Month: July 2018

Author’s note: Due to the exceptional length of the angry tirade I go on, this episode’s treatment will be split into three parts. Thank you for your patience.

And what would your name be?
Woodward and Bernstein didn’t need a name.
You’re Deep Throat?

It is April 24, 1989, or as they call it in Massachusetts, “New Kids on the Block Day”. The District of Columbia has, for the second time, been blocked from enforcing a new law that would forbid minors from being out on the streets of the nation’s capital after 11 PM. Deposed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda lost a SCOTUS appeal on the freezing of their assets. In China… My website is definitely getting blocked for saying that stuff is happening in Tiananmen Square. Noboru Takeshita will resign as the Prime Minister of Japan tomorrow, in the wake of the Recruit scandal, which we’ve mentioned before. Motorola will release the MicroTAC cell phone this week, the world’s smallest cell phone, which is pretty much the size of a modern cell phone, once you remove its camel-hump-like six-hundred pound battery pack, which can provide the phone with enough power to work for possibly as much as thirty seconds. Dad had one. To check the battery, you dialed *4 (From the mnemonic 4=GHI=”Gas”). He got an adapter kit for it that let you run it off of a dozen double-A batteries.

In the past week, a gun turret exploded on the USS Iowa, killing 47. In New York, Trisha Meili was assaulted while jogging in central park. She was given last rites due to the severity of her injuries, but emerged from her coma twelve days later and largely recovered. Because of media policies about not identifying victims of sex crimes, she would largely be known to the public simply as “The Central Park Jogger” until publication of her memoir in 2003. The case provoked huge amounts of public outrage, feeding into a culture of paranoia about urban violence, which has since been partially explained as the result of systemic lead poisoning from pollution, but, between genuine ignorance of how to deal with a then-growing violent crime problem and the political expedience of playing upon America’s history of racism, the attack was one more incident that served to help justify escalation of police militarization and mass incarceration, mostly of people of color over the next thirty years. Five young men were quickly apprehended, coerced into confessing, and were convicted the following year.

The actual assailant, Matias Reyes would confess to the crime in 2002 while already serving a life sentence. His confession was validated by physical and DNA evidence. Reyes would claim to have acted alone, though some connected with the case maintain that some or all of the “Central Park Five” likely acted as accomplices. All five convictions were vacated in 2002. Strictly speaking, this next bit goes next week, but let’s get it out of the way now: On May 1, real estate mogul Donald John Trump will take out a full-page ad in New York’s four biggest newspapers calling for the execution of the five suspects. The state of New York did not have the death penalty at the time. Trump’s advertisements are thought to have swayed public opinion in the rush to convict. As of October, 2016, Trump maintains that the Central Park Five were guilty of the crime and should have been executed for it.

Okay. Deep, cleansing breath, and try to pivot back to pop culture. Nintendo releases Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. Tom Petty releases his first solo album, Full Moon Fever. Madonna unseats Fine Young Cannibals for the top spot on the Billboard charts with “Like a Prayer”. Bon Jovi has a new song in the top ten, though I imagine he’s got other things on his mind, since he’s marrying his high school sweetheart this week.

Child’s Play is released on home video. Pet Semetary and Teen Witch open in theaters, but the real big news on the silver screen is Field of Dreams. Lucille Ball will die Wednesday. TV is generally new this week. Perfect Strangers, for example, gives us “Teacher’s Pest”. Here is a link to a Perfect Strangers review blog I really rather like, because I am sharing the love, and I imagine he would be happy if some of my many “one or two visitors a week” would swing by there. MacGyver gives us “Brainwashed”, where Mac has to stop a brainwashed assassin from killing a diplomat. BBC1 will air a documentary on spontaneous human combustion. Dragon Ball Z premiers in Japan Wednesday, while today, The Disney Channel will debut the third incarnation of The Mickey Mouse Club. It’ll air at 5:30, right after Kids Incorporated. Well, right after the ten minutes of music videos and time fillers they have to add to make up for the fact that The Disney Channel doesn’t show commercials yet, so the Hal Roach-produced Kids Incorporated, like all of their programming that was created for syndication, is ten minutes too short. This is the incarnation of the show which will introduce the world to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Kerri Russel and Ryan Gosling. Sunday, The Wonderful World of Disney will show a special introducing the world to Disney-MGM Studios (Now “Disney’s Hollywood Studios“), which opens the next day. Here is a link to the History Honeys podcast about Disney’s Hollywood Studios, because I am in sharing mood and also because Grant and Alaina are fantastic. Bionic Showdown, the second of three TV films reuniting The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, airs afterward. I am not currently following any Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman review blogs.

