Deep Ice: Some Quick Thoughts About Heavy Metal Summer 2011 War of the Worlds Special, Part 1

It is Summer, 2011, though time no longer has meaning. Having finally gotten rid of my old Subaru, I go through a weird little debacle with the MVA about returning my plates and cancelling my car insurance. I am on a cruise to the Bahamas but will be chased home by a hurricane. Space Shuttle Atlantis returns from its final trip – they hadn’t changed the videos at Kennedy Space Center yet to reflect that the shuttle program had ended. South Sudan had seceded from Sudan. Anders Brevik kills seventy-eight people in the course of two terror attacks in Norway. Gaddafi is overthrown in Libya. LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” tops the Billboard charts for much of the season. The biggest movies of the summer are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Captain America: The First Avenger. Somehow – this all seems like a dream now – Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

A very, very long time ago, I talked about the animated film War of the Worlds: Goliath. I stand by my assessment from five years ago, in that it’s a decent movie with strong worldbuilding, interesting characters, fun notes of alternate history, and beautiful visuals, but it suffers from a lack of narrative focus that makes it feel less like complete story and more like a clip show of a longer treatment. I thought it was okay at the time, and years of suffering though much worse adaptations has made me even more nostalgic for it.

Well, in the lead-up to Goliath‘s release, Heavy Metal, the famous French-inspired dark-fantasy-science-fiction-vaguely-naughty comics anthology, did a special issue compiling six comics that serve as a sort of loose backstory to the movie. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Animatrix, with each story in a different style, set in the world of the main story, but only tangential to the primary narrative. They’re small and mostly nice to read, and I don’t have a huge amount to say about them, but I thought I’d give them a quick once-over for completeness’s sake.

The first story is “St. Petersburg”, and I think it’s the backstory of General Kurshnirov, the future-leader of ARES (I mean, it’s clearly meant to be him, but he’s not referred to by name. He wears a locket similar to the one Kurshnirov carries in the movie, though the picture inside is visibly different). The story has a bit of dialogue, but the actual storytelling is almost entirely visual. It tells of a cavalry charge on the banks of the Neva River during the first invasion. It goes about as well as can be expected, but, spurred on by thoughts of his beloved Katya, Probably-Kurshnirov survives, only to look back across the river in horror to see St. Petersburg in flames.

This is a lushly-drawn story, in a very high-detail quasi-realistic style that reminds me a bit of oil painting. There’s a few panels of Kurshnirov in particular that remind me of Yoji Shinkawa’s character art for the Metal Gear Solid series, and one panel of a horse and rider being vaporized that is really haunting. Themes and moods come across very clearly, though the last few panels leave a lot to the imagination; I’m mostly drawing from outside knowledge of Kurshnirov’s backstory in my interpretation of the ending. I imagine that if I’d read this before seeing Goliath, it might’ve been a powerful moment when Kurshnirov looks at his locket and you realize that, oh shit, he’s the guy from that story. Coming to it now, years later, I feel a little bit like I’ve cheated myself out of the proper experience.

Next up is “Legacy”, which probably has the most interesting conceit to its style of storytelling. The narrative takes the form of a letter written from a father to his infant son as he prepares to face the Martians in a battle he knows to be futile, again during the first war. But what makes this interesting is that the visual narrative is told entirely from the perspective of the Martians. It’s a human father talking as he prepares to go to his death, but what we’re shown is a worried-looking cephalopod embracing its own young before departing for Earth. It’s a human voice talking about the invading monstrosities as the art shows us stern and determined Martians confronting humans who are drawn in a kind of deformed caricature, and the admonishment to, “Kill them all. Strip the flesh from their bones and burn their rotting corpses till they are ash,” accompanies a panel showing a street littered with blackened human bodies. There are scenes of human suffering, but they’re done in an exaggerated style that gives them an air of unreality, while the Martians are rendered with a sort of sympathetic style – in the panels where they are injured, their faces show recognizable terror; their downed machines ooze fluid like blood.

