Month: November 2017

It is 2007, a year in which many things happened. One of them is that Mauritania illegalized slavery, and it is pretty damned shocking to learn that there was a country in the world which hadn’t already done that by 2007, and even more shocking when you find out that Mississippi didn’t do it until 2013.

Or, rather, it would be shocking if I wasn’t writing this in 2017. Never mind. We’ve got songs like “1234” by Feist and “Bubbly” by Colbie Callat and “Umbrella” by Rhianna. This year gives us The Big Bang Theory, Yo Gabba Gabba!, Super Why, Mad Men, Pushing Daisies, and Flash Gordon. We say goodbye to Stargate SG-1, Gilmore Girls, 7th Heaven, and Veronica Mars. This year’s Power Rangers is Operation Overdrive, and I’d tell you about it except that the one good thing I have to say about it is “I can’t really remember anything about it.” Except that it’s the second season to feature a ranger who had previously been one of the kids on the Kiwi Post-Apocalyptic Tween Soap Opera The Tribe. Doctor Who airs from March through July, featuring David Tennant and Freema Agyeman as the Doctor and Martha Jones. It also brought us the animated miniseries “Infinite Quest”, which, oddly, ties into an arc on The Sarah Jane Adventures a year or two later. And it gives us the minisode “Time Crash”, wherein David Tennant gets to fanboy over Peter Davison, who is, fun fact, his father-in-law. The Christmas Special is “Voyage of the Damned”, which guest stars Kylie Minogue, who I gather is actually properly famous in the UK, and not just “The chick who did the 1988 cover of “The Loco-Motion”.”

Anyway. Here in the present, it’s Thanksgiving week, and I don’t have time to do anything difficult, so instead, we’re going to cover a comic book. Well, a graphic novel. Well, something.

Saddleback Illustrated Classics is a line of graphic novel-style adaptations of classic works of literature, abridged and using simplified language, to be used as educational resources for teaching remedial English. They apparently have an accompanying audio disc reading the story, but I didn’t get one with my copy.

As abridgments go, it’s only barely serviceable. Turning a book into a comic is going to require a lot of compression in the storytelling, and what they do here is done in the service of teaching people to read way more than actually conveying Wells’s story in a faithful manner. What’s here is accurate, but a lot gets left out. What can be grating is that a whole lot of the “nothing happening” stays in, while some of my favorite parts are dropped. The prose is simple and functional, nothing exciting. No, all we are really going to care about here is the artwork. Since I had fun mocking some of the artistic choices in the two Captain Power comic books and the Captain Power Annual, I thought maybe for some lighter fare, we could take a look at the artistic choices in Saddleback’s illustrated War of the Worlds. Because these choices are… Occasionally interesting.

Our opening shot is this full-page spread of a Martian slowly and surely drawing its plans against us from this kinda “I HAVE THE POWER!” pose.

They retain Ogilvy’s “The chances of anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,” which is nice.

It’s also the hat. I didn’t scan a picture of it, but Ogilvy wears a Greek fisherman’s cap in a bunch of panels.

They spend what feels like an inordinate amount of time in the build-up between the first cylinder landing and the reveal of the Martians.

The Martians finally reveal themselves, and… Not bad. A very retro sci-fi look to them. Reminds me a bit of the test footage Harryhausen did when he was considering making a War of the Worlds film.

The abridged narration doesn’t really carry over the sense of horror at the basic strangeness of the aliens. You could say that, being a graphical format, they can rely on the visuals to do that instead, only, come on; that Martian is clearly evil, but he’s not really all that scary.

There’s something about the way people are drawn in this — I’ve seen this art-style before, so maybe it’s one of the common comic art styles or something? — that sort of looks like everyone is made of wax.

The narrator narrowly escapes the attack at the pit, but once he gets home, promptly decides it wasn’t that scary after all.

As they flee the approaching Martians, there’s an odd decision to illustrate the fact that on the road out of town, “The hedges on either side were sweet with roses.”

There are more panels than we really needed of the narrator’s horse being spooked by a landing cylinder.