Star Trek The Next Generation airs “The Icarus Factor”. I should refer you to Josh Marsfelder on this one, because I remember this one as just being boring and about Riker not getting along with his dad while Worf is pissy because he never got to go through Klingon Fraternity Hazing, so his pals set up the holodeck to let John Tesh in Klingon Makeup zap him with a cattle prod. This week’s Friday the 13th The Series has the wonderful title, “The Secret Agenda of Mesmer’s Bauble”. The plot can’t live up to it. Just another “Cursed antique grants wishes in exchange for murder,” leaning heavily on stunt casting: singer Denise Matthews, then performing as Vanity, guest starred.

This episode is a callback to previous episodes in a lot of ways, but it’s strange about it. It’s not really an “arc episode” like you’d see in a post-The X-Files TV show. No, when I say that this episode calls back to previous episodes, it’s more of a feeling that this episode was filled out with trimmings from previous episodes. It’s somewhat adroit that we’ve happened upon this episode right after introducing ourselves to the Eternity Comics story. Much like how issue 3 there had that strange repetition that seemed meaningful but didn’t add up to anything, this episode is full of echoes to the past that are less “callback” and more “My typewriter ran out of ribbon. Just reuse page 24 from last week’s script here.”

Our writer this week is Jon Kubichan. This is his only contribution to the series. I wonder how much background he was working with. Given the production, let’s say, “difficulties”, maybe he simply didn’t know which elements of the series were meant to be recurring character and world tropes. Kubichan is probably best known as a writer and producer for the original Land of the Lost (he actually wrote my favorite episode, “The Repairman”, which guest stars Laurie Main, the voice of the narrator from Winnie-the-Pooh, as an eccentric, mysterious man with a British accent and knowledge of the workings of space, time, and the Land of the Lost, who wears a tweed jacket and a bow tie. Yes. The Winnie-the-Pooh narrator plays the eleventh Doctor in 1976), though this gives me very little enlightenment here. Near as I can tell, this is Kubichan’s last TV work. It’s also the only thing on his resume in the entire decade. Did he come out of retirement to write one middle-of-the-road episode of a failing first-run-syndication science fiction show? Sure, why not.

The aliens are in a pickle when we open, as it turns out that ten gallon food-grade buckets half-full of dry ice fog in their radiation-filled Land of the Lost cave is not actually a suitable environment for gestating the leathery, triangular eggs that the aliens hatch from. The heat is causing them to break open prematurely, and that’s bad news since the aliens can only lay eggs every nine years, which means that if this batch doesn’t make it, the, “Circle of life will be broken,” a sentence that is going to get really funny in a minute.

It’s actually kinda weird that they didn’t see this coming, since the second episode of the series was all about the fact that the radiation also makes it too hot for the adult aliens without those refrigerated suits. War of the Worlds hasn’t been great about following up on things. This is understandable. After all, it’s still the ’80s and any continuity from episode-to-episode beyond broad strokes isn’t really a thing you do in TV of this era. The fact that episodes often aired out of production order meant that trying to reference past details could bite you, and, in fact, we’ve already had them reference events from the future back in “Among the Philistines”. This episode is going to bring back some elements we’ve seen before, though, which makes it all the more surprising that, at least insofar as the “We need to find some refrigeration because it’s too hot in our radioactive cave,” angle, the show seems possibly to not have noticed they were doing it.

