Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
Of the stories in the collection, “The Oath” comes closest in style, tone, and content to the movie. It’s very anime. Maybe even a little more anime than the film proper. While hand-drawn with a deliberate sketchiness that isn’t present in the very smooth computer-animation of the film, the designs are the same, and there’s a lot of imagery that ends up in them movie – ARES HQ, the Leviathan, even a cameo by Kurshirov and Roosevelt (I think; they’re both visibly younger despite the scene being set no more than a year before the movie opens). It’s clearly meant as the centerpiece of the book, longer than the other stories and with a more traditional, linear narrative.
“The Oath” even foreshadows the opening scene of Goliath. After an establishing framing device of an injured ARES soldier reflecting that he’d, “Honored the oath,” we jump into a flashback. In Albuquerque, 1899, our unnamed narrator (It is surprisingly easy not to notice that they never bother to say his name. Having noticed, though, I’m annoyed now) watches his family get vaporized by the Martians. A few more pages show the futile human resistance, but the narrator is impressed by Sheriff Chavez, who stands his ground against a tripod, dual-wielding six-shooters and comes out of it alive for no clear reason beyond the good timing of the Martians dropping dead right as one of them grabs his leg (I feel like this aspect is underdeveloped, like there ought to have been a reveal later that post-war Chavez has a wooden leg or something).
The orphaned narrator spends a year in a refugee camp, then is forced into living rough on the streets. It’s Chavez who eventually catches him when he turns to pick-pocketing on the gotta-eat-to-live-gotta-steal-to-eat principle. Chavez takes the narrator in and raises him like he’s part of the family except for the fact that the narrator falls hard for Chavez’s daughter. He learns all about the importance of book-learnin’ and also manliness, which is symbolized by “that night” (no referent is given, but the art shows them having gone out into the wilderness for, I guess, manliness lessons) when Chavez reveals that he’d had the courage to face down the Martians on account of the manly need to honor one’s oaths, such as the one he’d taken as Sheriff to defend the town.
In the fullness of time, Nameless graduates from high school and signs up with ARES. He makes out with Maria then ships out to learn more important life lessons about manliness and fighting Martians and soldierly camaraderie which are expressed in the form of a two-page spread of people posing heroically in front of ARES HQ. After basic training, he’s assigned to a radar post a few hours’ drive from Albuquerque (Radar wouldn’t be developed in the real world for another twenty years, but primitive radio ranging systems were being developed at the time), and proposes to Maria on his first visit home.
When the Martians finally come, it’s preceded by an airburst explosion which knocks out the radar station’s electronics. Nameless and his friend Leon are sent toward Albuquerque to find a place where the phone lines are working so they can send warning to ARES command. Nameless finds a spot to splice his field phone into the telephone lines and gets the warning out, but he and Leon are accosted by a tripod. Like their Japanese counterparts, Nameless and Leon aren’t armed with heat rays, and the machine gun proves ineffective. Leon sacrifices himself, crashing his beloved motorcycle “Collette” into one of the tripod’s legs, which topples it. As the tripod starts to recover, Nameless retrieves a bazooka (again, 1914 is early for shoulder-fired missiles, but only by a hair or two… But where did he get it from? He wouldn’t’ve been carrying it while climbing the telephone pole, and one assumes the rest of their gear would’ve been in the motorcycle). He’s taken off his feet by a near-miss from a heat ray, but gets off a shot, not at the tripod itself, but at the cliff face above, the resulting rockfall crushing the tripod. We return to the framing scene as we close on Nameless, sitting in what might be a pool of his own blood, his survival uncertain (I choose to believe he made it, though it’s a bit of a stretch tonally), telling the absent Maria how he’d completed his mission, warned ARES, defeated the tripod, and kept his oath.
You know, it’s not just the style of story or the visual paradigm that feels close to the film. It’s also a lot like Goliath in the extent to which it paints a bigger (and honestly, more interesting) world than it actually shows. The storytelling style here is very abbreviated, often seeming to just quietly skip over things which really ought to be important. Like the protagonist’s name. Or what he was doing out in the wilderness with Chavez “that night”. Or his relationship with the rest of his unit beyond the fact that he’d take Leon with him on three-day-passes so they could take Maria out joyriding on Collette. His relationship with Maria is the one place where this highly compressed storytelling style really works – I did believe their relationship, even if the fact that he seems to fall in love with her at the age of about eight is a little uncomfortable.
