War of the Worlds – Page 5 – A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Deep Ice: Those Strange Beings Who Landed in the Jersey Farmlands Tonight (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 3)

I’ve been keeping a young man in my basement. Plus ça change, I hear you say.

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

So the Doctor has just discovered that he’s been had; Glory Bee is not, in fact, Professor Stepashin’s American niece, but a secret agent from Soviet Russia, sent to ensure that the professor doesn’t defect (Though, these being early days for that sort of thing, Stepashin recognizes the concept, but not the word). Given the cordiality between Stepashin and Don Cheney, I’m not really clear now whether Stepashin was actually “kidnapped” at all per se, or if it’s more the case that Stepashin’s help with the alien technology is Cheney’s payment for facilitating Stepashin’s defection. Glory (we never get a real name) explains that once Stepashin disappeared, she was forced to resort to hiring a, “Disgusting capitalist private detective. No offense.” The Doctor cops to not being the real Halliday. Jessica Hynes’s “Russian” accent isn’t exactly a convincing Russian accent, but it’s a pretty good “Russian character in a cold war spy movie” accent, down to her suddenly losing the ability to use English grammar (“This is all to the good,” and “It seems we have both been played games.”), except for the fact that she occasionally drifts a bit Dracula as they slip out of Cheney’s lair to find themselves on the architectural support for the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.

It might be a little surprising, if you’re coming to Doctor Who from the new series, that the Doctor gets taken in like this. I’m not saying it never happens, but if this were a David Tennant episode, that last cliffhanger wouldn’t be the Doctor shocked to discover that Glory Bee isn’t who she said she was; he’d just offhandedly reveal, Sherlock Holmes style, that he knew she was a Russian agent the whole time because of the way she was wearing her watch or something. Honestly, Paul McGann seems a little uncertain when he’s introducing himself to Stepashin, like he’s not sure whether the Doctor genuinely believes he’s reuniting family or if he’s really aware of what he’s doing as he forces Glory Bee to out herself. In the end, he unambiguously owns up to having been duped, but I think it would’ve been a little better if he’d turned out to have suspected her despite playing along.

So why did the Doctor fall for it? Well, mostly, I think, because he’s the eighth Doctor and these are the “wilderness years”. This is a period where Doctor Who is a TV show which was cancelled almost fifteen years ago. And where the dominant narrative in the fandom is that it had been in a decline for almost a decade before that.

Even before McGann, in the days of the Audio-Visuals, from which Big Finish drew a lot of its early material, we had an eighth Doctor that spends most of a season suffering from a crippling drug addiction, has his brain surgically altered by the Daleks, murders a god, wipes out his own people, loses at least one companion, has to be repeatedly rescued from the brink of death by an evil time-wraith who only keeps him alive to torture him, and tries and fails to destroy Earth (Long and not very good story). The BBC Eighth Doctor books feature, among other things, the Doctor callously dismissing the deaths of companions and even family; the destruction of the TARDIS; the destruction of Gallifrey at the Doctor’s hand; the Doctor being tortured to the point of madness; the Doctor shoving a dude into lava; the Doctor cutting out one of his own hearts; the Doctor literally bringing the concept of death to a world where it doesn’t exist; and the Doctor’s own past and people being deleted in favor of a new continuity where he’s a magic crystal skeleton creature that turned itself human (This was later walked back when it became clear that the radical changes to continuity they wanted to do weren’t going to stick in light of a new TV series, but at the time, yes, the intention was that the Doctor was not and had never been a Time Lord because Gallifrey was not only destroyed but retconned out of existence). Big Finish is actually less of a downer, but still manages to have the Doctor literally go insane in two consecutive season finales, along with another string of companion deaths. And when a clearly Big Finish-derived eighth Doctor appears on-screen in “Night of the Doctor”, he’s again defined by failure: he is outright rejected by Cass, who chooses to die rather than allow herself to be saved by a Time Lord, before dying himself and accepting resurrection only by rejecting the title of Doctor.

In part, this can be explained as a function of the eighth Doctor being the Doctor of the 1990s. For legal reasons, Big Finish didn’t get their hands on him until 2001, but a lot of his characterization had already been established in fan lore. Science Fiction fandom in the ’90s, and some segments of Doctor Who fandom in particular, were in a hurry to reject the “glam” sensibilities of the ’80s and to be “darker and grittier”. This was a period when antiheroes were in vogue, body counts were high, and things like intellect and romance were rejected as being “gay” in favor of brute force and cynicism. The ’90s — the real ’90s — weren’t amenable to the sort of thing Doctor Who was, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the kind of Doctor Who that grew there was a broken kind of Doctor Who.

