#now I Gotta come up with a clever magician name for him like his sisters...

[doctorstrangereview]

Strange Tales #152

Cover Date: January 1967 On-Sale Date: October 11, 1966

Doc vs. Umar starts in earnest this installment. It's also the final story drawn by Bill Everett. Namor's creator did a serviceable job as Doc's artist. His clean lines made story visuals easy to follow. I imagine his drawing table was piles with rulers, compasses and French curves. Everything is very precise. The story itself is series of battles between Doc and Umar's functionaries and then he faces Umar herself for the first time.

Doc has been kidnapped, plucked from his reality and plopped into the Dark Dimension. Unlike Ditko's vision of this otherworld which was overlit like an 80s episode of Doctor Who, under Everett, the Dark Dimension is actually dark. Ditko's great use of negative space is replaced by, well, space. It's black with stars. Except for a couple of weird floaty things, this could be the milky way.

We're getting dialogue by Stan Lee again so everyone's language is flowery and overly complicated. I wonder if Stan read Dracula and said to himself, that's how people should talk?

Doc walks along a Ditkoesque path and is confronted by a group of meanies. One looks vaguely Ditko-like. The others are just kind of blobby. Also, Doc grows round frilly things around his ankles. What's up with that?

Doc appears to have lots to say to creatures that probably don't understand a word. Without Wong to berate he's gotta get his frustrations out somehow. Doc vanquishes his foes and then we find out his All-Purpose Amulet tingles when there's danger present. Spidey-Sense, hold my beer!

Doc forges ahead through a series of glowing green and yellow rings and is so distracted he doesn't notice that his road has come to an abrupt end. Fortunately, the tingly amulet has got his back.

Doc is the repeatedly and relentlessly attacked. Kind of like how Henry Rollins describes a Ramones concert. "Not another one!"

Somehow, Doc senses his opponent is a female. Yeah, the 60s were pretty sexist.

Turning Umar on camera two, we learn that Umar is testing Doc and using what she learns to defeat Doc. She still doesn't face Doc directly but rather conjures a pair of smoke cyclopes.

Doc initially attempts to defend himself and defeat his smoggy foes, but eventually goes "the heck with it, not worth the effort, I'll just let them take me to their leader."

Doc finally meets Umar, who is sort of nice to him. The scheming female claims she was only kidnapping him (again) for his own good. She's so clever!

Doc doesn't know who she is just yet. She reveals she knows his name. When Doc asks how, she says her brother taught it to her. Was Dormie communicating with his sister while she was imprisoned? If not, she shouldn't know this. She does claim he imprisoned her because she opposed his evil deeds. This one is slick indeed! And she ain't done yet. Now she claims Clea has been captured by the Mindless Ones. Umar has cast a spell of believability that keeps Doc from figuring out that the Mindless Ones don't capture anything. They pulverize everything. Our lovestruck and slightly bamboozled hero jumps at the chance to rescue his silver-tressed temptress. Umar is about to send Doc... somewhere, but a tinge of awareness makes him refuse. "I'll do it myself." Umar realizes her feminine wiles haven't completely overcome the mustachioed magician.

Umar attempts to capture him. Instead of fighting back, he frees himself and runs off to find and free Clea. And we are left with Doc behind the barrier with some very poorly rendered Mindless Ones. The next installment awaits.

This was a bit of letdown. And after a story that was half a clip show, that's saying something. Everett's vision of the Dark Dimension and its inhabitants are less imaginative. It's only been six months and Ditko is sorely missed. We get Marie Severin on art chores next month so we'll see where that leads.