At last, almost halfway through, we get to see a tripod, and it’s not terrible. Kind of visually busy, lacking the elegant simplicity of most interpretations. The closest match is probably Goliath, though it doesn’t look nearly so good, nor does it have the allusions to a gas-masked World War I soldier. Continue reading Deep Ice: Anything that would serve the image emerging onto the canvas (Saddleback’s Illustrated Classics: The War of the Worlds)

Now, where was I…

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. This was pointless and stupid. I could rattle off a long litany of all the stupid, pointless things, but we’ve lived through them these past few months and I am loathe to go back into the details.

On some level, the fact that this series has had sweet fuck all to do with the original 1938 radio play is the least of its sins. I mean, George Pal’s 1975 proposal for a TV series (Which is presumably a big part of the inspiration for War of the Worlds II) has sweet fuck all to do with the movie it’s based on, and the TV sequel that ended up actually happening doesn’t really draw all that much from it either.

If you were to ask someone — someone who knew and was into War of the Worlds, so basically me — what War of the Worlds II was about, the most normal sort of answer would be that it’s a sequel to the 1938 radio play in which humans, using salvaged Martian technology, travel to Mars in 1999, where they find out that the Martians were themselves enslaved by a bigger, badder alien race who now want to take over the Earth.

That is technically true, and it doesn’t sound necessarily like a bad concept for a series. Like I said, it’s the basic idea George Pal came up with in 1975. For that matter, it’s not too far afield from the premise of the Stargate TV franchise.

But, of course, over the course of four episodes, of something in the neighborhood of twelve hours, that makes up what, an hour of the story? At the outside. So what’s War of the Worlds II about? Well, it’s partly a James Bond-style over-the-top international intrigue about an insane evil trillionaire concocting a nonsensical plan to dominate the world, only they neglected to include the savant gentleman superspy who is the only one that can defeat him. And it’s partly a weird political farce about politicians who are hamstrung by nebulously defined “special interests” and at the mercy of comedy over-the-top radio pundits.

In this War of the Worlds sequel. Those ideas, they just have no place here. Those aren’t the sorts of plots that have any place. I mean, you could maybe squeeze them in around the edges — the Strangis’s series is heavily inflected with black comedy, it’s even got traces of that whole, “the government is willing to let aliens take over the world rather than cause a PR scandal.” But those things are around the outside. Like, there’s episodes of the series where the team has to deal with journalists. But there’s still aliens in those episodes. And the aliens are still the primary focus of the plot. But here, over and over again, you’re hoping against hope that the story on Mars will fucking get on with it, but no, it’s time for a “hilarious” argument between obvious-Rush-Limbaugh-expy and obvious-Sally-Jessy-Rafael-expy while obvious-Geraldo-expy sleezily reports on it. There’s just so many plot threads that have nothing to do with anything that might conceivably have brought you to listen to this. There’s the nonsense with DeWitt’s political maneuvering and the nonsense with the assassination attempt and the nonsense with Tosh Rimbauch and the nonsense with Ratkin and the ice sectioners and the nonsense with Nancy and Ethan and the nonsense with Ratkin’s wife and the nonsense with the Underground, and I don’t give a shit about any of it.

And there is no way they could make that many subplots turn into something coherent, but maybe they could pull off a few of them. Except that in addition to being utterly pointless, they’re also terrible. There is nothing even slightly believable about Ratkin’s machinations, or DeWitt’s unwillingness to just have Seal Team Six rub the fucker out, or the whole “special interest” nonsense. There’s no reason anyone would take Tosh Rimbauch seriously in any regard whatever. Making Ethan all twee and naive up until he suddenly goes all Artemis Fowl in his very last scene, vowing to outthink his father? Stupid, cliche, unbelievable. It’s just all so dumb, and don’t forget poorly written.

And then, of course, the big question: where are these subplots going? The answer is nowhere, because every single subplot becomes utterly irrelevant the moment the Tor announce themselves to humanity. If you think no one fucking cared about whether Ethan Allen is going to beat Ronald in the race to rescue Mrs. Rochester from Steinmetz now, exactly where is that plot going to go once the Tor start abducting billions of humans and stripping Earth of its atmosphere? It doesn’t. There is no way to continue any of the Earth-based plots the instant this second War becomes a shooting war.