In Dillard’s novelization, there’s a reference to a third alien gender which gestates alien embryos, with an explanation that those ones were less hearty than the gamete-providing genders, and none had survived the initial invasion. That could serve as a setup for this episode, with the aliens struggling to find a means of artificial gestation in light of the impossibility of doing it the old fashioned way. I wonder if it was written that way in an earlier draft. Sadly, it doesn’t mesh with the dialogue of the episode as aired; instead, the Ilse von Glatz advocate orders the soldiers to find them somewhere safe and cold to put the eggs, “As on our planet.”

Before they can get on with that, the stillborn egg has to be disposed of. We’ve seen the weird green pit in the cave before, but there’s never been an explanation for what it is. Possibly it was formed by the underground nuclear testing which rendered this place suitable for the aliens. But this time, I notice that there’s something orange-red and quivering slightly at the bottom of the abyss. With the quasi-religious significance the aliens seem to give the pit, I’m curious about it. Did they stick something down there? In any case, one of the advocates says a few words, including the word “thee” to make it sound extra religious, in a scene that humanizes the aliens to an extent that’s largely unique for the show. And then we get another poorly composited shot when he tosses the little egg at the matte painting of a hole.

Continue reading Thesis: My Soul to Keep (War of the Worlds 1×20, Part 1)

Let us proceed from the assumption that it is March, 1989. The US joins the Berne Copyright Convention. Iran severs diplomatic ties with the UK over the publication of The Satanic Verses. Eastern Air Lines declares bankruptcy and their shuttle service, offering hourly flights between New York, DC, and Boston, is sold to Donald John Trump, who predictably renames it the “Trump Shuttle”. Speaking of disasters which threaten the global ecosystem, the Exxon Valdez runs aground and dumps almost a quarter million barrels of oil in Prince William Sound.

When we left Stanley Boyd and Rebecca McMannis, he’d just noticed that she had a bunch of velcro growing on the back of her neck, and this prompted him to point his gun at her, because the glowing hands and ability to summon spectral images of girls she’s never met and an unexplained affinity for the attacking aliens he can put up with, but she’s in serious danger of becoming too weird-looking for him to want to bang.

The dateline for issue 3 places us outside of Sheffield, where, now on the ground, Boyd again demands an explanation for Rebecca’s mutations. The dateline also assures us that it is May, 1913. Every dateline in the first three issues does this. This story takes place over the course of about five days, and every single establishing shot reminds us that it is May, 1913. In 2018, it is a four and a half hour drive from Edinburgh to Sheffield. The world record for flight airspeed around this time in history — May, 1913 — is around 110 miles per hour, so if Boyd could sustain that the whole way, it’s still a trip of more than two hours. Has he been holding the gun on her the whole time, but not actually pressing her for an explanation?

She calls his bluff, asserting that he won’t shoot her because he’s in love with her. He admits to it, but demands she disrobe so he can see “How much of you is still woman.” I am pleasantly surprised to report that the story acknowledges that this is an abusive thing to do, even under the circumstances. When Boyd says, “You’re not the Rebecca I knew,” she retorts that the Stanley Boyd she knew was a gentleman.

Of course, these two have known each other for what, a couple of days at the outside? But yeah, they actually made a point in the last issue of Boyd’s gallantry, with him apologizing for taking the “liberty” of picking her up when she’s unconscious.

Shamed, Boyd asks if the physical changes hurt, and Rebecca gives the rather wonderful answer that it’s, “Nay dif’erent than any woman’s aches and troubles. Only, they don’ show t’the eye, so men dinna’ fash ’emselves.” She tells him not to worry about it, since women have “Far more experience in copin’ than a man will e’er understand.” I am all for a streak of feminism in my apocalyptic aliens wars, so it’s really wild and interesting to have Rebecca essentially equate having her body slowly chimeratized to menstrual cramps, and then go on to turn it into an indictment of the extent to which men are generally oblivious to women’s pain.

