Deep Ice: We’re Going to the Bottom (Eternity Comics’s War of the Worlds #1)

Please note: This article covers a science fiction story which prominently features infant loss and infertility as a theme.

Let us begin again. It is October, 1988. For the sake of not treading the same ground again, let’s say the first week. Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family, died last week. Space Shuttle Discovery will be returning to Earth on Monday, completing the first US manned space mission since the Challenger disaster. In Seoul, the 1988 Summer Olympics come to a close. This is the first Olympiad I really remember as a specific event, since I was five for the last one and this one carried a bit of extra cultural weight because it avoided the major boycotts of the previous three games (The Soviet Union had boycotted the 1984 games in retaliation for the US boycott of the 1980 games, and 29 nations boycotted the 1976 games in protest after New Zealand violated the sporting embargo against South Africa). It was the last Summer Olympics for the Soviet Union and East Germany, neither of which would exist by 1992. Both countries outperformed the US in the medal count. The retirement of Andrei Gromyko makes Mikhail Gorbachev the head of state of the Soviet Union. If that sounds late to you, Gorbachev had basically been running the place since 1985; historically, the Chairmanship was a largely ceremonial role when not held simultaneously with the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. Gorbachev would be the last head of state to hold the Chairmanship, as executive powers would stay with him when he moved to the newly-created presidency. Gorbachev would oversee the restructuring of the Soviet Union from an “Evil Empire” to a more democratic federation that would usher in a new era of friendship and peace between east and west and surely lead only to good things, unless somehow they ended up handing over power to a handful of rich, corrupt oligarchs who would eventually mount a stunning campaign to sow chaos in western democracies by influencing the elections of far-right ethno-nationalist faux-populist crazy people, themselves falling under the leadership of, basically, a Bond villain. But what are the odds of that?

But you can feel it, here in 1988. Change is in the air. The Olympics, the US return to space, Glasnost and Perestroika. Things are a-comin’. Speaking of Glasnost and Perestroika, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” is at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Cheap Trick, Robert Palmer, UB40, Guns n’ Roses and Joan Jett are also in the top ten. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is released in theaters, and you could say, “This is where the franchise really starts to go downhill,” except that most Halloween fans hated Halloween 3 (I don’t) and the smarter fans consider Halloween 2 the real downfall of the series. Nice to see Donald Pleasance again. Disney releases Cinderella on VHS and Laserdisc. They also release The Wind in the Willows on VHS in an edited form, but it’ll be another four years before the theatrical version, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (an anthology film which, in addition to a longer version of The Wind in the Willows also contains an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) gets a home release.

Doctor Who returns this week on the BBC to kick off its silver anniversary season with part one of “Remembrance of the Daleks”, a serial widely considered the best of the era, and even possibly better than the best of several other, generally-better eras. The serial returns the Doctor to the time of the series’ premiere and the setting of the very first episode. Coincidentally, William Russell, who was introduced in that very first episode twenty-five years earlier, and now just a few weeks shy of 64, becomes a father this week with the birth of his son, Alfred Enoch. Enoch would grow up to play Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter movies. The Oprah Winfrey Show makes its debut on UK television. ABC airs Liberace, a biopic about the legendary singer. Next week, CBS will respond with their own biopic, Liberace: Behind the Music. The ABC version has the advantage of having the rights to more of Liberace’s music, jewelry and costumes, while the CBS version has the advantage of being honest about the fact that he was gay. TV is mostly repeats and specials, thanks to the Olympics and the Vice Presidential debate cutting into prime time. ALF is one exception, with a new episode. Debuting this week are the horror-anthology series Monsters, the Judd Hirsch vehicle Dear John, and Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest. This week

Next week, some time between Friday and Monday, many Paramount-affiliated independent stations will air the two-hour premiere of War of the Worlds. But we’ve been through all that. What I want to talk about this week is something else which popped up at the same time. Eternity Comics was an independent publisher in the ’80s that specialized in creator-owned comics and licensed properties. Their best-known titles were Ex-Mutants (A “lighthearted post-apocalyptic adventure”, and not, as it totally sounds like, a shameless X-Men knock-off) and their adaptation of Robotech. The company would gain a little infamy from frequent legal issues, such as when it turned out that they’d bought the rights to adapt Captain Harlock from just some dude, and not anyone who had any legal authority to grant them a license. Or when they published unredacted reprints of old Mickey Mouse comics which had fallen out of copyright (The sticking point being the lack of redaction; Disney would rather everyone just forget about just how ridiculously racist their 1930s comic strips were).

