Deep Ice: Ah, a kiss. Yes. (Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds #2)

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

I guess it’s January 1989? The only dates we’re given are “1989”, and we’re told that this is a bimonthly publication, a word which means both “twice a month” and “once every two months”. So two months after October, 1988 is… Okay, never mind. Let’s say it’s January, 1989. Reagan and Hirohito are out, Bush and Akihito are in. I turn ten.

Okay, so last time on Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds, the townsfolk of the Isle of Skye tried to kill Rebecca McMannis as a witch, and in return, they got exterminated by a race of giant tentacled mushrooms and giant creatures who looked like the love children of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Statue of Liberty (I am not alone in this interpretation; in his endnote to issue 3, Scott Finley says that artist Brooks Hagan refers to them as “matte black statues of liberty”).

This is an adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel.

Issue 2 may be the peak of incomprehensibility out of this series. Issue 3 is weirder, but it balances that with a bit of actual exposition. The plot isn’t actually that complicated, it’s just that the structure of the narrative makes it hard to follow. It’s particularly bad about establishing who characters are and how they relate to one another or even why they do things. The very first page of issue 1 did a great job of establishing the relationship between John and Rebecca. That they have a close bond despite recent tragedy, that he’s doing what he can to comfort her insecurities, and that they’re passionate toward each other. But this doesn’t carry over to any of the other characters in issues one or two. I spent a lot of issue 1 thinking, “Who are these people and why are they acting like this?” And I’ll still be doing it for issue 2.

For reasons which make even less sense when we find out what’s going on, Rebecca, last seen cradled in an Aarach’s tentacles, is now floating naked on a raft in the sea off the Isle of Skye. She’s spotted by a passing boat and taken aboard under orders of Stanley Boyd. I guess the boat is meant to be a Thunder Child analogue. We’re never given a name or anything. Boyd isn’t the captain, either. So why do they take his orders? Best guess is that he’s the owner. Boyd’s rich, his mother owning “about two acres” of Edinburgh’s market district. He doesn’t have a job per se, but he’s a flying enthusiast, and the boat is on its way to an exposition in Johannisthal (Germany’s first airfield) hoping to best “That red-headed Fokker kid”. The fact that he is a competent pilot will indeed be relevant later. Be happy about this, because it’s one of the few times that a character’s reasons for doing things is actually explained to us.

He orders Rebecca taken aboard because, “My mother raised three children, none of them to be fools.” See what I mean about motivations? The sailors aren’t sure if they should bring aboard the pretty naked lady drifting at sea. Okay. Sailors are a cowardly and superstitious lot — ir. No, wait. That’s criminals. But “sailors are uncomfortable with having women aboard boats” is a common trope. But how does his mother not having raised him to be a fool figure into his decision? There’s an alien invasion going on. Either she’s a refugee, in which case it’s not a matter of wisdom or foolishness; or else, she’s some kind of trap, in which case “My mother didn’t raise me to be a fool,” is the sort of thing you’d say before avoiding the trap. You don’t get to “Yes, let’s bring the naked pretty lady floating unprotected out at sea all alone aboard aboard our ship” from “We have a realistic decision one way or the other about taking this person on board, and I am not a fool.”

Rebecca dreams of the gallows. This is another wordless scene that is very powerful but doesn’t necessarily advance the story. And I’m not going to show it to you, because it is disturbing. A mob of dark-eyed townsfolk led by a demonic version of Shona has her hanged. As the rope snaps her neck, one dark panel shows the silhouette of a newborn dropping from her skirts. The final panel shows the neonate strangled by its umbilical cord.

Boyd tries to be reassuring as he wakes Rebecca, who claims her husband died in the attack before she was captured. Boyd warns her to “Be cautious about that kind of talk,” because they lost radio contact weeks ago and the men are close to mutiny. And for the second time in three pages, I’m not clear how what he’s saying connects to the situation. How much do they know about the invasion? Taken at face value, they don’t know that there’s been an invasion; they just know that they’ve lost radio contact. They’re still on their way to Johannisthal, with full intention of Boyd still making his air exposition even though the sailors are worried enough to be, “setting covetous eyes on the lifeboats.” And I guess, “Don’t tell the men that Scotland’s being invaded by aliens because the men are already wound up and I don’t want them abandoning ship,” is reasonable, but doesn’t it seem like if Boyd doesn’t know what’s going on, a better immediate reaction might be, “Wait, what alien invasion?”

Rebecca’s reaction is a little strange too: “I know what I know.” It’s enough to make me think maybe the text in Boyd’s speech bubble is misplaced and he was meant to say something else here. His reaction makes far more sense a few panels later, when Rebecca discovers that her hand is glowing.