Life is naught but dif’rent levels o’ sensation, you know. The rest is interpretation. Rebecca is strangely chill about the whole thing. She was at least a bit surprised by the glowing hands last issue, but it seems like the changes to her body are bringing along some changes to her thinking as well. For example, she now knows the name of the invaders, which is just slipped in there with no fanfare or even acknowledgement that this is the first time we’ve been given a name for them. While skinny dipping, she explains that the Aarach are a race older than man which has lived underground, and where does he get off thinking that humans have exclusive claim to the surface anyway?

We get a full page showing a town under Aarach attack. Sheffield, I assume. Some of the Aarach have come down out of their machine and shoot a man with a weapon that looks kinda like a flamethrower.

Rebecca does… Something… And the Aarach respond by… Something. It’s not clear to me at all, but Boyd gets it: they’re offering him and Rebecca a ride. When Boyd refuses to board the tripod with them, Rebecca does another thing, and the Aarach flee.

After a bit of fumbling with the controls, Boyd topples the thing over, and Rebecca takes over. Boyd is confident in his masculinity and, “Not the sort to be emasculated by a suffragette’s brazen display of female efficacy.” Though I guess she does some fancy maneuvering because on the next panel he’s feeling kinda emasculated by her brazen display of female efficacy. I can’t tell what she does to show off. Rebecca asks him what a suffragette is. Which I guess is supposed to be funny because it’s 1913 and women’s suffrage is a fringe position or something, but after the whole skinny-dipping sequence with its elements of postmodern feminism, it feels slightly misplaced and more-than-slightly cheap.

Their tripod acquires an escort to protect them on the way to London, but Boyd seizes the controls and fires on them after watching them dispatch attacking soldiers. Rebecca claims to object equally to human and Aarach death.

When they reach London (3 hours 11 minutes driving), Boyd demands to get out of the tripod at the sight of Westminster Abbey in flames, and demands Rebecca explain why they’d attack a church. He even offers her an out, suggesting she tell him that the militia had cannons behind the pews.

She says she’s going to explain, but doesn’t really. Rebecca says that the Aarach are like curious children, looking to learn. What does this have to do with them destroying a church? Nothing directly. Indirectly, nothing that is explained well enough to make sense.

Rebecca confuses Boyd for her dead husband, calling him John. A shot from her perspective shows that she’s even seeing him as John, though he reminds her of her husband’s death at the hands of the Aarach, cut down for “the sin of trying to reason with them”. She says that John died because he, “Dinna’ let them learn from ‘im. He blocked the process.”

You might recall, though, that the Aarach didn’t kill John. They traumatized him, but he survived and was starting to recover when the townsfolk dropped a boulder on him. But it’s what Rebecca told Boyd when she woke up. At the time, I assumed she was playing fast and loose with the details to abridge out the bit where her neighbors tried to murder her. Now, though, I’m starting to wonder if Scott Finley isn’t pulling a mild retcon.

A frame of flashback shows the bible in John’s hand when he confronted the Aarach. Since Boyd can’t see the flashback and Rebecca never says anything other than that John was “carryin’ resistance,” you’ve got to wonder what he made of that. A second flashback explains that weird sequence of panels back in issue 1 showing her crucifix. Since Rebecca “Dinna’ believe n’ more,” she, “Dinna block the learnin’.”

