Recently, it seems as though Rick Remender can do no wrong.  Fresh off his announcement that he’s taking a break from Marvel Comics writing to focus on creator owned work, the writer of Low and Deadly Class is now working with The Authority artist Jonathan Wayshak and colorist Jordan Boyd to bring a new series called Devolution to Dynamite. Described as “a pulp / grindhouse science fiction epic that blends high-octane action, character drama, a world of strange mutations, and social commentary,” Devolution is shaping up to be an incredibly ambitious undertaking, even for Remender.  Just take a look at the art:

The obesity epidemic, religion, suburban dysphoria, genetic mutation, and military action all one page.  If there were a literal hot button, I think the creative team would be pressing it with maddening glee.  Wayshak describes the book as an opportunity for him to “get down-and-dirty and draw some really gnarly stuff.”

Remender is overjoyed to be working with Wayshak and Boyd.  He says:

Jon Wayshak and Jordan Boyd are two of the very best guys working and I’m excited to see them take this old story and give it new life. Jon spends much of his time outside of comic books so I feel very fortunate to have roped him into Devolution, and when you see the first issue, you’ll thank me. I wanted to work with Jon since I was first exposed to his madness in an anthology book with Jerome Opeña and Harper Jaten, two of my very favorite art-type people in the world, with whom he shares a stylistic approach. We need Jon. We need his powers to protect us from banal bulls**t that is always attempting to seep in. Jon is a great storyteller, marvelous illustrator, and world-class stylist. His inks and textures are unparalleled. With Jordan doing his usual masterful colors, we have the new superstar art teams in the galaxy of the universe of power and magic and love and d-e-v-o.”

It’s interesting to note that Devolution was originally announced in 2012 with Paul Renard on art.  The style has changed a lot since then, but it looks like the heart of the series remains the same.  I’m very excited.

Devolution is scheduled for release at the end of 2015.

Scotland

As voting for the shortlist came to a close, Scotland took home the title of Oxford’s Place of the Year 2014. This region of the United Kingdom came into spotlight when nearly half its citizens fought to pass the Scottish independence referendum, which would have allowed Scotland to declare itself as an independent country.

But what happened in September wasn’t Scotland’s first effort to break away from the United Kingdom. Back in 1979, the majority of Scottish residents were in favor of devolution, which would pass the powers of the Parliament of the United Kingdom over to the Scottish Assembly. However, despite the public favoring this move, only 32.9% of the electorate voted “Yes” to this referendum.

Then Scotland appealed for power again. In 1997, the second devolution referendum made way for the formation of the Scottish Parliament, which effectively gave Scotland control of its domestic policy. At an overwhelming majority nearing 75% of citizens and 45% of electorates in favor, the Scottish Parliament was established and held its debut session in July 1999.

After surpassing the other shortlist contenders — Ukraine, Brazil, Ferguson, and Colorado — Scotland undoubtedly marked the history books despite the referendum failing to pass. But as evident in Scotland’s history, this probably won’t be the last we hear of them.

Read up on our Place of the Year archive, and remember to check back for more posts about Scotland. Let us know what you think of this year’s Place of the Year in the comments below.

Featured headline image: Calton Hill. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

The post The Oxford Place of the Year 2014 is… appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Professor Rab Houston is the author of Scotland: A Very Short Introduction, which publishes in the UK today. He is Professor of Modern History at St Andrews University, and his previous books include Autism in History: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue and Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500-1800. In the piece below, Rab looks at why Scottish devolution has worked.

A common but erroneous line in the English press is that Scottish devolution only works because London bankrolls it. The truth is that Scotland’s historic experience of diffused power and local administration has facilitated the functioning of modern devolved government.

Scotland and England have been in Union for three centuries. Joined less at the hip than by a fingertip, they have managed (with Wales and Northern Ireland) successfully to promote a British project in spite of a centuries-old legacy of distrust, double-dealing, broken promises, and betrayal. Since 1999 Scotland has readjusted in part to what it was before 1707: a completely independent state with distinctive experience of government, religion, law, education, social relationships, population mobility, and culture. The success of devolution comes not only in the restoration of a measure of independence, but also arises from the way Scotland was governed both before and after Union.

For the last millennium the genius of Scotland’s political development has been simple. It lay not in developing coercive state power, but in accommodating plural forms within a structure of government where the touch of the centre was usually light. Scotland was for centuries socially hierarchic and politically oligarchic, but it was also governmentally ‘heterarchic’, organizing itself into a functioning whole without recourse to the compulsive mechanisms that its English neighbour took for granted. There was an element of centralized political power focused on the authority of kingship, but the essence of Scotland’s historic government lay in devolving, directing and co-ordinating rather than controlling. Scottish kings secured a measure of harmony through a process of ethnic accommodation – admittedly not always easily realised - underpinned by core values. Loyalty to the monarchy and shared Christianity were the most important and enduring symbols of unity, with a later admixture of Britishness forging a distinctively Scottish ‘unionist nationalism’. The reservoir of symbols has changed over the centuries, but the sense of identity rooted in history has not.