The more serious flaw in the story is that the climax is kind of poorly justified. Sure, thematically it works that Nameless would need to make his stand, refusing to back down in the face of impossible odds. But as part of the story they are telling? They’ve completed their mission. ARES has been warned. That tripod isn’t a threat to anything except them. He wouldn’t be forsaking his oath to return to base, report the enemy location, and get reinforcements. Especially once the tripod is down and effectively limited to harming things in its own line of sight. What’s lacking here is any connection between the tripod and the rest of the story – defeating the Martian doesn’t accomplish anything for Nameless. If the tripod had been headed for Albuquerque, this would all just work: Nameless would be defending Maria, Chavez, his home. But they’re still over a hundred miles from Albuquerque. It wouldn’t even have to be Albuquereue per se; if it were another town, or a passing convoy, or a civilian family out for a Sunday drive – anything – that would create some stakes where Nameless had to choose to endanger himself to honor his oath to defend the Earth. But if it’s just him who’s in danger, the oath doesn’t really come into it. He’s not putting his life on the line for something. And that almost makes the climax into a joke. Instead of the story of a kid who makes good by learning the importance of upholding one’s obligations, Nameless effectively seems to have learned entirely the wrong lesson, throwing his life away for no clear reason out of a misguided belief that all that matters is a show of bravery. That isn’t how I want to interpret the story, and that isn’t how I think we’re meant to. But that’s what we’re left with when Nameless is never shown to have had a meaningful choice whether to stand his ground or run, and we’re never shown any stakes if he had chosen otherwise.
In some ways, “The Patient” is the most visually traditional story in this collection. It’s a simple linear narrative, and the art style is well within the bounds of mainstream American comic book art. Where it brings the weird is in the content of that narrative. To wit: “The Patient” is told from the perspective of an escaped mental patient during the invasion.
Now, the treatment of mental illness is handled pretty much exactly the way you’d expect. So that’s something we’ll just have to put off to one side as we go through this. The unnamed patient comes off as something in the vicinity of a Cop Show serial killer-of-the-week. His inner monologue establishes that he sees the world as fallen and sinful, and he interprets the Martians as God, eagerly awaiting the cleansing fire of their heat rays. But first one, then a second Martian machine is destroyed by an ARES tripod as it targets the patient, sending him into a rage. He bites the nose off a bystander who tries to restrain him and charges the ARES tripod, which is ultimately shot down by another Martian, possibly thanks to the patient either drawing the Martian’s attention or distracting the tripod’s. He’s elated when the Martian “rewards his faith by scooping him up in its metal tentacles and… Well, they actually showed us what specifically the Martians want with humans in the movie…
‘Nuff said, really. I have no strong opinions about this one. One small point of interest is that this is the only story to feature an ARES tripod. It’s interesting because if not for the tripod, you might assume this was set during the first invasion – the Martian tripods are all of the first-gen design and we see people on the street whose dress seems more Victorian than World War I-era. You know where it’s going from the start, but it’s executed pretty well, as far as these things go. Moving on…
We finish out with “The Captain”. It is set on an ARES battleship as joins the battle of New York from the climax of the movie. They fight their way through enemy mines in the harbor to battle and engage Martian tripods and flying machines before ultimately being overcome.
I think.
Look, it’s been a recurring problem with this book that the action sequences are visually messy and hard to follow. This has been a problem in pretty much every story except for “Divine Wind”. Most of the time, this isn’t an insurmountable problem, though, because the key details can be inferred from context. It’s not exactly clear what’s happening to Kushirov during the fight in “St. Petersburg”, but the gist is that it’s a close thing but he survives. “Legacy” is very deliberately bonkers visually. It’s not really clear what’s going on when Leon charges the tripod in “The Oath” – for a minute I thought he’d lost his nerve and made a break for it – but once you see the explosion and the tripod lying on its side, you can understand what happened. But in this particular story, with its very sketchy, black-and-white retro manga style, degenerates into a mess of lines and swirls that I think is the ship being torn apart by a swarm of tripods, but I’m not sure. How it all plays out is signified only by the last panel, essentially the “punch-line” of the story, showing a single fragment of the hull coming to rest on the seafloor:
The visual style of this story is very striking, with its inky linework. And there’s a few wonderful panels – hero shots of the Captain, and a half-page panel of tripods and flying machines flanking the partially-destroyed Brooklyn Bridge. But a lot of this one is just an incomprehensible mess. It’s hard to distinguish between waves, explosions, heat rays and engine-trails. At one point it seems like lightning is striking the Martians as they swarm the ship? And the ship itself is kind of ridiculous, a big bulbous mass of guns and towers and a secondary hull that looks like a smaller ship is mating with it. And it’s got a tiny little main-mast behind the smokestacks where it could not possibly do any good. I did a little research into early battleships, and what HMS Thunder Child II looks like is basically if someone looked at every ridiculous thing that they tried out during the pre-dreadnought era and said, “Yes. All of it.” All the individual bits (Save what I assume is a large heat ray cannon) are things I’ve found on late 19th century battleships, but there is absolutely no concession to how those piece ought to fit together, particularly in the fact that all the guns are in the middle; the front third of the ship and a long stretch of the back are bare. And it’s proportioned more like a cruise ship than a battleship, with what looks like ten decks above the waterline (and at least four levels above the main deck besides).
I’m really glad I found this collection. The stories are short and interesting even with their little foibles, and given that Goliath‘s greatest strength is the way it suggests a bigger and more complete world than just what’s in the movie itself, it’s really cool to get a glimpse at some other parts of that world. If you can track down a copy, I recommend it.
- Heavy Metal War of the Worlds Special is currently sold out on the Heavy Metal website. There is a substantial preview PDF available, though the link seems to be broken just at the moment.
hi!