At least, I assume that it’s glowing. This black-and-white, you know. Maybe her hand has just developed Spider-Sense.

After showing off his plane, Boyd climbs down onto… Something… I guess it’s the raft they found Rebecca on? For the love of God, explain something other than the Boyd family’s real estate holdings. Boyd shoots a hole in it… For some reason.

Okay. After a whole bunch of rereading, I guess maybe the “raft” was a hull plate from an Aarach ship, and he’s shooting it because he can’t tell what it’s made of and wants to see how resilient it is? But none of this is communicated to the audience. All we get is “For some reason, Boyd climbs down onto a black thing in the water, inexplicably asks for his gun, and shoots it.” And though the raft is indeed flat black like the tripods, there’s one panel where it kinda looks to have a grain to it, like wood. Or maybe that’s just the inking? The first time I read this, I thought he shot it by accident — he shoots immediately after Rebecca makes a joke about him accidentally shooting his foot off.

Whatever the reason, the instant he shoots it, a tripod emerges from the water. Rebecca orders him to throw his gun away, and he does, then Rebecca looks at her glowing hand. The tripod takes off, headed straight toward Edinburgh according to the captain. Rebecca asserts that the tripod wants them to go to London. No explanation for this is given. The captain tells her to shut up if she knows what’s good for her, but Boyd gives the bizarre response, “My mother’s in Edinburgh. We’ll talk of London once I know she’s safe.”

The next few pages are confusing. The ship sails by more tripods, which seem uninterested in it. The captain warns Boyd that they won’t make Johannisthal in time if they stop in Edinburgh and has to have it pointed out to him that competitive biplane handgun marksmanship might be obsolete in the face of these giant mechanical death machines stalking the countryside. And it’s only at this point, a day after their first encounter with the tripod, that the captain thinks to ask Boyd if he believes, “Th’ missy’s story,” or if he thinks she’s “one of them.” This is weird on two fronts. Most obviously, because the captain has not yet put his foot down and had her thrown off the ship for witchcraft. You know, once you’ve established that this is a world where a woman can be attacked by an angry mob and nearly murdered on suspicion of witchcraft for, near as I can tell, having had a miscarriage, there is a certain onus on your story to establish why everyone didn’t freak out when Rebecca turned out to actually have unnatural powers and some kind of mental link with the invaders. But they don’t.

The other thing they don’t do is give any context for, “Th’ missy’s story.” Because she hasn’t told a story, beyond “I got captured and I don’t know what happened after that.” Big chunks of this comic seem to either be missing or out of order or something. The captain being worried that Rebecca might be in league with the invaders makes perfect sense, but the framing of it is impossible to make sense of, since she hasn’t actually offered any explanation, and, in fact, she’s only ever been silenced when she tries to provide any sort of context.

Boyd decides to test Rebecca’s loyalties by smooching her, since he’s, “Never met a creepy-crawly with lips could do that.” Um. Okay. She turns out to be into it, and the preceding wordless panels of them exchanging looks can be taken as establishing some level of attraction between them, so I won’t object on the grounds of consent, but still, dude. Her husband’s been dead for less than a week. And, like, what if she were some kind of otherworldly creature? You want chestbursters? Because that’s how you get chestbursters.

Edinburgh is under fire when the ship arrives. Boyd tries to leave Rebecca aboard, ordering the captain to take her wherever she asks if he doesn’t return. But she goes with Boyd instead, as the captain’s men, “All think yehr glands are cryin’ oot louder th’n good judgment,” and won’t allow her to remain aboard. And if Boyd’s dialogue hasn’t been confusing enough, when the captain prays that God protect them from the monsters, Boyd answers, “What if these monsters are God?”

Wow, that’s an intriguing question that will not really be addressed in any meaningful way. Never mind then. We cut to Edinburgh to introduce Boyd’s mother with the rather wonderful description, “Yeh’ve admirable sized testicles for a woman.” Widow Boyd is trying to talk a Captain Bolander out of a futile defense of the town by pointing out that the tripods only fire when fired upon, “Returning your antagonism with tenfold the force.” This does something to explain the earlier scene with Boyd’s gun, and the fact that the Aarach don’t take any obvious interest in Boyd’s ship as it approaches. But I am not entirely convinced. I mean, it does appear that when we see individual people killed by the Aarach in issues 2 and 3, the comic takes some care to depict them firing first. But there’s also plenty of shots that look like they’re just shooting indiscriminately down at the city.