Okay. This much actually makes sense. Something about religious faith interferes with the Aarach. They tried to communicate with John, but he was carrying a bible, so the attempt left him cataleptic. By the time they grab Rebecca, she’s lost her faith after watching the townsfolk murder her husband. Possibly the Aarach tried to commune with Rebecca because they’d picked up something from their failed communion with John. They just flat-out murder Charon, and John was carrying a gun, but never mind. Religious angles are common in War of the Worlds adaptations, and there’s all sorts of places they could go here. There’s a straightforward Four Horsemen sort of approach of saying that, oh, something like, “Religion is the opposite of rational thought so the advanced logical minds of the Aarach can’t accept it.” Or maybe go exactly the opposite direction, and since the Aarach are underground-dwellers, maybe propose that they’re inherently demonic, and thus weak against Holy. You could push it to a Stargate sort of place and suggest that human religion is actually a corrupted race memory of an earlier encounter with the Aarach that implies the existence of some angelic aliens. Ooh, that’d be a twist if you had the angelic aliens swoop in from Mars at the end.

None of this is going to happen. I don’t believe the religious angle ever comes up again. We certainly never get an explanation for why they burned down Westminster. No, where we go instead is:

They’re readyin’ me. The truest learnin’ always comes from a mergin’. A thesis joined with its antithesis t’create the synthesis. That’s what they want from us– synthesis.

So that’s weird and florid and doesn’t really hold up under close inspection. But… I can’t honestly say that it’s unclear where they are going with this. Boyd will figure it out in two pages, but it only takes that long because they’re interrupted: a group of soldiers shows up. They saw Boyd and Rebecca disembark from the tripod and declare them traitors. I guess they didn’t see that bit where Boyd blew up all the other tripods. Just standard practice: if you see one of your own people get out of an enemy craft which is now vacant and isn’t doing anything aggressive, you don’t consider the possibility that he captured it, you just assume he’s a traitor and open fire instantly without even trying to capture him for information or anything.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Or maybe to make little baby aliens (Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds, Issue 3)

Please note: This article covers a science fiction story which prominently features infant loss and infertility as a theme.

I guess it’s January 1989? The only dates we’re given are “1989”, and we’re told that this is a bimonthly publication, a word which means both “twice a month” and “once every two months”. So two months after October, 1988 is… Okay, never mind. Let’s say it’s January, 1989. Reagan and Hirohito are out, Bush and Akihito are in. I turn ten.

Okay, so last time on Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds, the townsfolk of the Isle of Skye tried to kill Rebecca McMannis as a witch, and in return, they got exterminated by a race of giant tentacled mushrooms and giant creatures who looked like the love children of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Statue of Liberty (I am not alone in this interpretation; in his endnote to issue 3, Scott Finley says that artist Brooks Hagan refers to them as “matte black statues of liberty”).

This is an adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel.

Issue 2 may be the peak of incomprehensibility out of this series. Issue 3 is weirder, but it balances that with a bit of actual exposition. The plot isn’t actually that complicated, it’s just that the structure of the narrative makes it hard to follow. It’s particularly bad about establishing who characters are and how they relate to one another or even why they do things. The very first page of issue 1 did a great job of establishing the relationship between John and Rebecca. That they have a close bond despite recent tragedy, that he’s doing what he can to comfort her insecurities, and that they’re passionate toward each other. But this doesn’t carry over to any of the other characters in issues one or two. I spent a lot of issue 1 thinking, “Who are these people and why are they acting like this?” And I’ll still be doing it for issue 2.

For reasons which make even less sense when we find out what’s going on, Rebecca, last seen cradled in an Aarach’s tentacles, is now floating naked on a raft in the sea off the Isle of Skye. She’s spotted by a passing boat and taken aboard under orders of Stanley Boyd. I guess the boat is meant to be a Thunder Child analogue. We’re never given a name or anything. Boyd isn’t the captain, either. So why do they take his orders? Best guess is that he’s the owner. Boyd’s rich, his mother owning “about two acres” of Edinburgh’s market district. He doesn’t have a job per se, but he’s a flying enthusiast, and the boat is on its way to an exposition in Johannisthal (Germany’s first airfield) hoping to best “That red-headed Fokker kid”. The fact that he is a competent pilot will indeed be relevant later. Be happy about this, because it’s one of the few times that a character’s reasons for doing things is actually explained to us.