During this era, there were some pretty prominent fannish divides. One of these was the Frock-Gun divide, between those who were interested in fun adventures in time with character drama and humor and frilly costumes (hence the name) and those who were interested in hard-hitting sci-fi action with monsters and shooting (hence the other name). The other big divide was the Trad-Rad divide, between those who reckoned that the Doctor Who expanded universe was largely a caretaker position which should focus on producing nostalgic romps that recreated the feel of the classic series, and those who felt that, free from the shackles of having to be commercially viable, they should go nuts and explore new directions and be the cutting edge of science fiction media. These fights could get heated, with the frocks viewing the guns as a bunch of stupid meat-heads, and the guns viewing the frocks as — well, it was the ’90s, so they’d just use a homophobic slur. The rads would accuse the trads of necrophilia, while the trads would accuse the rads of mistaking novelty for quality, and question why the rads were bothering with Doctor Who in the first place if they wanted to do something that only vaguely resembled it.

The space Big Finish occupies is fraught in light of this. These loving reproductions of classic-style stories with the original cast and formatted into four-part serials with cliffhangers every twenty-two minutes are an inherently Trad endeavor, and the medium of audio is just inherently more friendly to frock sensibilities. But one gets the strong sense that on a personal level, the creative minds behind Big Finish are much more Rad and a little more Gun, which you see reflected in their eighth Doctor line, even if, as here, it’s being written by Mark Gatiss, who is pretty undeniably a Trad-Frock.

But whether one was a trad or a rad or a gun or a frock seemed to make little difference to the underlying presumption of how the eighth Doctor should be played (Well, except for the extreme Trads for whom the answer was “Not at all”). Failure is the default mode for a wilderness years Doctor, and especially for Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor, who, not without justification, is largely viewed as “the one who was supposed to bring the franchise back but didn’t.” The cancellation of the original series was a wound to fandom, and the coming of Paul McGann in the 1996 TV movie was heralded as the second chance that could heal that would… And then he just didn’t. As late as 2006, you were still seeing holdouts who refused to accept McGann’s Doctor as legitimate, who insisted that Christopher Eccleston should really be considered a replacement eighth Doctor, facilitated by the first season’s extremely light hand when it came to directly acknowledging the original. (And the fact that Eccleston’s Doctor was already the second officially sanctioned ninth Doctor, due to the stillborn animated revival staring Richard E. Grant.)

Like I said, this is less of a big deal in Big Finish than it is for other media, and this story in particular is a mild example of it. But we do see it here, with the Doctor being taken in entirely by Glory Bee. We’ll see signs of it again in a minute, but first, we’re off to New Jersey, where strange creatures have just set down, who are the vanguard of an invading army. More or less. Conservator Noriam and Destroyer Streath have arrived to recover their lost breeding party (way to ruin the cliffhanger, guys). The internet tells me that these guys are Leiderplacker, and that they resemble bats, though this does not come up in episode three, past the fact that they consider humans unusually hairless. Fun fact: Doctor Who already had an established race of batlike aliens. It’s slightly amazing that Big Finish missed a chance to recycle them. And this is sort of hard to explain, but despite the fact that this is audio and despite the fact that they are described as being large, I can’t help imagining them as muppets. Streath, as you may guess from the title, is eager to blow shit up, and he’s kind of screamy, sort of what you’d imagine if you remade Full Metal Jacket recasting R. Lee Ermy with Elmo. Noriam isn’t exactly opposed to blowing shit up, but insists on cataloging everything properly first, and has a correspondingly more urbane pattern to his speech. This is their shtick, and I find it a nice touch to make them seem like an actual alien culture and something other than just a generic monster: Leiderplacker culture appears to be based on maintaining a balance between the principles of conservation and destruction (they will explain this in a slightly awkward expository “As you know, Streath” sequence). That said, nice a touch as it may be, I do question whether it ends up adding anything useful in a story that already has so much going on, especially since it never becomes all that relevant to the resolution of the plot. In this episode, it only figures in insofar as Noriam repeatedly has to convince Streath to postpone blowing shit up. But it’s not like you need a cultural justification for that: “Wait, let’s find out if they’re useful before we kill them,” serves just fine. There also seems to be a thing where the Leiderplacker, or at least Streath, have a suspiciously intense interest in water.

The Leiderplacker are comedy relief aliens. I’m okay with that in principle. And I’m glad Big Finish was willing to do it, since that sort of thing tends to upset the humorless manbabies who are a core demographic. This whole story is a bit of a farce, so it’s not a bad choice to make the aliens fit into that framework. It’s a story that is in large part about performances and the power they hold, with Glory Bee, the Russian spy pretending to be a noir femme fatale, with Orson Welles the actor, with Cosmo with Devine’s over-the-top camp, with the Doctor pretending to be Halliday, even, to an extent, Bix Biro as a closeted gay man. And now we have, essentially, aliens playing at being Doctor Who aliens. That said, the Leiderplacker are somewhat lacking in a reality underneath their performances. Being the shouty, kill-crazy one is legitimately what Streath’s deal is, and likewise Noriam being the bureaucratic, officious one. The show they’re putting on is something different, and they’re kinda terrible at it. And there’s a sort of buzz underneath their voices which is physically unpleasant.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Those Strange Beings Who Landed in the Jersey Farmlands Tonight (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 3)

Deep Ice: That is my conjecture of the origin of the heat ray. (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 2)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

“I forgot to mention, I ran by the White House in this gorgeous lilac suit I had a little man run up for me. Later on, he ran down it again.”