That’s what’s been driving me nuts these past few months. Where could the other plots, the plots that make up about 90% of the story so far, go once the actual plot starts up? I could maybe see Ratkin continuing to try to work a deal with the Tor to be the warlord of a conquered planet if the Tor’s plan was simple conquest, but that doesn’t work at all if the Tor plan to transplant the entire human race en masse in the space of a week. Jessica Storm could maybe be salvaged. She seems right now like a character at the end of her arc, though: the traitor who realizes she’s been double-crossed and goes down in a blaze of glory that earns her partial redemption. But certainly, there’s room to rework her as the villain who’s forced to work with the heroes, while secretly trying to engineer things to get them killed in some “noble sacrifice”. The eleventh-hour introduction of The Resistance seems tailor made to be the backbone of the force that will fight against the Tor, except that nothing we’ve learned of them suggests this is in their wheelhouse or that there’s any reason to expect them to be more use to the cause than the actual military, which, remember, still exists. What about President DeWitt? Honestly, there’s nothing we’ve learned about her character that suggests she’d be of any use in an open war. It’s not simply her physical handicap — heck, the brilliant tactician who is physically handicapped is a fair enough trope all on its own. But DeWitt’s never really been depicted as having a particular skill at anything, really, other than the game of politics (at which she is, at best, just adequate). She’s a perfectly good character for a political drama, but nothing in the story implies that any of her skills would really be useful here. She can’t even give big rallying speeches, because she can barely speak unassisted. The pending plot to have DeWitt declared unfit, the Vice-President “taken care of”, and that weird Republican Kennedy-clone installed? This sounds like complete nonsense in the face of the alien invasion. And Tosh Rimbauch? Nope. Just nope.

So out of all the plot threads they started — and basically kept starting right up until the last twenty minutes — it’s only the ones involving the Orion crew that really even make sense going forward. And two of them are back on Mars, so barring a thrilling, “And then they spend four hours flying back to Mars to pick up the other two,” sequence, they’re out of the picture for the near future. Even if they were planning to set up, “Ferris and Rutherford rally the Martian slaves into revolting against the Tor,” it appears at the moment that the Tor have left Mars and the Martians don’t have any more ships, so there’s really nowhere for that plot to go.

Not that I miss them especially. Ferris has the personality of a block of wood, and Rutherford is a piece of shit who seems to exist only to make Nikki more likable by negging her. Asshole. Gloria, Talbert, Morgan and Gus are okay, I guess, though Talbert’s personality doesn’t seem to go much past, “He’s the only member of the crew who has heard of science.”

So what’s left to say in the final analysis? Not much, really. On a technical level, I guess I can give the weak praise that the audio is almost entirely intelligible. This should be a given, but I’ve seen too many low-budget productions that can’t get their audio levels right at this point in our little adventure through every War of the Worlds adaptation I could find to take it for granted. And there are clearly deliberate choices being made about how to convey these characters through their voices and tones of speaking. The major characters all have distinctive tones of voice, and there’s only a very few cases where it’s hard for me to tell them apart.

But, of course, you can’t go very far down the road of praising any element of War of the Worlds II without it leading you back to a problem. On the one hand, yes, almost everyone’s speaking voice is distinctive. But that is not the same as anyone’s voice being good. There aren’t many voice choices that I’d outright call “good”; most of them vary between “neutral”, “This was a bad idea but at least I can see where they were coming from,” and “What the hell were they thinking?” I mean, consider:

• Jonathan Ferris: I think they’re going for “stoic” here. I have made no secret of the fact that they overshot and ended up with “inanimate object”. If their goal was to make me believe this guy was real, real dull, then congrats, but this is not necessarily a great thing to succeed at.
• Nikki Jackson: Another very neutral voice. As her characterization shifts toward her being ruthless and driven, a less sociopathic version of Jessica Storm, her voice acting doesn’t do a great job of conveying it. The biggest flaw, of course, is that we’re asked to believe that this very obviously white upper-middle-class woman from the north east is, in fact, a black woman who pulled herself up out of poverty by her own bootstraps having been raised by her wise old Tyler Perry-portrayed grandmother in the Jim Crow south, which no. Just no.
• Mark Rutherford: Mark Rutherford I is fine. Neutral. It’s a dubious idea to have this character based around his acerbic relationship with Nikki, the implicit, “Isn’t it adorable how he constantly negs her. They should totally date,” thing is awful, but I can believe the aspect of, “They used to be friends, and they’re professional enough to work together, but there’s still some bitterness there,” even if they never quite settle on whether they genuinely dislike each other, or just have the kind of friendship based on mutual insult. Mark Rutherford II, though, pushes into this weird “hapless ’50s guy” thing that is supposed to remind us of Dobie Gillis or Dagwood Bumstead or something, and it just doesn’t really make any sense. I think it’s an attempt to make him seem adorably awkward and likeable, which fits progressively less well as he becomes more and more of an entitled jackhole. Mark Rutherford III gives up the pretense of adorkability, which at least makes sense for the character, and is played as more of a deadpan snarker, but there’s still an old-timey aspect to his voice which doesn’t make any real sense.
• Gloria Townsend: The combination of a slightly southern accent with her overly-technical mode of speaking is an interesting mix. I have no strong feelings about her.
• Gus Pierelli: He’s the gear-head, so they have him a working-class accent. A little on-the-nose, but okay. His Brooklyn accent becomes less pronounced as the series goes on, though, leaving him sometimes hard to distinguish from…
• Robert Talbert: There’s not really anything distinctive to him.
• Medic Morgan (I don’t think she actually has a first name): Having her be sort of mousy and uncertain makes it easy to distinguish her from the other women on the Orion crew, but the notes of insecurity aren’t something that you really expect from a medical doctor, and brings to mind some unpleasant stereotypes about women in “male” roles.
• Jessica Storm: So… I can see what they’re going for. Her tone of voice conveys a lot of information very quickly. From her first line, you know not only that she is evil, but also what kind of evil she is: she’s clever, ambitious and arrogant. But she also sounds like a soap opera diva. And I mean, okay, fair enough; War of the Worlds II, as it turns out, is a soap opera. But it’s impossible to take her seriously in any of her stated competencies. I don’t believe she’s a Wile-E-Coyote-class Sooper-Geeenious, I don’t believe she’s a top-notch space pilot. I don’t believe she’s a deadly assassin. I’d buy her seducing elderly millionaires, or even executing brilliant boardroom double-crosses. Not the actual things she’s allegedly brilliant at.
• Ronald Ratkin: Everything about Ronald Ratkin I is designed to tell you he is the villain. He sounds like cartoon character. He sounds like he should be trying to tempt young Skywalker over to the Dark Side. He sounds like he’ll disappear in a puff of smoke if you say his name. Ronald Ratkin II is much closer to what they actually ought to have been going for, being very clearly modeled on Brando’s Don Corleone. Even then, though, maybe just a hair too on-the-nose?
• Hoover Jones: Of course, they had someone playing a gangster before they recast Ratkin, but he’s playing a very different kind of gangster archetype. Fine, but the accent slips as the series goes on until he’s just doing a kind of generic “affluent” accent with his vowels inexplicably drawn out. I think maybe they wanted him to sound British (He’s one of the characters who awkwardly throws in occasional Britishisms for no reason), but he doesn’t. At all.
• Tosh Rimbauch: No. Just no.
• Sandra DeWitt: She’s so mellow and soft-spoken that it’s basically impossible to take her seriously as a politician. It doesn’t help that she clearly hasn’t learned her lines ahead of time and is hearing them for the first time as she says them. Also, her husband kinda comes off as a closeted gay man.
• Nancy Ferris: No one is that southern. Plus, far more than any other character, she tends to narrate her actions, which is really annoying.
• Ethan Allen Ratkin: Many, many things about the character of Ethan Allen Ratkin are wrong. The decision to have a voice actor who is not a twelve year old boy play him as a super-twee twelve-year-old boy is not terrible, until the end when they decide he’s suddenly going to take a level in badass and vow to bring an end to his father’s reign of terror using his own strategic brilliance of which there has been no evidence.

Continue reading Deep Ice: I don’t believe in anything (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II: Finale)