He orders Rebecca taken aboard because, “My mother raised three children, none of them to be fools.” See what I mean about motivations? The sailors aren’t sure if they should bring aboard the pretty naked lady drifting at sea. Okay. Sailors are a cowardly and superstitious lot — ir. No, wait. That’s criminals. But “sailors are uncomfortable with having women aboard boats” is a common trope. But how does his mother not having raised him to be a fool figure into his decision? There’s an alien invasion going on. Either she’s a refugee, in which case it’s not a matter of wisdom or foolishness; or else, she’s some kind of trap, in which case “My mother didn’t raise me to be a fool,” is the sort of thing you’d say before avoiding the trap. You don’t get to “Yes, let’s bring the naked pretty lady floating unprotected out at sea all alone aboard aboard our ship” from “We have a realistic decision one way or the other about taking this person on board, and I am not a fool.”

Rebecca dreams of the gallows. This is another wordless scene that is very powerful but doesn’t necessarily advance the story. And I’m not going to show it to you, because it is disturbing. A mob of dark-eyed townsfolk led by a demonic version of Shona has her hanged. As the rope snaps her neck, one dark panel shows the silhouette of a newborn dropping from her skirts. The final panel shows the neonate strangled by its umbilical cord.

Boyd tries to be reassuring as he wakes Rebecca, who claims her husband died in the attack before she was captured. Boyd warns her to “Be cautious about that kind of talk,” because they lost radio contact weeks ago and the men are close to mutiny. And for the second time in three pages, I’m not clear how what he’s saying connects to the situation. How much do they know about the invasion? Taken at face value, they don’t know that there’s been an invasion; they just know that they’ve lost radio contact. They’re still on their way to Johannisthal, with full intention of Boyd still making his air exposition even though the sailors are worried enough to be, “setting covetous eyes on the lifeboats.” And I guess, “Don’t tell the men that Scotland’s being invaded by aliens because the men are already wound up and I don’t want them abandoning ship,” is reasonable, but doesn’t it seem like if Boyd doesn’t know what’s going on, a better immediate reaction might be, “Wait, what alien invasion?”

Rebecca’s reaction is a little strange too: “I know what I know.” It’s enough to make me think maybe the text in Boyd’s speech bubble is misplaced and he was meant to say something else here. His reaction makes far more sense a few panels later, when Rebecca discovers that her hand is glowing.

At least, I assume that it’s glowing. This black-and-white, you know. Maybe her hand has just developed Spider-Sense.

After showing off his plane, Boyd climbs down onto… Something… I guess it’s the raft they found Rebecca on? For the love of God, explain something other than the Boyd family’s real estate holdings. Boyd shoots a hole in it… For some reason.

Okay. After a whole bunch of rereading, I guess maybe the “raft” was a hull plate from an Aarach ship, and he’s shooting it because he can’t tell what it’s made of and wants to see how resilient it is? But none of this is communicated to the audience. All we get is “For some reason, Boyd climbs down onto a black thing in the water, inexplicably asks for his gun, and shoots it.” And though the raft is indeed flat black like the tripods, there’s one panel where it kinda looks to have a grain to it, like wood. Or maybe that’s just the inking? The first time I read this, I thought he shot it by accident — he shoots immediately after Rebecca makes a joke about him accidentally shooting his foot off.

Whatever the reason, the instant he shoots it, a tripod emerges from the water. Rebecca orders him to throw his gun away, and he does, then Rebecca looks at her glowing hand. The tripod takes off, headed straight toward Edinburgh according to the captain. Rebecca asserts that the tripod wants them to go to London. No explanation for this is given. The captain tells her to shut up if she knows what’s good for her, but Boyd gives the bizarre response, “My mother’s in Edinburgh. We’ll talk of London once I know she’s safe.”