Where the hell were we? Orson Welles and John Houseman are getting ready to adapt The War of the Worlds for radio. Their CBS boss, Bix Biro (yes, really) is being blackmailed into working for Cosmo Devine, a campy gossip columnist who is… No, still not going to spoil the surprise. While they haven’t yet, these plots are eventually going to link up with the intrigue in which the Doctor and Charlie find themselves. They stumbled upon the corpse of private detective J.C. Halliday, and after determining that he was killed by a radiation weapon, the Doctor stole the dead man’s identity and offered his services to femme fatale Glory Bee, who is looking for her missing nuclear scientist uncle. Halliday was killed by a pair of gangsters who were in the process of cheating their boss, Don Cheney. Confused? You won’t be, after this week’s episode of… Actually, no, wait. You’re totally going to be confused, because we’ve got at least two major twists coming up, and there’s a whole plot thread that hasn’t even started yet.

So Don Cheney’s deal is that he found a crashed alien, which he’s keeping locked up in his lair, and said alien is supplying him with energy weapons. Cheney actually does have a strategic plan for these, but at the moment, it seems like he’s just using them for the ordinary sort of dominance in a violent trade.

They haven’t done a great job yet of selling me on why these alien heaters provide such a tactical advantage to the gangsters. I mean, sure, they can kill you right good. But an ordinary sort of gun seems fairly adequate to the task already. The two times we’ve seen them used, it was at close range, against an unarmored target, who already had a gun drawn, and it seems to have helped only in that the would-be shooter was startled by the sight of it, giving the user time to shoot first. The sound effect of the gun — deliberately similar to the heat rays in the 1953 film — lasts several seconds, which suggests to me that it’s not markedly faster than a regular gun to fire, plus it seems like it has to power up before it can be used. Now, in a non-visual medium, we can easily imagine there being more to it than we’re told explicitly. But I’ve still got the laser weapon from the TV series in my head, remember? Where the aliens made a huge deal of how laser pistols would definitely win them this war, only when they show us one, it takes like 10 seconds to kill one person who’s tied up at the time?

This isn’t an uncommon problem in sci-fi stories that use alien weapons as a plot point. They confuse being viscerally terrifying with providing a concrete tactical advantage. Before I watched Stargate SG-1, I probably wouldn’t have noticed myself. That show did, I think, a good job of demonstrating that while, sure, the Goa’uld had scary-looking sci-fi weapons, you weren’t any less dead if you got shot by a USAF-issue submachine gun, and, ironically, visually flashy sci-fi beam weapons in TV shows tend to have much slower firing rates than actual automatic firearms on account of you want to be able to actually see them. But here, it just sort of goes without saying here that energy weapons are better than guns because they just are. Compare that to, oh, let’s say, The War of the Worlds. The Martian heat rays are certainly terrifying from the start, but even there, once the initial panic has worn off, the narrator doesn’t see them as an insurmountable technological advantage on their own. Against soft targets, the heat ray isn’t much different in efficacy than a machine gun: you can sweep it across a group of people and kill them all. It’s only when you couple it with the fact that it can destroy vehicles, buildings, artillery, that it’s mobile, and that on top of that, the Martian war machines are far less vulnerable to human weapons that the Martian weapons become properly dangerous. Once the rest of the New York underworld learns not to panic at the sight of the Cheney gang’s alien weapons, “Just shoot first,” is going to go a long way to neutralize their advantage.