But we are here, of course, because they decided to take a swing at War of the Worlds. The timing is unlikely to be coincidental, but then, nothing is, really. It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the George Pal movie, and the cover of issue 1 reminds us that it’s “Now a hit TV show!”  Based on that, you might be forgiven for thinking that Eternity Comics had picked up a license to adapt the TV series. Have you learned nothing? No, despite the coattail-riding, this is a completely independent adaptation of Wells’s original story.

Or… Not. I’ve asked more than once now just how far afield you can go before you stop being an adaptation of War of the Worlds. There’s hardly anything in either season of the television series that really stands out as “Oh yes, clearly this is drawn from the source material written by Wells a hundred years ago.” But they clearly count because they’re both explicitly sequels to the 1953 movie. Is it enough to say, “A technologically superior alien race invades Earth without warning and humanity proves defenseless until the aliens are abruptly killed off by disease”? Alien Dawn omitted the disease, and several of the adaptations we’ve looked at gave humans agency in the aliens’ defeat. Is it the presence of tripod battle machines? The George Pal film is a stretch on that point, but of even more concern, has the entire Giant Robot Mech genre of anime now fallen within our definition? Certainly Goliath is an argument that a War of the Worlds adaptation can have some overlap with Robotech. And what do we do with something like John Christopher’s The Tripods, which is clearly inspired by War of the Worlds, but which no one has ever tried to pass off as an adaptation of it?

We open with a note from author Scott Finley, which claims that despite the breadth of adaptations the story has seen over the years, none stray too far from the original story. Clearly, he never watched the 1980 Polish version. He seems to reckon — with a certain amount of humility, as he doesn’t suggest that his version is better — that there’s value in trying out a radical departure or “blood-doping” as he calls it. But what is it, in a radical departure, that makes this still count as a reinvention of the original story, rather than a wholly new story in its own right?

I’ve been over the Eternity take on War of the Worlds a few times now, and I haven’t managed to get a comfortable hold on it. Here’s the basic plot of issue one: Rebecca and John McMannis live in a rural Scottish fishing village in the early 20th century. They’re a close, committed and loving couple, despite the trauma of a recent stillbirth that has left Rebecca unable to bear children (This is demonstrated by a page-long nude scene where she wakes in the night, has John remove a spider that’s crawled onto her, and then they make love).

For reasons that aren’t really clear, though, Rebecca is an outcast in town. Shona, a round woman with no neck who kinda looks like a Shel Silverstein drawing, is openly pushing the idea that Rebecca is a witch, that she’s responsible for poor recent catches, and that she’d actually murdered her baby to use its blood in satanic rituals. The closest thing to a reason for her accusations we see is a pair of panels indicating that Shona and John had been lovers at some point, but there’s nothing close to a reason the rest of the town would go along with it.

One of Rebecca’s sheep wanders off the next day, forcing her to visit the grave of her lost child. The sight of Rebecca visiting her child’s grave just gives more fuel to Shona, since, I guess, a grieving mother visiting her child’s grave is unusual enough to be clearly nefarious. Rebecca finds the missing lamb, mutilated by a tentacled, mushroom-shaped device that has sprouted from the ground. When she summons John to the scene, both the machine and the dead lamb are gone, and he assumes she was simply overcome by her grief.

Shona persuades Charon, a fisherman, to exhume the child’s grave in the night, certain he will find the body missing by holding his outstanding grocery bill over his head. I think Shona is married to Ian the shopkeeper, who’s recently had his stores raided — supernaturally, by Shona’s reckoning. Though Ian doesn’t object when Shona pretty openly admits her plan to make John her lover once his wife is out of the picture. Maybe he’s her brother or something. I note that this plan implies that she really does believe what she’s saying, since, had Charon returned to confirm that the mean ugly lady had just strongarmed him into digging up the dead baby of the beautiful grieving woman, that would probably not go well for her. Fortunately for our accuser, he finds neither a body nor an empty grave, but something very violent and well-armed.

When he doesn’t return, Shona, desperate, goes to John directly. They find Charon’s mutilated body, burned to the bone, laying in a stream that has inexplicably frozen.

This, of course, means war. Shona slings accusations at the funeral, and a new, unnamed character who for some reason looks like Edgar Allen Poe suggests to John that he murder his wife in bed that night. John decks him.