The next few pages are confusing. The ship sails by more tripods, which seem uninterested in it. The captain warns Boyd that they won’t make Johannisthal in time if they stop in Edinburgh and has to have it pointed out to him that competitive biplane handgun marksmanship might be obsolete in the face of these giant mechanical death machines stalking the countryside. And it’s only at this point, a day after their first encounter with the tripod, that the captain thinks to ask Boyd if he believes, “Th’ missy’s story,” or if he thinks she’s “one of them.” This is weird on two fronts. Most obviously, because the captain has not yet put his foot down and had her thrown off the ship for witchcraft. You know, once you’ve established that this is a world where a woman can be attacked by an angry mob and nearly murdered on suspicion of witchcraft for, near as I can tell, having had a miscarriage, there is a certain onus on your story to establish why everyone didn’t freak out when Rebecca turned out to actually have unnatural powers and some kind of mental link with the invaders. But they don’t.

The other thing they don’t do is give any context for, “Th’ missy’s story.” Because she hasn’t told a story, beyond “I got captured and I don’t know what happened after that.” Big chunks of this comic seem to either be missing or out of order or something. The captain being worried that Rebecca might be in league with the invaders makes perfect sense, but the framing of it is impossible to make sense of, since she hasn’t actually offered any explanation, and, in fact, she’s only ever been silenced when she tries to provide any sort of context.

Boyd decides to test Rebecca’s loyalties by smooching her, since he’s, “Never met a creepy-crawly with lips could do that.” Um. Okay. She turns out to be into it, and the preceding wordless panels of them exchanging looks can be taken as establishing some level of attraction between them, so I won’t object on the grounds of consent, but still, dude. Her husband’s been dead for less than a week. And, like, what if she were some kind of otherworldly creature? You want chestbursters? Because that’s how you get chestbursters.

Edinburgh is under fire when the ship arrives. Boyd tries to leave Rebecca aboard, ordering the captain to take her wherever she asks if he doesn’t return. But she goes with Boyd instead, as the captain’s men, “All think yehr glands are cryin’ oot louder th’n good judgment,” and won’t allow her to remain aboard. And if Boyd’s dialogue hasn’t been confusing enough, when the captain prays that God protect them from the monsters, Boyd answers, “What if these monsters are God?”

Wow, that’s an intriguing question that will not really be addressed in any meaningful way. Never mind then. We cut to Edinburgh to introduce Boyd’s mother with the rather wonderful description, “Yeh’ve admirable sized testicles for a woman.” Widow Boyd is trying to talk a Captain Bolander out of a futile defense of the town by pointing out that the tripods only fire when fired upon, “Returning your antagonism with tenfold the force.” This does something to explain the earlier scene with Boyd’s gun, and the fact that the Aarach don’t take any obvious interest in Boyd’s ship as it approaches. But I am not entirely convinced. I mean, it does appear that when we see individual people killed by the Aarach in issues 2 and 3, the comic takes some care to depict them firing first. But there’s also plenty of shots that look like they’re just shooting indiscriminately down at the city.

The gunners see the logic in Widow Boyd’s words, but Captain Bolander is from the tradition of pointlessly obstructive and stupid military officers in speculative fiction, and orders them to keep firing, threatening to replace them with his daughters, who, he claims, have, “Bigger clock-weights than yeh’ll ever see in the loo.” Y’know, that is a pretty high lines-of-dialogue-to-talking-about-a-woman’s-pendulous-testicles ratio. I feel like I should make a joke about transphobes here, but transphobia is too unfunny for me to think of a good one.

A confusing couple of frames later, one of the tripods is on the ground. It got shot by Bolander’s cannon, but the way the frames are arranged on the page, the causal relationship between the cannon firing and the tripod collapsing isn’t clear. It kinda looks more like the tripod suffers a friendly fire accident (This isn’t the only time it looks like the tripods fire on each other, and the way the story is going, the possibility of the Aarach having violent disagreements on strategy isn’t a stretch). Continue reading Deep Ice: Ah, a kiss. Yes. (Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds #2)