Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
And now, the conclusion.
The frontispiece tells us that War of the Worlds is published bimonthly — a slight exaggeration since this is the last issue — so that would put us in March or April of 1990, which fits with the advertisements in the back for “Silver Storm”, a new superhero series starting in May. The “Malibu Hotline” page at the back announces the upcoming releases of an adaptation of Logan’s Run, a Captain Harlock collector’s video, Ninja High School: A Boy and his Dog Supreme, an “adult” miniseries called White Devil, and Gun Fury Returns #1, in which the, ahem, “squirter of justice” faces off against the, ahem, “Notorious clown killer Buttman and his twisted sidekick Throbbin'”. Ahem.
Sorry. Bit of a chest cold. Anyway, issue 6’s splash page does not remind us that it is 1938. Instead, we just get Meat tending to the injured Boyd against a white background with the issue title, “Dead Godheads”. How am I supposed to know that a whole year hasn’t passed since the last issue? Other than the fact that Meat’s still trying to stop Boyd from bleeding out.
He fails, but the old man’s apparently not dying so fast that he can’t still have a subplot this issue. This is demonstrated when he picks up Meat’s flamethrower and immolates one of the brethren who was sneaking up on them.
n another apparent mismatch between the narrative and the art, Boyd proposes that he and Meat stop Gash by, “Forgetting that we’re alone,” having Meat call in the “cavalry”. Meat doesn’t understand this, so presumably Boyd explains off-panel; the next we see, Meat has said his goodbyes, strips naked, and jumps into what looks like a river. And Boyd looks completely shocked by this, apparently not having expected it.
The remaining female hybrids, who have some reason decided to strip naked, are trampled by Gash’s tripod while he babbles semi-coherently about his grand plan to, “scour away the surface and bring our mud people into the light.”
What happens next is a bit confusing because it gets a little metaphysical. You could be forgiven at this point for thinking that Meat swims back to the Aarach city, which is, you’ll recall, below England. But in this case, the art and the narrative align, though both remain vague. We’ve established that the Aarach are telepathic. Gash made comments about concealing the details of his plan from the others so the knowledge wouldn’t leak from their “fragile crania”, and Gash and Meat have been able to locate each other telepathically. Except that one time he had to send Sniv to murder a petty bureaucrat to get the location of Boyd’s asylum. Never mind.
Once under the water, Meat is able to commune with the old Aarach telepathically. Possibly being underwater helps with the range, since they made a big deal about Gash coming to America to get out of range. More concretely, Meat needs to keep Gash from overhearing this communication, though he will turn out to have underestimated him on this point. We get a large tableau of the Aarach domain which is lovely, though it does give the impression that the old Aarach don’t actually do much of anything, since they’re all just kind of standing around in a large cavern, with their fleet of tripods as the only obviously-constructed thing there.
The Aarach are not pleased with Kids These Days, and immediately lay into Meat for being a “product of that hate” that they were met with when they visited the surface, years earlier. Meat calls them out on it, that it’s not his fault he was born and that they’ve been kind of shitty parents. I guess they’re impressed by this, and ask him what he wants.
This gives us a good segue back to Boyd, who, apparently simultaneously, has walked, despite his mortal wounds, to the nearest army base, and is asking to borrow a B-17. The B-17 first entered service in 1938, so, as with the Lockheed Electra last time, the plane is historically reasonable.
Maybe a bit less reasonable is the dramatic necessity of having the airmen not notice Gash’s tripod bearing down on them until Boyd points it out to them.