I guess we should talk about the voice work. Strictly speaking, I should’ve brought this up sooner, but last week’s article was already close to five thousand words. I can comfortably say that these are some of the most convincing American accents Big Finish has ever produced. This should not be mistaken for them being good. They get a boost here from the fact that the previous eighth Doctor adventure, “Minuet in Hell”, was also set in the US. While “Invaders From Mars” is set in 1930s New York, “Minuet in Hell” was set in the near-future bible belt, in a hypothetical future state named, in a rather shocking level of Big Finish not having a clue of what is a realistic thing to happen in America, “Malebolgia”. That story, adapted from an old Audio-Visual of the same name, was full of fake Americans faking non-specific or vaguely southern accents poorly. “Invaders From Mars” has the advantage here that no one’s doing “generic American”; they’re all doing various shticks. David Benson voices Orson Welles, and he doesn’t quite manage to accurately reproduce a Mercury Theater-era Welles so much as he does a shockingly faithful reproduction of Maurice LaMarche’s Orson Welles voice, enough that I almost expect Houseman to ask him, “Gee, Brain, what’re we going to do tonight?” And I think it’s a strong choice for the role; being strictly accurate to Welles isn’t nearly so important here as evoking the zeitgeist of Welles, which this voice absolutely does. Benson also voices Halliday’s brief appearance, which is basically just his Welles toned down a bit. Later, we’ll also hear him affect a thick accent as Professor Stepashin, the missing uncle. Jonathan Rigby is similarly good as John Houseman. It’s distinctive enough that you can tell who he’s supposed to be, with a very distinctively “British Ex-pat” accent. He does come off a lot more British than the “classic” John Houseman accent, but I can’t say if that’s ahistorical; Houseman had been living in the US for about a decade at this point in his life, but it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that he would become well-known in front of the camera, so the Houseman voice we associate with Smith Barney commercials and his posthumous cameo in Scrooged is the voice of a man who’s spent another fifty years on this side of the Atlantic. Rigby does lay it on maybe just a bit thick with his tendency to end every other sentence with “, my boy.”

Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) — you may know her as Joan Redfern and her identical granddaughter Verity Newman in televised Doctor Who — plays Glory Bee with a considerable dose of Mae West. Her most consistent slip is that she pronounces Charlie’s last name, “Pollard” correctly, as Po-lard, where a legitimate American would change it to Pahl-ard. As with everyone, she’s more “Person trying to sound like archetype” than “Archetype”, though for reasons which become clear later, it makes sense for her character. WHat really makes these fake Americans more palatable than what Big Finish (or Doctor Who in general) usually provides in the way of “Americans” is that a lot of these performances are performances of performances. Orson Welles is an actor; John Houseman is a Romanian-born half-French half-Irish Brit trying to make it in America; Cosmo Devine is playing a public persona of a camp gay celebrity. So it’s expected that everyone should sound a little fake. The gangsters too, sound like characters out of a gangster movie. Simon Pegg voices Don Cheney, which is a surprise. His accent slips quite a lot, but even when he does, he doesn’t sound like Simon Pegg. John Arthur’s Cosmo Devine also slips out of his accent a lot, but I’m not sure that’s accidental; maybe they’re intentionally trying to signal that his exaggerated effeminate tone and mannerisms are an affect for public consumption. The gangsters, Pegg’s Cheney included, are all going for a generic sort of thuggish lout type; these are more your Cagney style gangsters than your Brando style. Ian Hallard’s Mouse is a fun contrast as the nervous-weaselly one, though it would get pretty grating if he lasted past episode one. Hallard returns with a more subtle accent as Jimmy Winkler in this episode.

We return to the story the next morning, where Charlie finds that the Doctor has stayed up all night reviewing Halliday’s files. This is a weird Wilderness Years Expanded Universe thing where the Doctor only sleeps when he’s sick or injured. He’s discovered that Halliday was already investigating the Excelsior Hotel, where Professor Stepashin was last seen. I don’t think we’re ever going to find out why Halliday had been involved with this business, since he doesn’t seem to have been hired by any of the other players. The Doctor and Charlie have to slip out on the fire escape when the police turn up, having found Halliday’s body, and in the chase, it takes the Doctor a minute to notice when Charlie gets kidnapped by Ellis.

When he reunites with Glory Bee, she convince him that Charlie’s abduction must be linked to Stepashin’s, and they proceed together to the Excelsior. Again they deny any knowledge, but a contrived distraction by Glory Bee gives the Doctor a moment to check the guest register. Based on the sound effect, he seems to speed-read it flipbook-style, as the televised Doctor would go on to do with The Lovely Bones in “Rose”. He finds an altered page where Stepashin’s name has been removed and leads Glory Bee to room 1504 based on the mismatch between the replaced page and the pen impressions on the page beneath. I’m not an expert in pens. But I object to this on the grounds that it’s 1938 and the first commercially viable ballpoint pen was only invented four months ago, and wouldn’t be on the market until the mid-forties. I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think you can apply enough pressure with a nib pen to leave marks that would be visible to the naked eye on the page beneath, particularly on the sturdy sort of paper used in guest registers. The Doctor picks the lock, only to be greeted by a gangster, who informs them that, “Glad youse could join us. Da boss would like a word. I understand youse been askin’… questions…”

Their arrival at the hotel and interest in Stepashin is overseen by Ellis, who is in the middle of connecting this plot thread to another via a clandestine meeting with Cosmo Devine. It was an agent of Devine’s who Mouse and Ellis had expected to meet the previous night when Halliday intervened. Given that Don Cheney is having the Excelsior watched, this seems like a dumb place for Ellis to meet with the guy he’s selling out to. Ellis was also behind Charlie’s kidnapping, and has delivered her to Cosmo’s New Jersey lair. Despite his divided loyalties, Ellis refuses to reveal to Devine where the alien weapons came from. He does allude, though, to Cheney’s involvement in the disappearance of Stepashin.

