Deep Ice: Or maybe to make little baby aliens (Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds, Issue 3)

Let us proceed from the assumption that it is March, 1989. The US joins the Berne Copyright Convention. Iran severs diplomatic ties with the UK over the publication of The Satanic Verses. Eastern Air Lines declares bankruptcy and their shuttle service, offering hourly flights between New York, DC, and Boston, is sold to Donald John Trump, who predictably renames it the “Trump Shuttle”. Speaking of disasters which threaten the global ecosystem, the Exxon Valdez runs aground and dumps almost a quarter million barrels of oil in Prince William Sound.

When we left Stanley Boyd and Rebecca McMannis, he’d just noticed that she had a bunch of velcro growing on the back of her neck, and this prompted him to point his gun at her, because the glowing hands and ability to summon spectral images of girls she’s never met and an unexplained affinity for the attacking aliens he can put up with, but she’s in serious danger of becoming too weird-looking for him to want to bang.

The dateline for issue 3 places us outside of Sheffield, where, now on the ground, Boyd again demands an explanation for Rebecca’s mutations. The dateline also assures us that it is May, 1913. Every dateline in the first three issues does this. This story takes place over the course of about five days, and every single establishing shot reminds us that it is May, 1913. In 2018, it is a four and a half hour drive from Edinburgh to Sheffield. The world record for flight airspeed around this time in history — May, 1913 — is around 110 miles per hour, so if Boyd could sustain that the whole way, it’s still a trip of more than two hours. Has he been holding the gun on her the whole time, but not actually pressing her for an explanation?

She calls his bluff, asserting that he won’t shoot her because he’s in love with her. He admits to it, but demands she disrobe so he can see “How much of you is still woman.” I am pleasantly surprised to report that the story acknowledges that this is an abusive thing to do, even under the circumstances. When Boyd says, “You’re not the Rebecca I knew,” she retorts that the Stanley Boyd she knew was a gentleman.

Of course, these two have known each other for what, a couple of days at the outside? But yeah, they actually made a point in the last issue of Boyd’s gallantry, with him apologizing for taking the “liberty” of picking her up when she’s unconscious.

Shamed, Boyd asks if the physical changes hurt, and Rebecca gives the rather wonderful answer that it’s, “Nay dif’erent than any woman’s aches and troubles. Only, they don’ show t’the eye, so men dinna’ fash ’emselves.” She tells him not to worry about it, since women have “Far more experience in copin’ than a man will e’er understand.” I am all for a streak of feminism in my apocalyptic aliens wars, so it’s really wild and interesting to have Rebecca essentially equate having her body slowly chimeratized to menstrual cramps, and then go on to turn it into an indictment of the extent to which men are generally oblivious to women’s pain.

Life is naught but dif’rent levels o’ sensation, you know. The rest is interpretation. Rebecca is strangely chill about the whole thing. She was at least a bit surprised by the glowing hands last issue, but it seems like the changes to her body are bringing along some changes to her thinking as well. For example, she now knows the name of the invaders, which is just slipped in there with no fanfare or even acknowledgement that this is the first time we’ve been given a name for them. While skinny dipping, she explains that the Aarach are a race older than man which has lived underground, and where does he get off thinking that humans have exclusive claim to the surface anyway?

We get a full page showing a town under Aarach attack. Sheffield, I assume. Some of the Aarach have come down out of their machine and shoot a man with a weapon that looks kinda like a flamethrower.

Rebecca does… Something… And the Aarach respond by… Something. It’s not clear to me at all, but Boyd gets it: they’re offering him and Rebecca a ride. When Boyd refuses to board the tripod with them, Rebecca does another thing, and the Aarach flee.

