Deep Ice: Oh yes, dear. Quite mad. (Eternity Comics’s War of the Worlds #4, Part 1)

Author’s Note: Writing this piece was taking too much time away from me shaking my fist in impotent rage over the recent confirmation of the attempted rapist Blackout Bart Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States of America and the systematic gaslighting of the public by the Senate Majority as we are forced to pretend to believe a litany of obvious lies such as “The Devil’s Triangle is totally a drinking game,” “I believe Professor Ford except for the bit about her being attacked,” “We care about women,” “Brett Kavanaugh will be a fair and impartial Justice,” and “Oh, I would totally still be saying ‘innocent until proven guilty’ if it were a poor black man being accused instead of a rich white one”. Thusly, I have split it into two parts, the second of which will run next week.

I suppose we’d better get on with it. It is still 1989, but the closest I can narrow it down to is “before September”, based on an ad announcing issue 1 of Aircel’s The Walking Dead. Which is a different thing from the comic book called The Walking Dead which you have actually heard of.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. — H. P. Lovecraft

I didn’t mention it at the time, but issue 2 began with a quote from The Call of Cthulhu. Issue 3 began with a passage from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. For issue four, we’ll lead in with this quote from Human, All Too Human:

War. Against war one can say: It makes the victor stupid, the vanquished malignant. In favor of war: Through both of these effects it barbarizes and thereby makes more natural; it is a sleep or a winter for culture, and man emerges from it stronger for good and evil.

It is attributed to “Fred Nietzsche”.

Sigh.

Breaking with the convention of the first half of the series, we’re done with this series ripping off my titling convention a quarter century before I thought of it. This is a mixed blessing, because I’ve been desperately trying to come up with other words that end in “-thesis” in case I find some War of the Worlds ‘zines on eBay for a price I’m willing to pay, or I ever get another chance at the original 1988 press kit which is holy fuck beautiful but the only one I ever saw got bought for several hundred dollars by someone who definitely thought it was linked to the Spielberg movie.

Anyway, issue 4 bears the title “Zarathustra Syndrome”. In case it wasn’t sending up enough red flags that they opened on a quote from Nietzsche.  And I like Nietzsche, and think that he gets way too much of the blame for the fact that he didn’t rise from the dead to denounce the Nazis for misreading him so badly.

Our next red flag is the opening text, which tells us that it is no longer 1913, but now 1938. Yes, that 1938. This can only mean one thing:

Superman Crossover!

It now becomes clear, of course, why they chose the date they chose for the first part of the story: because “twenty-five years later” is a nicely-shaped amount of time for a big time-skip and 1938 is a significant date to put at the far end of it.

“25 years ago,” we are told, “The first generation of Aarach arose from the strata.” A serviceable recap tells us how the Aarach sought not conquest but nookie, and kidnapped Rebecca to get their fuck on. “That was 25 years ago. Now mankind is about to know the razor-fine disparity between the generations.

“Teeth.”

Overblown, much? Also, I realize that I myself sometimes get lost and begin three consecutive paragraphs the same way, but there aren’t a whole lot of words between “25 years ago” and “That was 25 years ago,” and even fewer between establishing that it is 1938 and hopping back a quarter century for backstory.

Anyway, the first proper page is a full-page spread of a nude Rebecca, still looking like a cross between an H. R. Geiger and a self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat, being murdered by a very large, very butch looking hybrid, who is also nude. I mean, they’re all nude down here, it’s not a sex thing in-story, but it’s hard to imagine the decision to play up the sexualized aspect of the violence was accidental.

On page 2, Rebecca’s murder at the hands of her offspring is intercut with scenes of Stanley Boyd, now an old man, and institutionalized. And also nude for some reason. It’s not exactly clear why and of it. He says, “Like a fool, I continued to talk while the rest of the world struggled manfully to forget.” Does he mean that this world, like the one of the TV series, has so completely repressed the memory of the invasion that he’s considered insane for remembering it? They know his hand glows, right?

So I guess now we have to count “The guy who insists on reminding people of the invasion afterward is widely dismissed and reviled,” as a recurring theme. We’ve seen it with Doctor Forrester in the backstory to the TV series, a bit with Walter Jenkins in Baxter’s book, and now Stanley Boyd.

