Deep Ice: Floating Green Weirdness (Mickey Mouse’s War of the Worlds)

Guess where I am this week! That’s right, once again I have descended into the house of the mouse to face murderous Floridian climate in the name of standing in hour-long lines for a three minutes ride! But look, ragging on Disney is all well and good, but, y’know, they do good work. I don’t like travel or crowds or heat or the outdoors, but I had a blast the last time I went to Walt Disney World all the same. So, in light of the occasion, why not?

It is January 18, 1987. Let’s see. The president of Ecuador got kidnapped last Friday. The treasurer of Pennsylvania will commit suicide on live television this Thursday. It is otherwise a fairly quiet week. Nintendo releases Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in Japan, but the US release will take another two years. The Tortellis, a sort-lived spin-off of Cheers, debuts this week. Howard the Duck comes out on home video. Labyrinth and Flight of the Navigator will both come out a week later to coincide with my birthday.

American Bandwagon censors The Beastie Boys. Bruce Willis releases his debut album, The Return of Bruno. Gregory Abbot’s “Shake You Down” takes the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 from the Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”. Duran Duran, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Genesis, Wang Chung and Survivor are all in the top ten. 1987 actually seems like a hell of a year, but it’s really still just spinning up. Television is almost entirely new, full of shows I have heard of but episodes I have not. MacGyver gives us “Soft Touch”, in which Mac and his disaster-prone friend Penny Parker prevent an assassination, and I will provide a little linklove to Philip and Casey by noting that ALF is A Little Bit of Soap, and Perfect Strangers provides Trouble in Paradise. Charles in Charge and Remmington Steele have both unexpectedly returned to TV after being cancelled, the former resurrected in syndication, and the latter pulled out of retirement by the network apparently just to screw Pierce Brosnan out of playing James Bond for a few years.

But never mind all that, because we’re not talking about TV or film this week, but sequential art, the field I don’t know a lot about despite it somehow coming up about once every six weeks on this blog. I’ve read one or two Disney comics. Reprints of the old Don Rosa-era Donald Duck stuff I think. It’s not nearly as well-known in the US, but over in Europe, where the comic book market is considerably more diverse, Mickey, Donald, and the lot inhabit a universe far more fleshed out and consistent than the one-off cartoon shorts that largely defined their American mythos up until the debut comics-inspired Ducktales (woo-oo-ooh!).

Under the localized name “Topolino”, Mickey Mouse had been a fixture of Italian comic book stands since the ’30s. By the 1950s, Topolino was a monthly and later biweekly comic, and started occasionally offering up literary parodies, starting with L’inferno di Topolino, a Mickey-fortified retelling of Dante’s Inferno. They followed it up with such offerings as Paperino Don Chisciotte – Donald Quixote – and Donald Duck versions of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Orlando Furioso, and Les Miserables. Yeah.

Donald is sadly absent from today’s tale, but the original mouse himself instead takes the lead in Alessandro Sisti’s 1987 literary parody, Topolino e la Guerra dei Mondi: Mickey Mouse in War of the Worlds. Holy crap.

So when I say it’s a “parody”, I probably ought to explain myself a little. If you’re used to contemporary usage, you might be expecting a sort of Zucker Brothers kind of “over-the-top nonsense made up of pop-culture references and hyperbolic exaggerations of genre tropes.” But this is a parody in an older, more subtle sense: more of a Man from UNCLE sort of parody that’s less about being overtly ridiculous and more about a take on the genre that’s lightheartedly self-aware.

The War of the Worlds might seem like a hard sell as a children’s comic. But it’s easier than it sounds. We already saw the weird Magic Lantern adaptation that “For kids!”‘d the story up and left it largely unrelated to the original. This version sanitizes the story and makes it more gentle and more, well, Disney, but it still tells basically the same story. Tragedy, when you get down to it, is often just comedy with a different soundtrack. All you really have to do is make the heat ray do a little less “zaps you into a smoldering skeleton” and a bit more “makes you jump up ten feet in the air with a comical shout and your underwear showing through a smoldering hole in your pants.”

And that’s exactly where we find ourselves. Mickey Mouse stars as a character of the same name, a well-respected citizen of Maybury Hill in Woking, whose friend O’Goofy invites him to try out his new telescope just in time to see the explosions on Mars that foreshadow the Martian invasion. Well, I say invasion; these invaders are far less hostile, and only rarely attack without provocation. Atypically, we get to hear conversations among the Martians, who speak to each other in emoji which is subtitled for our benefit. And their dialogue is, I think, deliberately ambiguous. They certainly consider the humans to be primitive, but they mention conquest only once in passing, and mostly just express frustration at the hostility they’re met with. They do still fire on O’Goofy, hitting his flag of truce, but they otherwise tend not to shoot first, leaving open the possibility that the “war” was more of a series of misunderstandings unfortunate escalations.