The gunners see the logic in Widow Boyd’s words, but Captain Bolander is from the tradition of pointlessly obstructive and stupid military officers in speculative fiction, and orders them to keep firing, threatening to replace them with his daughters, who, he claims, have, “Bigger clock-weights than yeh’ll ever see in the loo.” Y’know, that is a pretty high lines-of-dialogue-to-talking-about-a-woman’s-pendulous-testicles ratio. I feel like I should make a joke about transphobes here, but transphobia is too unfunny for me to think of a good one.

A confusing couple of frames later, one of the tripods is on the ground. It got shot by Bolander’s cannon, but the way the frames are arranged on the page, the causal relationship between the cannon firing and the tripod collapsing isn’t clear. It kinda looks more like the tripod suffers a friendly fire accident (This isn’t the only time it looks like the tripods fire on each other, and the way the story is going, the possibility of the Aarach having violent disagreements on strategy isn’t a stretch).

I am at a complete loss as to the details of what happens next. Bolander’s men climb on the felled tripod. Widow Boyd warns him of committing parricide. The tripod stands up again and shoots the men in front of it. Then the cannon shoots again, possibly at the same tripod, or maybe at a different one. Then something shoots the cannon and the men operating it. Bolander reacts in horror and accuses Mrs. Boyd of having, “Cheated meh of a Scots first victory ‘gainst the space froggies.” Okay, so most of the actual events are comprehensible, but I can’t find any sort of causality in them. Why is he blaming Mrs. Boyd? Hell, what is he blaming her for? What any of this? And is he meant to be threatening her? He’s shaking his fist, but I can’t tell if it’s a threat or just exasperation. Mrs. Boyd’s posture suggests that she’s recoiling out of his reach, but he’s facing the wrong way.

Stanley and Rebecca turn up, and Bolander immediately sees Rebecca’s hand and accuses her of being a “Space froggy” in disguise. I mean, okay, it’s weird, but isn’t “She’s a space froggy in disguise,” still a leap? Have they seen what the Aarach look like? And why “space froggies” for that matter? They look like matte black Statues of Liberty. We can see why a human would call an alien a “space froggy” because we’ve got this cultural thing of depicting aliens as “little green men”. But this is 1915 and we are in the story which originates the trope of squishy green aliens.

When Bolander threatens Stanley for defending her, Rebecca summons up an image of Bolander’s daughters, screaming in terror, from her magic hand. Their testicles are not visible. I guess this throws him off guard enough for Boyd to disarm him, but Bolander orders his men to shoot Rebecca, forcing the two to retreat, jumping from a rampart. Widow Boyd begs off as she’s got, “An engagement I shouldn’t like to miss.” Um.

So they leave. I’m not even sure why they came here in the first place. Boyd wanted to check on his mother, which I guess he technically did, but then he just leaves her in the middle of the battlefield. I think Rebecca is knocked out cold in the fall, and a tripod’s tentacles try to claim her. Boyd picks her up and makes a break for it, pausing to apologize to her unconscious form for taking the liberty of carrying her.

They arrive back at the boat just in time, but the captain already has the men preparing the aeroplane for takeoff and warns Boyd that his men will mutiny if Rebecca remains aboard. Rebecca does… A thing. Her hands glow, but I guess something’s meant to be different about it this time?

They cut back and forth between Rebecca and the tripods, and Boyd suggests that the ship might be safer with Rebecca aboard. So I guess the idea here is that the tripods stopped or drew back in response to her hands. But I’ll be damned if I can see how you’re supposed to get that from what we see. The captain gives Boyd his pistol and sees him off. We cut to the tripods destroying a ship, and it sure looks like Boyd’s plane just came from that direction, but I guess not, because the ship is still there on the next page. The captain takes a shot at them with a long gun, and the deck gets hosed down with heat rays in response. Which maybe is meant to reinforce the idea that the tripods only fire when fired on, but it’d be easier to understand if it weren’t immediately preceded with panels of the tripods shooting without being fired on.

Boyd has Rebecca sit up front, since the tripods are actively avoiding harming her. Rather than high-tailing it out of there, I guess Boyd’s got a mind to defend the city, because he flies toward a tripod and shoots at it with his handgun. This is a nice payoff for establishing that he was on his way to an aerial marksmanship contest. A series of very arty but not very comprehensible panels show him shooting out windows on a tripod, which I guess blinds it, because it shoots another tripod.

When Boyd turns back to Rebecca, though, he discovers what look like thorns growing from the back of her neck. He cocks his gun, and issue 2 ends on a long shot of the plane against a cloudy sky as he asks, “Rebecca, is there something you’ve neglected to tell me?”