There are hints of optimism in the narration, but its most chilling aspect is the father’s insistence that the only valid response to the Martians is to, “Meet might with might. Exchange brutality for brutality.” The last page shows the launch of the second invasion fleet, as the letter-writer cautions that, “History is but a single story repeating itself into infinity.” A self-reinforcing cycle of violence and revenge that reminds me a little of The Great Martian War. Though the backstory in this version of the narrative does somewhat less to justify it, this story does a pretty neat trick in being the only element of Goliath that tries to show a basic similarity between the human and Martian sides.

“Divine Wind” is the first story proper to be set in the timeframe of the movie itself. Strictly speaking, it should probably go after the following one, as it seems to be set a good way into the second invasion. It’s set in Kyoto, Japan, and opens with a general at ARES high command delivering a speech about the story’s namesake – a typhoon that derailed the thirteenth century attempted invasion of Japan by Kublai Khan. The Japanese Imperial division of ARES recruits ten volunteers to parachute onto the approaching tripods to hand-deliver high-tech grenades to the cockpits of the war machines. No explanation is given for why ARES Japan seems not to have heat ray technology or tripods of its own (The metafictional explanation is presumably that giving Japan giant robots seemed too on-the-nose), but a close-up reveals that the combat knives the paratroopers carry are ARES technology, explaining how they can cut through Martian metal.

We’re not given a full accounting of the fates of the ten paratroopers. One dies to a chute malfunction, and at least one is torn apart by a heat ray. A soldier named Kawada lands on the first tripod and is able to force it open, but is dismembered by the Martian inside and is forced to detonate the bomb while it’s still in his remaining hand. The viewpoint character, Yoshi Tsukada, has more luck, severing the tentacles of the Martian in the second tripod and dropping to the ground as the timed explosive goes off above him (Whether he could realistically survive a fall from that height is largely immaterial for reasons I’m about to get to…)

Of course, what’s not said here is more potent than what is, because this story is in English, and never comes right out and uses the Japanese word translated as “Divine Wind”. Yeah. For an American audience, the word carries some incredibly heavy baggage. I think it’s safe to say that most readers are going to associate a lot of the imagery in this piece much more strongly with World War II than with the World War I-parallel timeframe of Goliath (did you know Japan was in World War I on the side of the Allies? It’s a pretty cool story too, though the entire Pacific theatre was a comparatively minor part of the war). So a lot of the weight rests here on that tension. These kamikaze are still bombers who drop from the sky on a suicide mission, but it’s in defense of the Earth and of course we’re supposed to view them as noble… But then, so would a wartime Japanese audience reading about the historical kamikaze. There’s a reference to the emperor, and of course, my mind instantly goes to Emperor Showa – who I’ve been predisposed (possibly more than is really fair) to imagine in one breath with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, but if we’re following real history, the Emperor of Japan at this point is Emperor Taisho, a weak emperor who suffered from lifelong neurological disabilities caused by a childhood bout of meningitis (and possibly lead poisoning) and had little to do with the running of the country. Of course, just as the American leadership took a different path in Goliath (As a recap, Teddy Roosevelt did not seek reelection after finishing out McKinley’s term), it’s possible that Yoshihito didn’t ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne in this timeline, in which case I have no idea who would be Emperor – he was the only one of Emperor Meiji’s sons to survive to adulthood.

It took me a while to figure out how to describe the art style of “Divine Wind”. There’s certainly some similarity to Nihonga style, and at first that was what I keyed in on, but there was something else in there that I didn’t sort out until I was looking at the Post Office’s online store and saw this World War I commemorative stamp. Because that’s what the look of this reminds me of: early-century propaganda poster art (Or really, poster art in general from that period, but especially propaganda).  And in light of that, of course it ends on a larger-than-life image of the heroic warrior doing an impossible leap from an exploding war machine while declaring, “I am Yoshi Tsukuda. I am the divine wind,” and perhaps even this is why ARES is shown doing a big dramatic one-on-one hand-to-hand battle rather than shooting the zap-zap guns. This is basically the Starship Troopers (the movie) of Goliath: a story not meant to be read entirely as literal, but rather as the kind of story people in this world tell about themselves. Yoshi’s story is a recruitment ad, and I kinda love it.

To Be Continued…