conferences, but I never got to do this because all of the conferences I usually go to were cancelled in 2020 and 2021!

The citations editing is fun. What is surprising to me-- but maybe should not have been-- is how bad at MLA style some academics with decades experience are. It gives me some sympathy for my students' own struggles (if someone with a Ph.D. can't figure out what kinds of titles get italicized, why should my students?) and understanding of why they are so bad (if the other professors grading their citations don't know what they should look like, of course the students aren't going to learn)... not that I am going any easier on my students as a result!

But if the citations were perfect, I wouldn't have as much to do.

---

Anyway, if you are an academic who works on the fantastic in any form (the Weird, science fiction, fantasy, and so on), we welcome submissions! Currently we're putting together a special issue on Lovecraft Country (and submissions for that are closed), but we take submissions on a rolling basis for our general-topic issues. The submission guidelines are here.

Review: Doctor Who: A Matter of Life and Death by George Mann and Emma Vieceli

Every morning over breakfast, I read a single issue of a comic book. If I have one to hand, that's a hard copy comic. (Usually of late, that would be from my reading through of all of DC's post-Golden Age Earth-Two/JSA comics.) When I don't, I read a digital comic, usually from a Humble Bundle; these days, I'm reading Titan's Doctor Who comics in publication order. Things have worked out recently such that I've been reading a lot of those, and I am a bit behind on reviewing them. So starting today I catch up! If you are not interested, come back on June 28 when I review, er, a Doctor Who prose novel, or July 12 when I review, ah, um, a different Doctor Who comic. But after that things should finally get more diverse again... if you count Transformers as diverse! (Of course my Friday posts will continue their usual eclectic selection of topics.)

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2015-16
Acquired: September 2018
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor, Vol 1: A Matter of Life and Death

Writer: George Mann
Artist: Emma Vieceli
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

The first (and so far only) volume of Titan's eighth Doctor range is another slice of perfectly adequate Doctor Who comics from Titan. George Mann has written worse stuff, and Emma Vieceli proves excellent on the artwork. A lot of the plots were decent Doctor Who ideas, but rushed or poorly implemented. Art comes to life in the first story, but so quickly we barely see its effects; in the second story we're asked to believe the best match for a race of living crystal is a race of sentient cats; the idea of a weird dimensional portal in the third seems over before it's even used; and so on. Titan's Eleventh Doctor series has done done-in-one tales much more successfully. On the other hand, I liked Mann's emphasis on the Doctor as a man trying to find peace in conflict, and Vieceli brings both Doctor and companion to life in a way utterly suited to the bouncing, emotional eighth Doctor. If there are more eighth Doctor comics (seems unlikely), get someone else to write them, but bring her back.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Tenth Doctor: Arena of Fear