In the Beneath, once Meat finishes making arrangements with the Aarach to intercept Gash with their own tripods, Gash reveals that he’s been listening in on the whole conversation. Once the flying fortresses have taken to the air, Boyd persuades the crew to leave the ship to him and bail out by threatening them with a grenade. Since I am taking so damn long with this, you may be wondering what Boyd is doing with a grenade. But we actually established in the previous issue that Boyd had stopped somewhere on the way to Pittsburgh to buy grenades. If you are not from the US, you may find it odd that Boyd was able to just casually buy two of them. But in the close-up, the grenade he’s holding is quite clearly a US Army Mk I; a World War I-era grenade which was withdrawn from service during the war due to it being considered too easy to screw up when starting the fuse, in which case you didn’t so much throw a grenade at your enemy, as give them a gently used grenade in convenient ready-to-use form for them to properly start and throw back at you. So I assume, twenty years later, the Army probably still had crates of those things they were looking to get rid of. Y’know, I bought a grenade at Sunny’s Surplus once, about 30 years ago. Admittedly, it was a Mk II, not an Mk I, and the guts had been taken out. But I think my point stands. Whatever it was. Boyd is planning a suicide mission and wants to spare the pilot because this unnamed character who appears in all of four panels reminds Boyd of himself as a young man. To punctuate this, we see the pilot shout, “Shit ‘n perdition!” as he parachutes away.
Meat narrowly avoids being trampled by Gash, and even manages to retrieve his flamethrower, but is ultimately caught up in the tripod’s tentacles and captured. Like most of Gash’s scenes, especially in this issue, it’s a little confused between the visuals and the writing. In particular, Gash keeps talking about how he wants to capture Meat and force him to watch from the tripod as he destroys first England, then the world. But the whole time, the tripod is pretty unambiguously trying to kill Meat, to the point that when we do cut to Meat, tied up inside the tripod, a few pages later, it’s clearly meant to be a surprise that he’s still alive.
Certainly, a lot of Gash’s inconsistency can be explained as him having gone mad, twisted by the discovery that his biology won’t allow him to survive long on the surface. But on balance, it feels more like a lot of Gash’s plans and motivations were tweaked late-in-the-day. You get the impression that Gash’s “plan” is sort of like the plan the Cylons had in Battlestar Galactica — that is, the writers asserted that their was a plan back at the beginning, and just hoped they’d think of one before it was time to reveal it.
Boyd, meanwhile, as you’ll remember, dismissed the crew of his Flying Fortress, but, like, he’s up there with two other ones. Those dudes are screwed. Boyd reflects on how they don’t stand a chance since they don’t know that the tripod’s weak spot is the eyes. Okay. It’s not necessarily a showstopper, and maybe if I weren’t so damn exhausted from the effort of trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I’d overlook it. But I have a couple of concerns here:
- Like, aren’t the big eye-shaped windows kind of an obvious target even if you haven’t been told that it’s the weak spot? Are the gunners in the other planes saying “Aim for the undifferentiated gleaming metal shell, guys; I bet that’s a better target than the big glass windows”? This is like how in Power Rangers everyone finds the Z-putties completely indestructible unless they have the keen fighting instinct to work out their one highly secret weak spot: the giant clearly-marked symbol covering their entire chest. (This once led to them being defeated by children with dodgeballs).
- Boyd talked to these guys. He couldn’t have mentioned the fact that the eyes are the only useful place to shoot them? He knowingly sent them to their deaths? Dick.
But then, even knowing the weak spot, Boyd only fares a little better. I can’t tell exactly how it goes down. At least two of the four planes are hit by the tripod’s heat ray, and one of them crashes into a third. I think an engine from one of the destroyed planes hits the front of Boyd’s, destroying the bombardier’s compartment. My gut tells me that this should be the kind of injury a plane like that could limp home with, but I don’t have anything like the aviation knowledge to dispute Boyd’s assertion that his plane is dead.
Before the showdown, Boyd monologued about how he can’t sense Meat anymore. I think possibly this might have been an attempt to build up suspense that Meat really is dead, since we last saw him being dragged into a cloud of steam with Gash laughing at the prospect of boiling him alive. But the suspense is undercut when Gash shouts to his unconscious and restrained prisoner that, “I just killed daddy, yes.”