Scotland contained within its small compass many productive tension between different regions and cultures, of which the Highland-Lowland divide is only the most obvious. Since the time of Cinaed mac Alpín in the ninth century the success of kings in Scotland lay in accommodating diversity of race, ethnicity, language, lifestyle and social organization. From the fourteenth century Stewart monarchs tried by education policies and other means to reconcile and assimilate the ‘wyld wikked hielandmen’ with Lowlanders, but they were always aware that part of their kingdom’s heritage lay with a distinctive Highland culture. During the eighteenth century another bridge was built as tartan became a symbol of what Scotland could contribute in men and materials to British imperialism. Highland identity became firmly associated with Scottish identity in the nineteenth century, encapsulated in the romantic image of the Scot-as-Highlander that was popularised by Queen Victoria.

The tensions were creative because rulers reached important accommodations with local and regional diversity, enshrined in substantial degrees of local government autonomy. The enduring power of the nobility is one example, but Scotland’s largely self-governing towns also exemplify the strength of devolved authority. Burghs were financially flexible, empowered to respond to changing needs by legislation enabling them to charge additional levies on, for example, the sale of beer. Acts hypothecated the taxation to specified ends: Greenock built its new harbour in the mid-18th century using beer money and Edinburgh, among other things, to build churches and to fund its University’s chair of law. Many towns too had corporate endowments and incomes, known as the ‘Common Good’, which they were legally obliged to use on collective necessities. Sometimes that just meant corporate junketing, but it also delivered a social dividend in the promotion of a wide spectrum of both private activities and public interests ranging from clubs and welfare projects to civic histories and buildings. The importance of family, community, and locality that this focus implied is preserved in gravestone inscriptions from across 18th- and 19th-century Scotland.

The essentially local core of political and social life is also clear in British lawmaking on Scotland. In the half century before it was subsumed in 1707, the Scottish Parliament produced two-thirds of all legislation in Britain, but three-quarters of the acts were ‘private’, affecting particular towns or districts. After 1707 Scotland’s representatives used their time on the same local issues and kept distinctively Scottish law and religion out of the British parliament. Only in the field of economic policy did post-1707 politicians continue legislative attempts to foster national growth: for example, protection and bounties for the linen industry from the 1740s.

Being local did not necessarily mean acting parochially. Sometimes regulation was not just acceptable, but necessary and Scots were more comfortable accepting interventionist social policies than were the laissez faire English. An important example was the regulation of rents that began with the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915 and ended with massive government investment in housing in the era of the Welfare State. Yet Scots were also prepared to resist the power-seeking impulses of the centre and to promote a strong ‘civil society’ or ‘voluntary sector’ of collective action in bodies as diverse as trades unions, churches, social or sporting clubs, and neighbourhoods. These associations were autonomous, overlapping and sometimes competing, but they relied for their strength on a shared acknowledgement of the legitimate claims of all members of society, individuals and groups alike, in an interconnected whole.

It is the appreciation of diversity and the strength of internal political devolution that explains the many good things about modern Scotland. As much as the fact that Scotland was once independent, the way it was governed in the past and the means its people used to create multiple lines of authority accounts for the success of modern devolution.

I thought you all might be getting a little fatigued with your Presidential race (I may be wrong) so I thought that this week’s Very Short Introductions column might come as a welcome break. Dr Tony Wright, the Member of Parliament for Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, is the author of British Politics: A Very Short Introduction. He has kindly answered a few questions on politics on this side of the pond.

OUP: You talk in the opening chapter of your book about the confusion between Britain, England, and the United Kingdom. Eight years into devolution, do you think the confusion has improved or got worse?

TONY WRIGHT: There is a lot more attention to this issue now, inevitably so. Independence is on the agenda for Scotland now that the nationalists are in government, and there is more focus on the English question too in terms of England’s place in the union and a growth in Englishness. It is no longer possible to use words interchangeably as it once was. But much is still confused!

OUP: “The British enjoy a marvellous constitutional illiteracy. They think pluralism is a lung disease. This is not because they have no constitution… but because they have a constitution of a peculiar kind.” Can you briefly explain our peculiar constitution for our non-British readers?

WRIGHT: It’s the peculiarities of a constitution that has been made up over time, adjusting to circumstances, and never taken in hand or written down in a joined-up way. That’s why it’s been called a ‘political’ constitution. Whether we can go on like that in the future is less clear than it once was.

OUP: Is Britain still “the home of strong government”?

WRIGHT: In key respects, yes. There are more checks now (such as the Human Rights Act) but executive power is still largely in place. Just compare the different responses to the financial crisis in the UK and USA. In the latter Congress was central - in Britain, Parliament was not even sitting!

OUP: Back in 2003 you wrote a piece for The Guardian newspaper calling for an end to political spin. Has this been achieved?

WRIGHT: I called for an end to outrageous and excessive spin, and I do think it has been reined back from then. But spin of some kind is intrinsic to politics - it just has to be kept in check and not allowed into areas (like the civil service and official information and statistics) where it should have no place.

OUP: Once people have read your British Politics: A Very Short Introduction, which books would you point them too next?

WRIGHT: I would suggest Anthony King, The British Constitution and David Marquand, Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy.

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