Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
After an interlude of Gash doing some exposition and Stanley washing his face, angering his nurse for daring to be in a good mood because of “A tingling in my hands”, we find the now-dressed Meat asking around the city to try to find Boyd. And… No one really reacts to him. I mean, the drunk called him ugly, and a woman on the street says he’s, “A right queer one,” but those both seem muted reactions to a seven-foot-tall dude with no pupils, a crested head and an unnatural skin color. (I think. There haven’t been any black humans to compare to, so I guess it could be that this is just how a normal human sort of dark skin comes out in this art style. But that doesn’t sit right with me.
Spoiler: this comes up later in a way that is not good. Not good at all.)
Gash and his gang attract similarly little attention, at least until Gash decides on a whim to murder a grocer for trying to sell him an orange. He immolates the orange (All the hybrids, including Meat, carry flamethrowers) and makes a speech using the orange as a metaphor for how he means to scourge the surface of the Earth, leaving the inside, “safe, juicy.” Then they go on a little murder spree.
Gash’s plot benefits a lot more from having dialogue than Meat’s. Too bad the dialogue isn’t any good. There’s some variety among the different characters, but they’re all variations on a sort of sing-songy thing that’s part philosophical, part caveman-speak.
Meat goes to a government office and loses his cool when the government man is all snooty over being interrupted by a “commoner”, overturning his desk and baring his claws. One of Gash’s men witnesses the meeting and relates the news to Gash, who’s taken up residence for no clear reason in the clock tower at Westminster:
Gash: News of Meat, yes?
Other Guy: I see’d him at a leader building.
Gash: And you ascertained his purpose, yes?
Other Guy: He had some writey scratches on paper.
Gash: Yes, words, they’re called. You saw these words?
Other Guy: The leader man gived me what he gived Meat.
Gash: And you left the government man silent?
Other Guy: Leader men– They jabber and jabber till I fill jabber hole with these lady pictures (Banknotes. I can’t help thinking the “lady” he’s talking about is Elizabeth II, who woulda been like 12 at the time. But give the benefit of the doubt and say it’s Britannia, who did appear in a small vignette on pound notes of that period. But this seems like a lucky break, since the previous version of the pound note had George V on it) he give me. Jabber and spit. Jabber and go purpley and jabber no more.
Yeah. So…
Meat is shaken by how easily he resorted to violence, but eventually gets control of himself by the time he accidentally breaks in to the Mountbatten Home For the Mentally Infirm. He just tries the doorknob, but it breaks off in his hand. He quickly befriends the night caretaker, who takes him to Boyd’s padded cell.
Again, the art seems just a little at odds with the text, with the caretaker clearly frightened, and Meat trying to calm him, while the next has the caretaker, not unlike the drunk earlier, being mostly interested in whether Meat will pick up the tab for a new doorknob.
While Meat introduces himself to his father, the others appear and dispatch the caretaker, Gash ordering that his death must noisy enough to get Meat’s attention.
His dying shriek of “Kshudd Graaaaaaaaaaaa!” prompts Meat to shout the wonderfully awkward line, “My new friend!” and try to peel the cell door open. You know what this book is lacking? A couple of scenes of Meat wandering around London marveling at the beauty of the surface. The handful of panels we get of him just walking around are always with him distracted by his quest. But in three of his four interactions with humans on his way to find Boyd, there’s an implication that Meat actually has a really easy time getting close to people, a contrast to the antisocial tendencies of his siblings (And, probably unintentionally, a contrast to the way that almost everyone Rebecca crossed paths with wanted to kill her). The idea that Meat thinks of the caretaker as a friend, even challenges Boyd when he says to leave the caretaker as a lost cause, is really cute, but it would work better if we had more insight into Meat’s character at this point to contextualize it.
Or, y’know, they could just leave out the word bubbles, and it simplifies down to “Meat realizes the others are there, his instinct is to confront them, but Boyd talks him down.” Boyd pulls up the bedding, revealing that he’s spent the past 20 years digging an escape tunnel.