The Martians are also far less formidable. Cannon shells punch clean through the tripods and Thunder Child, signaled by Mickey via semaphore, makes quick work of two more. The Martians, unaccustomed to large quantities of water, declare sea battle too difficult and retreat. Thunder Child is still sunk, but all hands appear to escape safely. The black smoke serves only to scatter soldiers, not kill them, and we don’t even see a tremendous amount of property damage from their advance.

Mickey is rarely alone in this version of the story, so the entire element of the narrator’s growing isolation and despair is largely absent. O’Goofy survives the initial attack and is reunited with Mickey when they both happen to take refuge on the same boat at Byfleet. O’Goofy thus serves as a substitute for the Curate, and to a lesser extent, the artilleryman. Though Mickey and O’Goofy encounter other survivors, and reach London well ahead of the tripods, with Mickey conscripted to help organize an evacuation.

As in the book, Mickey and O’Goofy are trapped in a farmhouse with a Martian excavation site outside, where O’Goofy is captured. But unlike the Curate, who is promptly killed and eaten, O’Goofy is simply locked in a cage as a spy. O’Goofy, who’d been developing a cold ever since spending a night in wet clothes at Byfleet, sneezes on his captor, who is quickly rendered too ill to prevent Mickey from effecting a rescue.

Not long after, the Martians abruptly stop their advance. Not, as in most adaptations, because they’ve all died, but rather, they simply give up after finding Earth to be bad for their health. They declare that, “We won’t bother you any more. Your beautiful planet is not for us,” coming off less as invaders and more as particularly unpleasant and unwanted tourists. They depart, leaving Mickey musing on the possibility of Earth one day sending its own peaceful expedition to Mars.

It really is remarkable how close you can get to Wells’s original story and yet completely change the feel of the thing. We’ve still got all the major plot beats up through the end of book 1, and most of them afterward. Where it varies from the book, it does so only in a mild sort of way. I mean, sure, the Martians decide it’s too much trouble and fuck off rather than just dying, but it amounts to the same thing. The only place where it gets a bit weird is right at the end, when Mickey laments about his fiancee not being there just before she shows up. We’ve seen no evidence of anyone actually having died, and his reaction is too mild to imagine that’s his worry, more sort of slightly odd sense of him maybe imagining she’s taken this opportunity to skip town for good.

The art very clean and very crisp and the colors are bright and really pop. The tripods have an interesting palette, red on top and blue for the legs, which makes the brief cameo of the flying machine reminiscent of the design we saw in Superman: War of the Worlds, where the legs were a separate, removable unit. There’s also a single panel showing the embankment machine, another rarity in adaptations.

The models for Mickey and Goofy don’t look quite like any of the classic designs I’m familiar with. You sort of imagine that hand-drawn animated characters would translate very directly to comic books, but these have a little bit of a different style to them. Mickey’s face is a bit more circular than usual, and his nose a bit pointier. Goofy has stray hairs poking out all over, which I feel like I’ve seen before but I’m not sure where. Both of them are paler in their light spots, basically just flat white rather than beige. They’re consistent throughout the book, so I don’t think this is a matter of quality control or anything, probably just the house style.

The stars of the show, of course, are the Martians, who are kinda adorable. They’re tan octopedes with big eyes and red noses and smiling faces that are very Disney. They don’t look especially insectoid or cephalopod. There’s maybe just a hint of caterpillar to them, but mostly they look like a kind of eight-legged hairless mammal. Their faces are expressive and have a familiarity to them, reminding me a lot of the giant from The Brave Little Tailor, though I feel like there’s something from the Disney canon they resemble even more closely, I just can’t remember what. There’s nothing of Wells’s “cold and unsympathetic” to them, and they seem almost human in their reactions and responses, showing curiosity and amusement at times. When they do become aggressive, it’s in a kind of Donald Duck-like, “You’ve wronged me and now I’m gonna get my own back,” sort of way.

The dialogue is fine. It’s exposition heavy, of course, but serviceable. The introduction feels a bit less florid than you’d expect. I’m not sure if that’s just to keep it simple for the kids, or the result of this rendition having been translated from Wells’s original text to the Italian of the original comic, back to English for my benefit. In the end, this is exactly what you’d expect from the title. A version of War of the Worlds that covers the main ground of the story, but makes it into the kind of story that fits into a Mickey Mouse world. Compared to something like Mickey’s Christmas Carol, it diverges much more in tone, but abridges much less of the story itself. I didn’t really need this in my life, but I’m not sad I forked over a few bucks for it (I think I had a coupon, so even better).

But now I kinda want to read Mickey’s Inferno and Donald Duck’s Faust. Which is a real thing that really happened.

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• Mickey Mouse in War of the Worlds is available from Comixology