[spacesuitsforemergency]

Zayne Zatara

⁃ 20 years old, older brother of Zatanna, Zelena and Zabrina Zatara

⁃ He’s friends with Onawa and Jonah, they’re gonna be a Justice League trio now. They’re all mom/dad friends and are actually responsible. They watch over the JLI

⁃ He’s super protective of his sisters, they’ve all always gotten along really well so he makes sure that Zabrina being a villain doesn’t tear apart the family at all (which it doesn’t, they’re all cool with it)

⁃ And Zelena’s his favorite but don’t tell the other two-

⁃ But seriously it’s obvious, they hang out the most. Which is fine, cause Zatanna and Zabrina are the more mischievous ones so they’ll go out while those two losers stay in

⁃ Zayne is of course a magic user as well, his mother is actually Hela. He uses necromancy the most, so him and Zabrina practice that together

⁃ He also has a cat named Zamantha (like Samantha from Bewitched) (so the Zatara’s cats names are Zamantha, Oz and Zalem and I love that)

[fillorian-pocketwatch]

The Makings and Fate of Quentin Coldwater: What Were the Writers Thinking?

Trigger warnings: Quentin Coldwater, seasons 4 and (briefly) 5, mentions of suicide/suicidal ideation, outdated ideas about the purity of women.

General warnings: Spoilers for the show and the books.

Buckle up, darlings, and my apologies in advance: this is a rough ride, and I don’t recommend reading it if you aren’t in the right headspace for it right now.

I hope that those who do read it might drop some LGBTQIA+ positive book/tv recommendations in the comments as a pick-me-up for others. I will add some myself if I can think of some good ones.

So as it turns out, I ran into something entirely by accident: the inspiration behind the character of Quentin Coldwater.

I knew that Eliot and his "will-they-or-won't-they" dynamic with Quentin in the Magicians books were both borrowed from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (Grossman has said so himself)--

but I didn't realize there was an actual preexisting character Grossman borrowed from for Q:

Quentin Compson, from The Sound and the Fury.

This explains so much for me. So much.

I ran across information about the character the other day while doing something completely unrelated (looking up some other book if I recall correctly), and when I saw the similarity of the two names and then learned about the first Quentin’s fate, I thought, could this be LG’s inspiration?

Further research revealed that yes, Lev has said as much in articles. And even if he hadn’t, the fact that he has written extensively *about* TSatF online makes it a relatively easy conclusion to draw.

While the two Quentins aren't actually much alike (at least on the surface; I haven't read TSatF yet, just in-depth summaries/analyses of it)--other than the fact that they are both mentally ill over-achiever college students, are preoccupied with the idea of another world (the world as they each wish it was), and constantly associated with symbolic clocks and watches--Quentin Compson's fate explains everything for me in terms of how to understand Quentin Coldwater's series-four fate.

Quentin Compson ultimately kills himself in the famous classic novel; he does so by drowning after jumping off the Anderson Memorial Bridge in Boston, Massachusetts. Today there is a plaque there to commemorate the character:

In the Faulkner novel, Quentin associates the smell of honeysuckle with his obsessions over his sister’s purity--an ideal he comes to feel let down by after she loses her virginity and then seems to lose herself further in the company of men he feels are unsuitable.

I can’t help but make a parallel with the “drowned garden” of season 4, episode 12.

Quentin makes the following speech in the drowned garden, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the closest thing we get to a suicide note:

You know the worst part of getting exactly what you want? When it's not good enough. Then what do you do? If this can't make me happy, then what would? Fillory was supposed to mean something. I was supposed to mean something here. But it's all... it's just... it's random. It's so random that the only way to save my friends is to yell at a fucking plant! Honestly, fuck Fillory for being so disappointing. You know what, maybe I was better off just believing that it was fiction. The idea of Fillory is what saved my life! [laughs.] This promise... that... people like me... [weeping] People like me... Can somehow... Find an escape. There has gotta be some power in that. Shouldn't loving the idea of Fillory be enough?

But the idea of Fillory is not enough, in the end, because the idea of happiness is also not enough. And by the end of his time on the show, that’s all Quentin has: the trappings of happiness (or at least the ones available to him, the ones he thinks might get him there), without the actual emotion.

Maybe he realizes, in the drowned garden, that he is at the end of his rope. Maybe that is where he decides to give up.

That, in my opinion, is why he begins to seem so shut down: it isn’t uncommon for people to distance themselves emotionally as a precursor to suicide (hence Jason being accused of “refusing to act” toward the end of S4).