In back on issue 2, commenter Seed of Bismuth brought up the in-hindsight-obvious fact that this was series was probably drawn first, and the dialogue was only added in hindsight. That seems to get less true in the back half, but it’s still definitely a thing, and the story holds together fine as a purely visual experience. Boyd’s narration from the mental ward is a place where it holds together somewhat better without the words even. In particular, this passage:

I think it happened during my- was it? – Sixth year here. My mother passed on. And lacking the means to attend the funeral, I attempted to join her in another fashion. I severed the chartreuse veins in my left wrist with my teeth. My departure was interrupted and my hands, uh, removed. But I could feel Rebecca still. Almost taste her.

Um. Chartreuse is green. We don’t really know why he’s institutionalized to begin with, and it’s hard to make sense of what he means by “My hands, uh, removed.” I mean, the accompanying picture shows him in a straitjacket, but that’s a weird way to describe it. Besides, he’s unrestrained again in the next panel. In fact, he goes on to talk about his hands more, how they’ve stopped glowing now with Rebecca’s death.

It would make more sense if he’d been out on his own until his mother died, and it was his suicide attempt that got him locked up. But the panels don’t bear that out, so the narrative twists itself up to explain what we’re seeing. If you just ignore the narration boxes, it makes a lot more sense: Boyd in a padded cell, seeming to take comfort in the glow from his hands. Intercut with Rebecca’s death, Boyd has a violent outburst and needs to be restrained. Eventually he calms and is released from restraint but has become morose, and his hands aren’t visibly glowing. That’s a simpler and more satisfying story than the digression about his mother’s death, and the pictures really tell us all we need.

Meanwhile, in hell, a race of over-muscled dudes and ladies with head-tentacles and back-ridges. The largest one, and the only one to have white skin, is Gash, who we’d seen bits of in the frontispiece, killing Rebecca. He’s the leader of the hybrids. Other named characters include Sniv, a mousy, henchmanny sort of character, and Melina, who is interested in drinking her late mother’s blood. “Come, Melina, yes,” Gash says, “I know you thirst, but we will each drink from Rebecca’s crimson pools (“He means blood, right Joel?” “I sure hope so, Tom.”) after our remaining work is complete, yes.” Sniv doesn’t want to see any more killing, but, “There is the brother who blocks our path. He must be removed, yes.”

Said brother is “Meat”, the only one of the hybrids to have absorbed some humanity from his mother. Once again, the narration boxes add little: Meat, who’s a bit less grotesque than his siblings, makes his way to the surface. He has a brief setback when the manhole cover he tries to emerge through gets run over by a car. His siblings track him through the underworld. The narration here adds the idea that their plan involves five of them reaching, “The lands of the lady with the torch,” for reasons that won’t become clear for some time. How exactly Meat is an impediment to their plans isn’t clear.

Meat encounters a hobo and apparently steals his clothes. This scene is… It’s very straightforward without the dialogue. You’ve seen this scene if you watched Peter Capaldi’s first episode of Doctor Who. The dialogue that goes here gives the scene a completely different tone, though, and the juxtaposition is simultaneously cool and frustrating.

The images we see show the drunk clearly terrified of the large, naked, not-quite-human creature that confronts him. He scrounges in the rubbish, possibly looking for a weapon. Meat looks confused. The next time we see Meat, he’s fully clothed (Though he’s wearing a dark coat and a fedora, while the hobo was wearing a bowler and a light coat).

In the dialogue, though, the hobo is initially sort of bemused by the sight of a “bastard” uglier than himself. Despite looking terrified, he’s sympathetic and willing to help, especially when Meat says that he is looking for his father. He rummages through the rubbish, claiming he something Meat could wear, and asks what Meat can offer as payment. We never see him again, and the next time we see Meat, he’s clothed.

I love the idea of the drunk actually being willing to help. And the weirdness of his businesslike conversation while the visuals clearly show a terrified man desperately looking to defend himself is cool. But the conversation doesn’t set up what it delivers. It ends in the middle of a negotiation about payment. Compare that to the exchange in Doctor Who:

The Doctor: Now give me your coat.
Barney: No.
The Doctor: I am cold.
Barney: I’m cold.
The Doctor: I’m cold. There’s no point in us both being cold. Give me your coat. Give me your coat.

 

See, that sets up an ominous note and with us unsure about the character of this new Doctor, it’s clear when we see him wearing Barney’s coat later that he forced that wino to strip. There’s none of that here; no hint that Meat would resort to violence — that concept will come up later, but as of right now, the fact that he’s not like his violent siblings is the only thing we know about Meat. So instead, we just get a kind of not-very-interesting cliffhanger of “How will Meat pay this drunk for clothes?” which we don’t even bother resolving. (He mentions having silver later on, but they never connect these threads up, so it feels like they just neglected to finish the scene)

To Be Continued…