Since “Hysteria isna’ going t’help us find,” the cause of the town’s calamities, John picks up a shotgun and a bible and returns to his son’s grave. He confronts the returned mushroom, which disarms and attacks him. John is not killed, but left in a fugue state. He’s found “Back o’ Ogilve’s sod house,” by the torch-wielding mob that is on its way to murder Rebecca. She’s narrowly saved from being fire-bombed when Shona objects to the use of her good whiskey.

Rebecca takes a chance on playing at their fears by copping to being a witch, and threatening to curse them all. Shona is thrown into a scratching fit at the suggestion that she’s been supernaturally infested with chiggers. Rebecca claims her stuporous husband and leads him to the cliffside, hoping to find their way to a boat before the rest of town musters the courage to pursue. Unfortunately, they only make it half-way down before the mob arrives. John recovers and has just enough time to profess his love before he’s crushed by a large rock the villagers huck over the cliff.

Rebecca is captured and returned to town to be, y’know, murdered. This is a bridge too far for Ian, who has to be cold-cocked by his sister-daughter-wife-whatever so she can “baptize” the “witch” by drowning. Once she’s under, though, everyone learns what a bad idea it is to go mistreating a witch, because the three big brothers of that mechanical mushroom dealie emerge from the ground, and it’s heat-ray time. At least, I think they’re bigger, and I think it’s a heat ray. Black and white is very powerful and a good fit for this comic for the most part, but when it actually comes to shooting stuff, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.

Ian recovers and tries to make amends for his role in events by rousing Rebecca and putting himself between her and the “aliens”, but it comes to nothing; he is easily dispatched, and then, um. A thing happens.

Yeah, maybe color would’ve made this clearer. I don’t know. This Gort-looking motherfucker shows up and… It gets in a fight with the mushroom thing, maybe? And it looks like it wins, maybe? But then in the issue’s final panel, we see Rebecca held prone in the tentacles of one of the mushroom-shaped thingies.

To Be Continued…

Um. Wow. This is different. After only one issue, it’s hard to know what’s going on. And what’s going on isn’t really going to be clear until the midpoint. Rather than play coy, I’m going to come out and explain some of it. I haven’t actually figured it all out yet, and probably won’t. Our “aliens” here, technically, aren’t. These are the Aarach, an ancient, subterranean race. Okay. That’s new. Even it it is, oddly not the only time we’re going to see the alien war machines rise out of the Earth rather than fall from the sky. Heck, we’ve already seen it once. But having the “aliens” be native to Earth? I dunno. I’m not sure if this doesn’t actually cross a line. I mean, if the aliens aren’t aliens, can we still call this an adaptation of the alien invasion story?

This is not great. Some of the art is very striking, but a lot of it is just muddled. And that’s going to get worse, with some recurring images and iconography that you can’t really make out. The story is similarly muddled. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about turn-of-the-century Outer Hebrides culture, but I find it hard to buy this whole “Jilted girlfriend convinces the entire town to burn her ex’s wife as a witch,” in a story set in 1913. Motivations are muddled and character actions don’t make a lot of sense. Now, the story will settle down and become more straightforward as we go, but unfortunately, it’s going to peak in terms of weirdness before the narrative really gets its act together, so the story is a lot more boring by the time you can actually follow what’s going on. These characters and this setting we’ve been introduced to? Done, except for Rebecca. Who isn’t even the main character, as it turns out.

The mushroom machines are, of course, this story’s interpretation of the tripods, though in the few panels we get where you can tell, they don’t have the right number of legs. But that’s okay. The Statue of Liberty/Gort thing? Near as I can tell, that’s the Aarach’s natural form. Scale is hard to judge. The first time we see a tripod, it seems tiny, about the size of a dog. But I’m not sure if it really is, or if that’s a trick of perspective. The Aarach will consistently be depicted as larger than a human, but in some scenes, it seems bigger than the tripods as well, while in others, it’s only about twice human size.

The art isn’t much clearer than the storytelling, even when it is striking. The frozen stream bit, for instance, is communicated purely by John saying “It’s the bloody month of May” and then bouncing a pebble off the surface of the water in the background of one small sixth-page panel. There’s repeated cuts to Rebecca’s crucifix where it looks like she’s casting it away, only for it to still be on her in the next panel. And while the tableaus are very nice, anything with even a hint of action is confusing.

Did Scott Finley create, as he intended, “Something more than an anemic picture-book suitable for your plastic sleeve pile… but not suitable for reading”?

Well, he created something novel to be sure. But when it comes to actually reading it?

I reserve judgment.