After a bit of fumbling with the controls, Boyd topples the thing over, and Rebecca takes over. Boyd is confident in his masculinity and, “Not the sort to be emasculated by a suffragette’s brazen display of female efficacy.” Though I guess she does some fancy maneuvering because on the next panel he’s feeling kinda emasculated by her brazen display of female efficacy. I can’t tell what she does to show off. Rebecca asks him what a suffragette is. Which I guess is supposed to be funny because it’s 1913 and women’s suffrage is a fringe position or something, but after the whole skinny-dipping sequence with its elements of postmodern feminism, it feels slightly misplaced and more-than-slightly cheap.

Their tripod acquires an escort to protect them on the way to London, but Boyd seizes the controls and fires on them after watching them dispatch attacking soldiers. Rebecca claims to object equally to human and Aarach death.

When they reach London (3 hours 11 minutes driving), Boyd demands to get out of the tripod at the sight of Westminster Abbey in flames, and demands Rebecca explain why they’d attack a church. He even offers her an out, suggesting she tell him that the militia had cannons behind the pews.

She says she’s going to explain, but doesn’t really. Rebecca says that the Aarach are like curious children, looking to learn. What does this have to do with them destroying a church? Nothing directly. Indirectly, nothing that is explained well enough to make sense.

Rebecca confuses Boyd for her dead husband, calling him John. A shot from her perspective shows that she’s even seeing him as John, though he reminds her of her husband’s death at the hands of the Aarach, cut down for “the sin of trying to reason with them”. She says that John died because he, “Dinna’ let them learn from ‘im. He blocked the process.”

You might recall, though, that the Aarach didn’t kill John. They traumatized him, but he survived and was starting to recover when the townsfolk dropped a boulder on him. But it’s what Rebecca told Boyd when she woke up. At the time, I assumed she was playing fast and loose with the details to abridge out the bit where her neighbors tried to murder her. Now, though, I’m starting to wonder if Scott Finley isn’t pulling a mild retcon.

A frame of flashback shows the bible in John’s hand when he confronted the Aarach. Since Boyd can’t see the flashback and Rebecca never says anything other than that John was “carryin’ resistance,” you’ve got to wonder what he made of that. A second flashback explains that weird sequence of panels back in issue 1 showing her crucifix. Since Rebecca “Dinna’ believe n’ more,” she, “Dinna block the learnin’.”

Okay. This much actually makes sense. Something about religious faith interferes with the Aarach. They tried to communicate with John, but he was carrying a bible, so the attempt left him cataleptic. By the time they grab Rebecca, she’s lost her faith after watching the townsfolk murder her husband. Possibly the Aarach tried to commune with Rebecca because they’d picked up something from their failed communion with John. They just flat-out murder Charon, and John was carrying a gun, but never mind. Religious angles are common in War of the Worlds adaptations, and there’s all sorts of places they could go here. There’s a straightforward Four Horsemen sort of approach of saying that, oh, something like, “Religion is the opposite of rational thought so the advanced logical minds of the Aarach can’t accept it.” Or maybe go exactly the opposite direction, and since the Aarach are underground-dwellers, maybe propose that they’re inherently demonic, and thus weak against Holy. You could push it to a Stargate sort of place and suggest that human religion is actually a corrupted race memory of an earlier encounter with the Aarach that implies the existence of some angelic aliens. Ooh, that’d be a twist if you had the angelic aliens swoop in from Mars at the end.

None of this is going to happen. I don’t believe the religious angle ever comes up again. We certainly never get an explanation for why they burned down Westminster. No, where we go instead is:

They’re readyin’ me. The truest learnin’ always comes from a mergin’. A thesis joined with its antithesis t’create the synthesis. That’s what they want from us– synthesis.

So that’s weird and florid and doesn’t really hold up under close inspection. But… I can’t honestly say that it’s unclear where they are going with this. Boyd will figure it out in two pages, but it only takes that long because they’re interrupted: a group of soldiers shows up. They saw Boyd and Rebecca disembark from the tripod and declare them traitors. I guess they didn’t see that bit where Boyd blew up all the other tripods. Just standard practice: if you see one of your own people get out of an enemy craft which is now vacant and isn’t doing anything aggressive, you don’t consider the possibility that he captured it, you just assume he’s a traitor and open fire instantly without even trying to capture him for information or anything.