Continue reading Deep Ice: That is my conjecture of the origin of the heat ray. (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 2)

Deep Ice: This is Orson Welles (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 1)

“NEVER play the same game three times running!” — Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth, Act II.

It is January, 2002. The Euro becomes legal tender in 12 EU nations. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle accuses the GOP of causing, “The most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation’s history,” to which the Republicans respond, “Hold our beer,” and proceed to reorient the economy primarily around credit default swaps. Brewer Freddy Heineken, restaurateur Dave Thomas, and singer Peggy Lee die. Apple introduces the iMac G4. I turn twenty-three.

Out this month on the Playstation 2 is Rez, a rhythm-based rail shooter inspired by the works of Wassily Kandinsky. It’s notable for the fact that in Japan, it came with a sex toy. I mean, not deliberately, but the designers wanted more powerful haptic feedback than the Dualshock controllers could provide, so they included a USB-controlled rumble-pack called — because Japan — the “Trance Vibrator”. And it came with a washable sleeve so it’s not like they didn’t know what the deal was or anything. It’s a fun and really trippy game even if you choose not to let it reward you with orgasms for playing.

Nickelback holds the top spout on the charts for half the month with “How U Remind Me”. It’s hard to believe now, but there was indeed a time when people actually liked Nickelback. Usher will take the spot from them for the second half of the month with “U Got it Bad”, part of a Bush-Era austerity drive that forbade songs in the top 10 from wasting three letters to spell the word “You” correctly. U think I’m making that up, but this is the fourth time a “U” song has been in the number one spot since 2001. “You” hasn’t been spelled correctly by a #1 song since last May’s “All For You”, and won’t be again until 2004, while two of 2003’s number ones will spell it “Ya”.

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast — the 1991 animated one — is back in theaters, at least those which support the IMAX format, to which it’s just been converted. Disney’s Snow Dogs also comes out this month, and the Hong Kong Cinema parody Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

Television this month will give us a fiftieth anniversary special for I Love Lucy, a sixtieth birthday special for Muhammad Ali, the thirtieth anniversary special for The Price is Right and the thousandth episode of Soul Train. Conspicuously Absent Franchise Title: Enterprise returns from its fall break with several new episodes, including “Dear Doctor”, justly maligned as the worst mangling of the theory of evolution Star Trek ever did. And if you don’t appreciate how much that is saying, remember: there’s an episode of Voyager where going faster than warp 10 causes Paris and Janeway to “evolve” into giant salamanders with Fu Manchu mustaches, and then fuck. The West Wing has three new episodes this month, and The X-Files is still on somehow, which surprises me. So is Dark Angel, which, it turns out, got way better after the six episodes I watched, and I will try hard not to slam it in the future.

Fun fact: I started writing this article almost exactly a year ago. Only I decided for some reason that I should do Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II: Electric Boogaloo first, and things kinda spun out of control from there, with me repeatedly losing my will to continue this project, or, indeed, do anything at all ever again. But we’re back now, I guess, and I won’t blame you if you’re confused.

So yes, I’ll cop to the fact that last summer, I ran a pair of articles which crossed over between our years-long meander through adaptations of The War of the Worlds with my years-long art project positing an alternative version of Doctor Who. And it followed the premise that the Doctor and his companion happened upon a plot to invade the Earth in October of 1938, and took advantage of the Orson Welles broadcast to trick the aliens.

And because I’m a hack, I lifted the broad concept of the thing from something which is real. To be clear, my version of “Invaders From Mars!” is not a straight lift from the twenty-eighth Big Finish audio drama. I had to make room for poorly colorized newspaper archive photos, poorly edited screenshots from the 1999 made-for-TV movie RKO 281, and dick jokes. But certainly, the general gist is there.

So, Big Finish. Is this the first time we talked about them? Big Finish is a British company that has been producing audio dramas for the past 20 years. Their focus is audio plays based on British cult media, mostly TV, and they’re best known specifically for their Doctor Who line, which started out by picking up out-of-work Doctor Who actors and having them reprise their TV roles in plays based mostly on Virgin’s New Adventures and Missing Adventures novel lines, along with some remakes of a late-90s series of fan productions that the producers had been involved with. But after a couple of years of that, they decided to try something bold and got Paul McGann to reprise his role from the ill-fated 1996 American TV movie, taking a stab at being the “official” continuation of the Doctor’s adventures.

This was, in the real world, basically peak “wilderness years”, when it seemed basically impossible that Doctor Who would ever come back to TV. It was just about believable that the future of the franchise might just be low-budget licensed spin-offs in other media. And — this all seems like a weird fever-dream now — some people in fandom welcomed this. At last, they said, Doctor Who belongs to us, the fans, and we can finally do it properly, the way it should always have been, with a slavish adherence to continuity, and nothing even vaguely American, and long expository segments to canonize our pet theories, and NO GIRLS. And it would be great and show all those corporate suits that we know best and that living in our mom’s basements is too cool!