Well now. That was an oddly beautiful slog. Kinda like a bad theme park ride of a story. So much of it is visually striking, but I can’t tell what’s going on. I mean, okay, I guess I figured it out mostly, but I feel like I’m the one imposing a narrative on it rather than the narrative presenting itself to me.

Maybe I’ll find some explanation in the author’s note on the last page…

The fantasy isn’t that space froggies come down from on high to steal our Eggo’s and overthrow Western Civilization. No, that’s not it at all. The fantasy element in “Invaders from…Mars/The Soviet Union/Cochise and the Chiricahua Indians scenarios is that humanity can come together in crisis and kick some “alien” butt. I, too, have lost my quarter in the Xenophobe machine and it’s damn compelling.

Director John Millus made a money and reactionary friends with Red Dawn with his assertion that “guns make you feel good.” I think he understands that the overriding attraction of fictional global threat is that, for once, the guns would all be pointed in the same direction.

Stephen King says this kind at horror is conservative: “I‘m okay, your’re okay-EEK…what’s that?” The ensuing summer festival of billowing skirts and golden epaulets is out reassurance that: 1) our way of life is worth defending; 2) that within each of us lie the resources to face the black-hatted usurpers of our liberty
and; 3) we can all join together if the threat is great enough.

It’s a terribly comforting thought. It’s also a lie. Humanity is as its best when it’s uninterested. We have trouble enough reaching consensus on a good day. Why would it be any easier on a bad one? The myth of unity emerging from crisis
is just that—a myth.

Our global threat exists today. It doesn’t come in tripods bearing heat—rays. It doesn’t come from double rows of latex teeth trickling Karo syrup. And it doesn’t come with a political agenda, though some would attempt to pin one on it. Yet, it has arrived, in hypodermics and acts of love.

Where is our unity now?

Scott Finley
Seattle, 1989

Or not. A… Are the Aarach a metaphor for AIDS? I understand less now than before I read that.

There’s a one-two-three punch of inscrutability here, between the aliens’ plan, the motivations of characters, and the actual details of what the hell is going on. We don’t know what the aliens’ game is. And that’s okay, on the face of it. That’s the sort of thing which ought to need figuring out after the fact, once you’ve got all the pieces. Except that there are bits of narrative that don’t act as though the aliens’ actions are inscrutable. Widow Boyd trivially works out that the aliens only fire in self defense, and Stanley Boyd trivially works out that the aliens won’t shoot Rebecca, and Rebecca trivially knows that the aliens want her to go to London, even though the aliens themselves are going to Edinburgh.

Then, we don’t really have any sense of why the people in the story do things. We’re literally never given a better reason for why Boyd is willing to risk his life to defend Rebecca than, “because he’s thinking with his dick.” And even so, Boyd and John McMannis are the only people in the story who haven’t reflexively wanted Rebecca dead, even before the Aarach show up. Why? If Rebecca is so compelling as to make a man like Stanley overlook the possibility that she’s a muderous alien, why is he the only one affected? Because the plot says so. Why is Stanley’s mother on the rampart with the gunners and Bolander? How did Boyd know to find her there? Why does he just leave her again a minute later? What the hell is that business with Widow Boyd having, “An engagement” in the middle of a War of the Worlds? What was the deal with Rebecca summoning a scary hologram of Bolander’s daughters?

And then, on top of it, the art keeps putting striking tableaux above actually conveying story. I have no idea how many tripods attack Edinburgh. The most we see in a single panel is two, but all the panels showing them are tight. Is it just the two? What are they shooting at? I can rarely tell. I frequently can’t tell if it’s meant to be the same tripod from one panel to the next. Individual panels have lots of detail, but almost all of them are close and crowded, and often, continuity of action doesn’t carry across groups of panels. The entire exchange where Boyd baits one tripod into shooting the other is squished into three panels at the top of page 26, with the plane and the tripods facing different directions in each of them. The entire bottom half of the page is a close-up of Boyd’s face, mouth open, his goggles maybe reflecting an explosion but I’m not sure. Possibly he’s pumping a fist in triumph. It’s the same fist he holds his gun in on the preceding and following pages.

There’s a whole bunch of stylistic decisions that went into this comic, each of which has its advantages — the black and white; the depiction of the Aarach entirely in silhouettes; the long dialogueless stretches; the lack of expository text; the frequent use of close, crowded panels. It makes the book very interesting to look at, but every one of those choices works against it actually telling a story. I’ve seen each of those techniques used on its own to tell a story well, and possibly some stories could be told well using all of them, but this story isn’t working for me. Pretty, though.

To Be Continued…