I think it’s also why he doesn’t stop to wait and see how Eliot is after Margo strikes the Monster with the axes: he has given up on the idea that the things he thinks will make him happy actually will, or that happiness is actually attainable for him in the first place.

Quentin Coldwater drowns not in the fading of honeysuckle; for him it’s peaches and plums. In any case, he is definitely in over his head, and the water that spills out of the mirrors after his death feels like an homage to that literal drowning of his predecessor.

The TM writers found ways, as the show progressed, to tie the books back in to the show; the way they did it, however, was often roundabout to say the least. Their takes on how different plot points should occur, or be interpreted from book to screen, were usually close to abstract. They did do it, in many ways, but theirs was far from a faithful adaptation.

It fits, therefore, that they would tie The Sound and the Fury into S4 the way that it appears they did.

It also tells me something about how blame for their decision can be distributed, because either the showrunners:

a.) really did their research re: Compson and put together that this was the character that inspired Lev

or, as is much more likely, they:

b.) discussed it all with Lev himself--or LG was the one to broach the subject to see what sort of take they could spin.

Whatever the lead-in to the decision, I think three things combined to give them the idea for Q’s fate:

1. Quentin Compson;

2. Alice’s description, in the third book, of watching an old god kill herself to make way for a new world (which was when Umber and Ember emerged);

3. The following lines from The Magician’s Land: “The truly sad thing was that Ember actually wanted to do it. Quentin saw that too: He had come here intending to drown Himself, the way the god before Him had, but He couldn’t quite manage it. He was brave enough to want to, but not brave enough to do it. He was trying to find the courage, longing for the courage to come to Him, but it wouldn’t, and while He waited for it, ashamed and alone and terrified, the whole cosmos was coming crashing down around Him.

Quentin wondered if he would have been brave enough. He would never know. But if Ember couldn’t sacrifice himself, Quentin would have to do it for Him.”

So, it appears, the group of writers (LG included, however actively) apparently decided to take Quentin’s thought from book three and put him in exactly that position: make the choice, or fail to make the choice.

But the need for him to make that choice was never horribly convincing. They were very mistaken if they thought it was. And no matter what, it was ultimately a horrible, damaging idea. It hurt the audience, and it killed the show. The only sacrifice that was made was made in the name of ego and “clever writing” that the writers thought was edgy and risky in some desirable way.

[Quote from vulture.com]

It's not so deep.

What they did, ultimately, was borrow from more than one outdated work, and use those as excuses to do the wrong things re: mental illness and LGBTQIA+ representation:

Evelyn Waugh’s characters fail, once again, to live their lives and desires freely and openly (What a waste to rehash the long-denied dynamic from Brideshead Revisited only to deny it again);

Quentin Compson’s legacy of suicide and hopelessness lives on (and this is made all the more offensive when you learn that Compson’s suicide was based largely on ideas of spoiled purity which were solely the burden of women to uphold).

They took what could have been made right and beautiful and instead used their story to perpetuate the same sad old traditions of queerbaiting and Burying the Gays.

Tragedy is not more profound than happiness (just ask Quentin Coldwater). I'd argue that to make something really beautiful, you need to mend what's broken.

The world is a broken place. It's easy to break things here.

The worst thing they did to Q, by far, was to use the beautiful concept of minor mending against him like it was the fuse on a stick of dynamite: the thing he’d spent his whole life seeking--his specific field, his special skill in the actual real world of magic--was what he used to kill himself. He killed himself by *fixing something.* We need no further evidence that Q had given up hope.

What a terrible message, and what a slap in the face to viewers who put their trust in this atrocious writing.

And they did nothing to redeem themselves after the fact, either. If anything, they made it even worse, somehow:

Eliot, by the end of the show, has even less than he started with.

Eliot, apparently, is us: left without Q, stripped of the comfort of a world we thought we knew. Utterly let down by the writers who had the power to make things different.

I hate to end this on such a terrible note. So let me just say that if you were let down by the show, and you miss Q, you’re far from alone! I see you, and I hear you, and I share your pain.

TM got it all wrong. But I have faith that others will get it right.

And no matter what, in the last book, Quentin lives, and has nothing but a whole world of possibility open up before him.