Draw what conclusions you like. Here’s the thing: Big Finish Productions are entirely competent at making high-quality audio dramas with talented actors and competent writing and entirely professional production values. And their series have produced many really fun and enjoyable things like Doctor Who and the Pirates and …Ish and Colin Baker getting to redeem his reputation by playing the Doctor in a period when everyone involved in the production didn’t clearly hate the show and want it to die, and they gave Paul McGann the chance to actually develop the character for himself, and really the only problem with Big Finish’s Doctor Who at a basic level is that the basic concept of what it is isn’t all that worthwhile of an idea. I mean, the target audience for Big Finish Doctor Who consists of 40-year-old men who desperately want an exact reproduction of a show that was cancelled thirty years ago, and are willing to pay a bunch of money to indulge their nostalgia. On the one hand, they’re free to do things that are innovative and new, because they effectively have a captive audience who will buy any old crap they put out. But on the other hand, their target audience profoundly isn’t interested in something innovative and new. They want something familiar and comfortable. Something that has cliffhangers every thirty minutes even if they don’t actually make any sense and fuck up the narrative flow of the story and reassures us that the Doctor never ever has sex and does not have any biological children, and takes time out of an audio-only narrative to assure us that they switched back to jaunting belts because no one liked the jaunting bracelets (that last one was The Tomorrow People).

What I’m trying to say is that the Big Finish Doctor Who audios are fine. Some of them are even good. But at no point do they ever really make any serious attempt to justify their existence. It’s a series that was tailor-made for a very specific audience who effectively had no real choice if they wanted to get their Doctor Who fix. It was the closest thing you could get to more Doctor Who (There was a line of novels produced by BBC Books at the same time, of course, but the novels never had any real claim to being the “legitimate continuation” of the series proper — they were, if anything, the successor to the series of novelizations produced alongside the classic series, and by extension were inherently positioned as supplementary). So nothing Big Finish did prior to 2005 ever had to answer, or even address, the question, “Why should I consume this particular media instead of one of the myriad other options I had.” And then 2005 came around and… honestly, they never managed to give a fully satisfying answer to why we should bother with them now either, but at the least, they didn’t take the presumably attractive option of hardcore catering to 40-year-old men who ragequit the new series because of the kissing and the women who serve narrative functions other than to twist their ankles and get captured. I assume. I mean, I haven’t really listened to much of their post-2005 output because why bother when there’s real Doctor Who to watch now.

Big Finish, at this point in their history, had sort of stumbled into being the de facto “main” continuation of the series. But it’s not like they’d won that title somehow; they were just the only viable option. And even today, it’s their version of the eighth Doctor, the sardonic one with short hair who doesn’t wear a Wild Bill Hickok Halloween costume, which is accepted as mostly-canonical. On paper, the BBC Books would seem to have the stronger claim, being actually produced by the BBC. But it’s the Big Finish companions Paul McGann names when toasting his own regeneration in “Night of the Doctor”.

Now, if I haven’t already set us up for failure sufficiently, I’ll reveal that the real Invaders from Mars was written by Mark Gatiss. If somehow you’re not familiar with him, Mark Gatiss is a writer, actor and comedian, who’s probably best known for his work on The League of Gentlemen and for playing Mycroft in Sherlock. Or maybe for his role in Game of Thrones, I have no idea. He’s one of those long-time ascended fanboys in the Doctor Who universe, having gotten his start as a professional writer in the New Adventures novel line, and his start in “TV” writing P.R.O.B.E., a direct-to-video Doctor Who spinoff that he would really prefer you not track down and watch because it’s terrible. He also wrote a number of episodes of the current television incarnation of Doctor Who and starred in several episodes, most recently as The Captain in “Twice Upon a Time”.

And, well… Mark Gatiss is a competent writer. Perfectly competent. But he’s… He’s got this kind of style to him. And it’s a style that can be a bit problematic. Let me put it this way: at one point, Mark Gatiss converted one of the rooms in his house into a Jules Verne-style Victorian Scientist’s laboratory. The kind way to put it is that he’s big on nostalgia. The less kind way of putting it is that he is kind of uncomfortably obsessed with an utterly undeconstructed love of the grandeur the imperial age of Great Britain with absolutely no apparent acknowledgement of just how incredibly skeevy that imperial past could be. To the point of occasionally blindly walking into things like speaking with a wistful longing for the days when foreigners knew their place, casually dropping racial slurs, and, on occasion, parroting the talking points of the British National Party. Which is strange for literally anyone, much less an openly gay man. He’s also almost serenely bad at writing women. I mean, you may think that his frequent collaborator Steven Moffat has some problems when it comes to writing women. But Moffat at his worst does still appear to have actually met a woman at some point in his life.