It just seems like a bad move in terms of the emotional beats of the story to show us Meat here. The logic of the scene is mostly solid: Gash sees that the fighters have been dealt with and he taunts Meat, which is what wakes him up. Indeed, the fact that Gash considers the battle won figures into what happens next. How Gash knew Boyd was in one of those planes, we’ll just have to handwave. But from an emotional standpoint, the right place to show us that Meat is still alive is actually on the next page, and here’s why:
Boyd decides to point his crashing plane at the tripod’s eye and sacrifice himself to stop Gash. “Sometimes the only option left is the unthinkable. This one last thing I’ll do right.”
In a strange twist that I think is emblematic of the whole series in its failure to quite know what it wants to be, the emotional climax of the story turns the plot climax into an anticlimax. Because just as Boyd is about to take Gash down once and for all, Meat stirs briefly. The light switches back on in Boyd’s head, and Stanley Boyd leaves our story not by nobly sacrificing himself to defeat Gash, but by diverting the plane away from the weak spot at the last moment, the flying fortress uselessly exploding against the tripod’s armored side.
Harrumph. It’s not like Boyd was a great character, but he is the one who sticks around the longest. It’s an ignominious end, and he doesn’t even really get a character arc. There’s a hard cut from him as a brash, cocky middle-aged man to a broken old man, but we don’t actually get to see him grow or change. There’s hints at the beginning of this issue and at the end of issue three of him growing a more philosophical side, in parallel to Rebecca, but it just comes and goes rather than following an arc. Having him die in a noble sacrifice — even an ultimately doomed one — could be a solid idea, but there’s nothing to earn here: he doesn’t grow into it. He instantly commits himself to helping Rebecca, at no point shows any reluctance to sacrifice himself, instantly commits himself to helping Meat, and never has any real trouble facing down the various challenges put in front of him. He’s practically an action movie hero, except for the fact that he’s old and can’t shake off bullets as “only a flesh-wound.” (Well, except that he actually does spend a good chunk of this issue only mildly inconvenienced by the process of bleeding out.) There’s a saving throw in the last few pages to frame his death as a parallel for Meat, but it’s too little too late.
After Boyd dies, Meat blacks out for another sixteen hours, because Finley and Hagan realized that Gash still had to walk back to England for the climax proper. The Aarach cavalry arrives, a wall of black tripods facing off against Gash’s white tripod in the water near the coast of England. The fight that follows is three and a half wordless pages, a rare show of trust from Finley to just let the visuals tell the story for him.
It’s… Fine. It has its moments. Like all the fight scenes, it gets a little confused in the details, but the gist is clear enough that this doesn’t matter. The fight is entirely one-sided: Pittsburgh steel is apparently immune to heat rays. They never come out and say why, and the only reference to it before sounded like a joke. The old Aarach are unable to scratch Gash’s tripod, while he’s able to dispatch them with little effort.
There was a thing about the white tripod being solar-powered and this making it stronger than nuclear power, but it’s not clear what that meant or how it’s applied. The only thing I can tell definitively from the fight is that the black tripods can be damaged by heat rays, but the white one can’t. If the white tripod’s weapon is more powerful, that is not made clear (Remember, we already learned in issue 3 that the tripods can take each other out). I don’t necessarily need it all spelled out for me, but everything about Gash’s plan and his tripod has been vague and confusing, and I have little enough faith in this production that my default assumption is just “Finley has no idea what’s going on and is just handwaving it.”
You could just say that Gash worked out how to block heat rays by adding something not found in the Beneath to the alloy, instead of the confused nonsense about harnessing the power of the sun and needing to go to Pittsburgh for the steel. Especially since they never once address how it is that Gash knows how to build a tripod at all, let alone one superior to the Aarach ones. Gash, after all, does not really seem like the engineer type.
With the only remaining opposition taken care of, Gash prepares to, “Peel away England – layer by layer.” Though, “Boyd would know what to do. He flowered in hopeless tableau,” Meat finds that his only ally is desperation. And in desperation, he does “the unthinkable”.
“I sure hope so, Tom.”