Rebecca takes a bullet before Boyd can pull her to cover, and begs for her to “interpret” the pain differently. It’s a callback to the earlier scene, but like a lot of the dialogue here, it’s been compressed so much that it’s hard to really see what the point of the callback is. Aarach mushroom-craft come to their rescue, incinerating the soldiers. (I can’t tell if the mushroom-shaped craft are meant to be a different thing from the tripods or if it’s just the art.)

 

With the soldiers dealt with, Boyd finally has time to sort out what Rebecca’s synthesis speech was getting at: the Aarach want him to impregnate her. He’s amenable to this, but as he’s, “Not eighteen anymore,” he doesn’t get on with it fast enough for the Aarach’s liking. With Rebecca unconscious, they decide to get proactive, scooping Boyd up in their tentacles and it looks for all the world like he’s about to get a probing. Boyd, of course, objects to this:

Rebecca recovers just in time to protect Boyd’s callibisters. For about the fifth time in this issue, Boyd uses the exclamation, “I’ll be buggered.” “Only if that’s what yeh wish,” Rebecca responds.

Hm.

Y’know, awfully progressive for a woman of 1913 to suggest pegging on the first date. Heck, awfully progressive for a comic book writer of 1989 to make the joke. She orders him to disrobe, another mirroring of the earlier scene. Despite his unease at having “curious children” as an audience, Boyd eventually manages to to do the deed.

A page later, he rouses from post-coital slumber to find Rebecca kneeling before an Aarach. She initially refuses when it asks her to come with it, but then she sees it as a naked glowing-handed John. With an apology to Boyd, she embraces the Aarach and descends into a hole in the ground. “Uh… Does this mean it’s over between us?” Boyd asks.

He has to beat a hasty retreat as the remaining tripods begin firing in unison. And for the umpteenth time in this series of articles, they do “a thing”. All we see is them shooting and a bunch of smoke. I think the idea must be that they’re boring a hole back to their subterranean empire. A page of images of dead London is accompanied by narration by Boyd, four years in the future. “I’ve been interpreting ever since. On my better days, it nearly works.”

We cut to the repaired Abbey, where Boyd is giving a lecture. Here we get an odd tie to the contemporaneous TV series: according to Boyd, humanity has largely forgotten the Aarach invasion as a coping mechanism. He explains that the Aarach would not “interfere with the sacred synthesis of a fertile couple,” and this is why they chose Rebecca to become the mother of a race of human-Aarach hybrids.

Boyd looks down to his lecture notes to see something happening to his hand. The last three pages have a parallel design. On the left side, nine small panels showing Boyd as he leaves the church and puts on his hat, scarf, and gloves, and we see that he too now has a glowing hand. (I say nine panels, but by the third page, it’s just one large picture arbitrarily divided into a grid.) On the right, a tall panel shows the progress of Rebecca’s transformation, her body shiny and her hair replaced by the same crown-like structure as the Aarach. The final image of the comic, which I can’t show you, is Rebecca’s final form, a sexy nude sort of vaguely Giger-inspired creature. The final line of issue three is the end of Boyd’s lecture, on the first of the three pages: “Should Rebecca’s progeny turn out to be anything like she was, they’ll be beautiful indeed.”

Spoilers: They will not.