So Invaders From Mars is not necessarily an obvious brief from Gatiss. I mean, sure, it’s nostalgic, essentially Big Finish’s homage to the golden age of radio. But it’s an homage to the golden age of American radio. And that’s not really Gatiss’s particular thing. If you look at the rest of his Doctor Who output, it’s like, yeah, he wrote the one where the Doctor met Charles Dickens and he wrote the one where the Doctor hung out with Winston Churchill without a single bad word to say about him, and he wrote the one which is basically Moonraker in Victorian London, and he wrote the one where the Doctor met Robin Hood and he wrote the one where Victorian soldiers go to Mars and treat an Ice Warrior as Friday. On the one hand, “The Doctor fanboys over a historical figure” is very much a Gatiss thing to do, but on the other hand, the Doctor fanboying over someone who isn’t Victorian or at least British is odd. But okay, it’s not like “Mark Gatiss also likes American Golden Age Radio” is much of a stretch to believe. I mean, I like American Golden Age Radio and also post apocalyptic children’s television, so who am I to judge?

I like genre collisions, on principle. I’ve said this before. So Doctor Who-meets-Golden-Age-Radio should be a winner, even with Mark Gatiss to deal with. And in practice, we can expect that Big Finish won’t produce a complete train wreck at this stage in their creative output. But enough damning with faint praise. What’s the damn story about?

The Doctor is traveling with his companion Charlie Pollard, a self-described Edwardian Adventuress who he rescued from the dirigible R-101 (Internet personality Bill “The Engineer Guy” Hammick wrote a book on the subject), a doomed British airship which would probably be a lot more famous if it weren’t for that other doomed airship. Rescuing Charlie is in the process of destroying the universe, on account of it having changed history, since no one is supposed to have survived the R-101 crash.

I mean except that people did survive as a matter of historical record, and as Charlie was a stowaway, there wouldn’t have been any record of her being there in the first place so history wouldn’t notice her not dying anyway. And also the whole “You can’t change history!” thing is bullshit anyway, and treating it like an inviolate concept due to one line in “The Aztecs” back in 1964 is part of the fanwankish bullshit that is the hallmark of the worst excesses of the wilderness years, and I’m getting off topic. The point is that the current plot arc in the Paul McGann adventures is that the web of time is in serious peril. This is going to take the whole season to unfurl, so for the moment, it’s pretty subtle.

There’s no cold open. The theme music is a not-especially-good techno mix of the Doctor Who theme (I wonder a bit whether this is a deliberate rejection of the more orchestral arrangement of the John Debney version of the theme music used for the 1996 TV movie. Actually, I don’t wonder. Making a point to do something stupid and petty just to reject a thing that the fans didn’t like is basically peak Big Finish) which plays without any spoken titles. Given Big Finish’s distribution model — CDs at the time — this is a defensible choice, but given that I remember a guy from rec.arts.drwho who sent the BBC increasingly threatening letters raging at them about how intrusive their corner-of-the-screen channel bugs were once a week for six months until they told him to stop, I feel like probably what they’ve actually done here is broken with audio convention to avoid the fanboys complaining about them ruining the shitty techno cover of the Doctor Who theme by talking over it. Sorry. I shouldn’t be this bitter.

Continue reading Deep Ice: This is Orson Welles (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 1)

Deep Ice: I thought you’d surely burned (Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s War of the Worlds, Part 2)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

I mean, the first half of War of the Worlds happened. You know the drill. There’s a very minor reordering of events so that the Curate can tell George about the Thunderchild incident. The curate is another kinda freaky character model, looking like he’s about one third Peter Lorre.

George has been incapacitated for days since the attack at Weybridge, and there’s a detail here which I’ve never seen in any other adaptation, though it’s implied in the book: after his near-scalding in the river, George’s face is badly burnt, and he’s pocked with blisters for the rest of the comic, even having what I think are visible scars in the epilogue.

The Curate’s breakdown isn’t as profound as in some versions, though he does go all gloom and doom, referencing Sodom and Gomorrah. Edginton retains that wonderful line where the narrator admonishes him as, “What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?”

Also kinda looks like Hyrule’s nerdiest Goron

It is from the Curate that George hears about the black smoke, before a sadly abbreviated version of the Thunderchild incident, told as just four or five red-tinted panels showing Thunderchild “smiting” one fighting machine before the “inevitable” outcome.

Ahem, it’s, “Standing *firm* between them,” thank you very much.

After being trapped in the collapsed house and witnessing the Martians feed, when the Curate decides he has to go “witness” to the Martians, George incapacitates him with a broken piece of lath rather than the flat of a knife, but the scene plays out otherwise the same as always.

This is possibly the only adaptation I can think of that includes — and more, gives us a look at — the embankment machine, and even leaves in a note explaining that the machine is unpiloted.