I do have to admit, fifteen panels of total darkness serve as a counterargument the thesis that this comic was originally meant to be wordless. It gives Meat a chance to lay down some exposition about Gash’s masterplan: Gash and the others, “Believe the time of man’s rule has passed,” and plan to send humanity the way of the dinosaurs and the mammoth. Boyd interprets this to mean that Gash is planning to trigger a new ice age, though, spoilers, if that is actually what he’s going for, nothing even close to that ever becomes clear. I mean, you will not really be surprised to learn that Gash’s plan, though the details aren’t fully explained, mostly involves shooting stuff with a giant mech.
There’s a really nice callback when they finally return to the surface: Meat is nervous about climbing up through a manhole after what happened the last time.
On the surface, it’s daytime now, and Boyd looks up in delight, as they’ve emerged outside an airfield, and there’s an airliner, looks like maybe a Lockheed Electra, just waiting for them to steal.
Issue four ends on the letter of introduction Rebecca sent with Meat:
So some things: interesting that she’s just flat-out wrong about the method of her murder. Gash does kill her himself, not Melina. But it’s a mistake that fits well, since they seem to be setting up Melina as the Dragon of this series. First we have her desire to feed on Rebecca’s “crimson pools (“He means blood, right Joel?” “I sure hope so, Tom.”)“. Also, the two times we see the brethren get their murder on once they reach the surface, Gash asks for volunteers, and she takes the lead.
Among the ads at the back of the book is one for Eternity’s upcoming adaptation of Captain Harlock, the one which will gain them some infamy in a couple of years when it turns out that they’d been defrauded when they thought they were buying the rights. There’s also, as I mentioned, an ad for Aircel’s The Walking Dead. Fun fact: Aircel also did the comic adaptation of Debbie Does Dallas.
You see, I hope, what I meant before when I said that the back half of the series was going to settle down and have a more normal plot than the first. Obviously, it’s a bit of a loss to have our weird esoteric plot about finding synthesis give way to, “And now it’s just a bunch of CHUDs who want to take over the world.” But in it’s way, it’s something of a relief to just read a normal sort of story where bad guys and good guys fight.
I find myself appreciating the story a lot more now that I’ve learned to just take in the pictures first, and take the narration and dialogue as more of a supplement than the main story. It’s surprisingly easy to follow just from the pictures alone. You miss some things, but a lot of what you miss isn’t actually that good. The first half of the series suffered from a strange abundance of storytelling paired with not a lot of actual stuff going on. Now that things have settled down, the visual storytelling is good enough to really convey plot as well as tone.
The one thing I do take umbrage at is the title. Zarathustra Syndrome. And I know it’s hardly a problem specific to Eternity’s War of the Worlds. But… So fucking often I see people invoke Nietzsche this way. Using the image of the Ubermensch to describe a being who is (if only in his own mind) superior to the common man by virtue of breeding and racial superiority. We’ve already seen it here, with Lex invoking Nietzsche in the Superman crossover. Hell, that Kevin Sorbo series Andromeda had a whole race that named themselves after Nietzsche whose culture was based around eugenics and who sat around reading Beyond Good and Evil all the time.
You’d think if they were really reading Nietzsche, they’d notice that the overman described by Zarathustra is not like that. The actual Nietzschian ubermensch isn’t a genetically superior being physically different from lesser races; the ubermensch is fundamentally, critically a self-made man. The ubermensch is not born to a great destiny, but — this is kinda the whole point — makes his own destiny. And while the man himself would’ve said it was Judeo-Christian otherworldliness he was rejecting, I think it’s more specific to say that the ubermensch is a contrast to the gnostic tradition that, despite about 3/4 of early Christian theology being dedicated to arguing against, pretty much became the dominant thing that informed popular Christianity for the rest of history. All that nonsense about genetically superior super-beings, destined by birth to dominate? That’s very essentialist philosophy, while the actual Nietzschean ubermench is an early prototype of an existentialist philosophy, one that finds his own meaning in life and his own values, rather than being a product of where he came from.
But I’m getting too philosophical. Let’s get back to big scary monsters punchin’ things.