Whoa man, that got a little trippy. All the same problems we had last time are back. The artwork is less beautiful this time around, aside from those last few pages. We do get some explanations this time, which helps a lot, but the explanations tend to be fragmentary, to not go far enough, and to latch on to the wrong things. There is a certain amount of presumption on the part of the writing about which things the audience will need explained and which things they won’t, and I don’t find those presumptions entirely justified. We get a lot of words to convey how the Aarach want to use Rebecca to create a race of human-Aarach hybrids. But, like, that much I coulda figured out on my own. That much was pretty obvious. But you know what they never explain? Why the Aarach are stomping around England in tripods hosing down churches with heat rays. What does the whole warring (of the worlds) thing have to do with the Aarach desire to gain knowledge via “synthesis” with humanity? Even if you grant the dubious claim that they only fire in self-defense, what are they doing stalking around the countryside? Are we to understand that they’re literally just doing a geographic survey except that humans keep shooting at them? Because I could believe that if they actually made an effort to convey it. But we don’t see the Aarach doing anything at all that looks like exploration and study. The only thing we ever see them do is blow stuff up.

And you could have a great thematic thing here, linking back to the original Wells novel. Wells’s original novel was an allegory for European imperialism, with alien conquistadors dropping in out of the blue, laying claim to the place, and treating humans as vermin to be exterminated. You could view the Aarach here as an evolution of that trope, no longer conquerors but “explorers” who, again, turn up out of the blue, but only pull out the boomsticks if the local fauna proves dangerous. That could make for an interesting comparison with the original, demonstrating how even the more “genteel” ostensibly-peaceful explorers who come seeking knowledge and only kill in self-defense are still fundamentally imperialistic and differ from the conquistadors only in ways that are frankly a bit too subtle for the distinction to matter to the locals.

But if that’s what Finley was going for, he missed. The Aarach are too irascible to get that point across. Maybe that’s intentional, since our perspective is that of the humans, and Darwin’s finches probably didn’t grasp that he was there for research and not to eat them. That said, the whole, “To them, we’re basically animals. And while that doesn’t make them think they can kill us for shits and giggles, they’ll definitely put us down if we bare our teeth at them,” thing falls flat on a point so major as to basically be the whole “what this story is about”: y’don’t try to interbreed with animals. I mean, unless you’re John McAfee. It’s clear that the Aarach do recognize humans as a class of being they can and want to achieve synthesis with.

What we learn doesn’t justify most of what happens. The Aarach want to create human-Aarach hybrids. So they mutate Rebecca and then release her back into the wild to find a mate and get herself “storked”, and once she does, they collect her and take her back home. That’s all fine. But it doesn’t justify anything else that happens in this story. Why send an army of tripods to destroy cities? Why burn down Westminster? Why lead Rebecca and Boyd to London? Why anything other than delivering Rebecca to a convenient 16-45 year old man and turning on the Barry White? 

That’s the trouble with finally explaining some things. When you aim for weird and transcendent — and I think that’s what Scott Finley is aiming for — the explanation is almost certainly going to fall flat. It’s clear that from all the talk of thesis and antithesis that they’re going for something philosophical and cerebral here, but the deep parts aren’t really supported by the shallow parts. Like, there’s quite a lot of repetition that’s clearly meant to be meaningful: Boyd repeatedly using the phrase “Bugger me,” or the mirrored scenes at the beginning and end of Boyd and Rebecca ordering each other to disrobe, or even the very close repetition of Stanley explaining how it’s going to take him a minute to get an erection because he’s not eighteen any more to the Aarach, then to Rebecca a page later.

But at no point does this repetition ever feel like it’s teaching me something about the situation, the characters, or the human condition. It’s just kinda there. It’d be easier to derive some meaning out of the number of references to testicles (Especially since Boyd once comes close to Freudian-slipping the word in when talking about Rebecca’s growing tentacles).

Issue 4 presumably will land in May, though I’m no longer sure; the promised bimonthly schedule isn’t going to hold, since issue 5 is dated 1990. I haven’t been able to find a source that gives a more specific date for any of the issues than a year. Since our next stop, chronologically, keeps us in April 1989, I think we’ll wait a bit before returning for the second half of this War. The last three issues switch to a much more straightforward story, which on the one hand, is disappointing after the weirdness in these opening issues, but on the other, makes for a more readable experience.