Well, actually, he just struggles against his bonds until the fine wire holding him to the wall breaks. I guess the idea here is that while Meat compares himself unfavorably to Boyd, he ends up executing the same plan: just power through it despite it being impossible and throw himself directly at Gash. Before Gash can open fire on the English coast, Meat grabs him from behind and… Then I do not know what the fuck happens.
Seriously. I do not understand the next page. We see Meat’s bleeding hands, still bound together at the wrists, grabbing for… A thing. The heat ray controls, I guess? The tripod shoots at… Something? It explodes with a big mushroom cloud. Then there’s a bunch of streaks going up through the tripod, blasting the cockpit open in a vague parallel of the damage to Boyd’s flying fortress. And then there’s a panel where it looks like a meteor hits the tripod.
My best guess is that Meat shoots the ground and somehow this creates a frickin’ volcano, which burns the side off the tripod. What? That’s not just a natural feature of shooting heat rays at the ground; we’ve seen that before. The tripods back in issue 3 returned to the beneath by burning their way down. So… What? Did it just so happen that the tripod was standing right over a pocket of magma? Did Gash take the long way around and they’re actually in the North Sea and Meat shot an undersea gas deposit? Did he know that was going to happen? Was it just good luck and all Meat actually meant to do was spoil Gash’s aim? And what about Scarecrow’s brain?
Gash begs for his life, but Meat isn’t having it, and garrotes his brother with the bindings between his wrists, pulling until they break.
It does not become clear exactly how Gash dies until the next page, where we see his severed head on the floor at Meat’s feet while he surveys the burning tripod and reflects that he is, “The last remnant of the war.” Like his father, he declares, “This one last thing, I’ll do right,” and jumps into… Something. A plume of smoke that’s still rising in front of the tripod. The maybe-volcano. The smoke clears, leaving us to end on a wordless full-page panel of a planet (I can’t swear it’s the Earth; in black-and-white, I can’t tell if it’s meant to be clouds and ocean, with the shapes of the continents obscured. There are some hard lines mixed in there too, so possibly this is meant to be Mars, because… I have no because here) floating in space.
END
Oh, were you hoping for closure? Well, we made sure everyone was dead by the end, so that counts, right?
I mean, sure; the story is pretty well all wrapped up with nowhere obvious to go from here, so it’s a fine place to stop. But still, with everyone dead, it just feels abrupt. Though I am a little suspicious about the whole “everyone dead” thing: I feel like they kinda glazed over that part. Sure, we see Boyd kill a bunch of the male hybrids and Gash trample a bunch of female ones, and Melina is killed by Meat. But back in issue 4, I thought they said only five of the bretheren were going to America. And are we really just taking for granted that Meat murdered Sniv after interrogating him?
Are we supposed to conclude the old Aarach are all dead too? Did they send their entire species up to lose to Gash? I guess we don’t really have to decide one way or the other, as surviving Aarach content to stay underground forever doesn’t actually constitute a loose end the way a surviving hybrid would.
Ending this way, I don’t really know what we’re supposed to take away from this. There’s no lesson to be learned here since there’s no one left to learn it. There is a kind of optimism in the first half, with its talk of “synthesis”, that is completely undermined by the second half’s presumption that, “Upon reflection, contact between different races was a mistake,” a moral which makes my skin crawl.
There’s good stuff mixed in here, of course. The decision to make Meat dark-skinned while Gash is an albino helps soften what would otherwise be H. Rider Haggard-levels of unpleasant racist implications. Doesn’t fix the fact that this still comes off as pretty much a sci-fi tract warning of the dangers of miscegenation.
The crypto-racist implications are this interpretation of War of the Worlds‘s greatest sin, hands down. But for the purposes of this project, there’s another sin we really need to address: this just isn’t an adaptation of War of the Worlds. I’ve asked before how far afield you can stray from the source material before you stop being an adaptation. I think we’ve found it. Alien Dawn may have strayed a long way, but you can still watch it, and see that it’s about vastly more powerful aliens quickly disrupting the Earth, with the bulk of the story following its heroes trying to survive in a world dominated by the aliens. This comic? This comic has nothing to do with the source material. You could’ve adapted War of the Worlds with the aliens as a secret underground Earth race rather than aliens and still had it be recognizably War of the Worlds. But there’s no invasion here. There’s no “life under the Martians” here. There’s no sudden reprieve after all man’s defenses had failed here. The fact that the Aarach use tripedal mechs is the one and only tie to the source we’ve got.
So it’s false advertising to try to slot it into the War of the Worlds hermeneutic, and it’s got a pretty abominable moral message. But I watched Kerblam! a week ago, so I’m well aware that being reprehensible on a moral level does not preclude a work from being really good as a work of fiction. So is this?
Not especially.
It’s not terrible, by any means. But its good points never quite manage to be good enough to make headway in the light of the bad points. The art is where it fares best. The character work is solid. People stay on-model; we rarely lapse into Escher Girl poses; there’s far less dongs-face than, say, the Captain Power book. Landmarks and aircraft are recognizable, and bonus points for using period-appropriate planes, clothes, and weapons. And there’s some really striking tableaux, and excellent use of black-and-white (There is an odd inconsistency with the shape of the Aarach tripods, though, with them switching between the sort of vaguely fox-head shape that Gash’s design uses and a simpler oblate spheroid, but I don’t know what to say about that).
But the strengths of the static shots turn into weaknesses any time Hagan wants to convey action. The action scenes tend to be confused messes. There’s a lack of continuity of motion from panel to panel, with directions and relative positions changing for no reason over the course of a page. And despite the fact that Hagan is clearly pretty good at drawing backgrounds, the action scenes are often set against blank backdrops or confusions of smoke.
And I guess now that I’ve written it down, the problem with the narrative is similar in nature: there’s some ideas which are interesting taken on their own, but when things are moving, the story gets confused and messy. The first half is something of a kitchen sink of ideas. The business with Shona trying to get Rebecca murdered by an angry mob for witchcraft? Or the Aarach having a vaguely defined problem with human religion? And the whole thing where what they want is to mate with a human in order to achieve “synthesis”? That’s an interesting idea, sure, but it isn’t actually consistent with their behavior.
But never mind that, because the second half of the series has almost nothing to do with the first, and all that weird esoteric stuff about the Aarach seeking knowledge through synthesis really has nothing to do with anything from issue 4 onward. The second half is just a very straight “CHUDs want to take over the world” affair with only a very tenuous link to the first half of the series. The whole thing is full of sloppy logic where major plot points turn on characters doing things for no apparent reason or knowing or not knowing things for no apparent reason.
In a strange way, I’m reminded of some less-remarkable mid-90s adventure games. It was a transitional period when there was a push to move to higher-quality graphics and a lot of full-motion video but the underlying technology wasn’t quite there yet, and you had an odd little subgenre there of games composed of a lot of video clips playing over prerendered 3D backgrounds, running in game engines which were essentially hacked PowerPoint slide decks. So they didn’t have a lot in the way of state tracking, and as a result, you could pretty easily end up reaching some points in the story without passing through all of their logical antecedents. So to patch this up, there were a surprising number of games which simply baked into their premise, “Oh, and something weird and existential is going on so causality might not always work the way you expect and possibly you might sometimes randomly hop between parallel universes.”
Nothing here is quite on that level, but you certainly get a sense that the story kind of got away from Finley at some point, leaving him to make some hasty last-minute changes to keep things on track.
The Eternity version of War of the Worlds, therefore, is probably not worth your time. If you do happen to read it, you probably won’t be angry about the use of your time, but I can’t imagine it would make anyone’s top ten lists.
Between now and the end of the year, I’ve got two birthdays in the family, plus Christmas, plus I really want to watch the rest of the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, so I’m probably going to need something more lightweight for these War of the Worlds articles. We’re in the home stretch on the TV show, so maybe I can carve out time to watch a couple of those. If not, there’s still more comics I have to put myself through. See you then…
But I think my point stands. Whatever it was.
I’m putting that in my quote folder.