One decision I find kinda odd is that they never actually say anything about the red weed. It’s there, as a kind of thick spaghetti ground cover, but the dialogue never brings it up.

Also, maybe just the tiniest bit phallic. George wanders through the depopulated town, lucking into finding some edible root vegetables in someone’s abandoned garden. I really dig his self-satisfied look as he walks on with an armload of tubers.

I get a bit of a Don Quixote vibe from the windmill in the background.

The artilleryman is okay in this version. Not too distinctive. I don’t really get the sense that George is ever taken in by his “strange charisma” in this version, and is just going along with him out of desperation. Like, when the Artillerman tells the story of the people left behind in London partying in the streets the night before the Martians took the city, it occurs to George to question how he could know about it. Also, like George, the Artilleryman has gained a prominent scar, though given that his is from a cut, I wonder that it might have been from a human adversary over custody of that sword.

The Artilleryman tells George about the Martians developing a flying machine, but also adds in the idea that the Martians are building themselves an entire city, which I assume is to set something up for Scarlet Traces.

Nice visual homage to the Al Nozaki war machine, though in more of a *Robinson Crusoe on Mars* configuration.

One of the places where Edginton and D’Israeli get to expand on the original novel without changing anything is the way that they illustrate the Artilleryman’s thoughts. Like, there’s two panels illustrating the Artilleryman’s contempt toward what a modern telling would have him call “sheeple” in the form of a ersatz clone army.

“And then one particular cloning machine got badly out of sync with itself. Asked to produce six copies of a wonderfully talented and attractive girl called Lintilla for a Brantisvogon escort agency, whilst another machine was busy creating five hundred lonely business executives in order to keep the laws of supply and demand operating profitably, the machine went to work…” — The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

And this wonderful vision of the Artilleryman’s underground city, which is just about the most Victorian thing I’ve ever seen.

The underground city is really cool. It’s not just simple steampunk, but reminds me a lot of images of imagined super-highways-of-the-future from 1950s futurism, but with a more Victorian flavor that calls to mind, say, the Burlington Arcade.

But the jewel of this collection is the illustration of a fighting machine operated by, “Men who’ve learnt the way how!”

We’ve seen human-made tripods before, of course. But I guess it never really occurred to me that this would be what the Artilleryman was talking about, rather than humans simply stealing Martian Tripods.

George slips out while the Artilleryman is asleep and makes his way into Dead London proper. There’s a few very evocative panels of the dead or dying, including a woman who, I assume, reminds George of his wife, prompting his suicidal charge at the Martians. But there’s also a number of panels that try to convey the scope of the human tragedy by just piling the streets with vaguely-sketched gray corpses, ash-covered victims of a smoke attack.

When the Martian tripod refuses to oblige George by killing him, he discovers the occupant dead, and as he runs off in his joy, he suddenly crests the edge of a crater — the geography gets a little sketchy here, since he’s presumably at a cylinder impact site in the middle of London, but we can’t actually see any London in the background — and finds the half-built Martian city.

He also gets to see the partially-built flying machine. I’m guessing the Martian city and flying machine are relevant to Scarlet Traces, since we dwell on it more than I think any other adaptation has.

Edginton has the narrator work out the Martians’ cause of death right on the spot, rather than it being presented as the best guess of scientists after the fact. It helps with the pacing some. I just love George’s goofy look of joy here. He becomes hysterical at the idea and eventually blacks out from it, awakening days later in the home of some locals who’ve taken him in. I think the family is meant to be Jewish — the man looks like he’s wearing payot and and kippah, but he’s drawn small and in dark panels so I’m not sure. I’m curious whether this family turns up in Scarlet Traces.

George takes the news of the destruction of Leatherhead oddly in stride. Upon hearing that “hardly anyone” escaped, he says only, “Ah, I see. Then I shall return home to Woking and whatever’s left there.” And indeed, he seems more sort of resigned than distraught when he returns home, pours himself a drink, and looks wistfully at a picture of his presumed-dead wife. You know, we’ve seen a few adaptations which use the protagonist’s desire to reunite with his family as the proximate motivation behind his actions. The Asylum had their George trek across Virginia to find his wife and son. Jeff Wayne’s version too has the Journalist driven by the hope of finding Carrie. But in the original novel, the narrator is almost bizarrely ambivalent about finding his wife. He spends a good chunk of the story heading for London for no clear reason, when he last saw his wife in Leatherhead and has no reason to think she’d left. I’ve got an adaptation coming up — if I can make it all the way through it — that actually makes something of that.

A young Sir Toppum Hat declares a salvaged Tripod “Very Useful”.

But George and his wife are indeed reunited and a few panels show humanity rebuilding. It says nothing specific about salvaging the Martian technology, though we do have a panel I think is meant to imply it. George mentions the possibility of man exploring space one day, though in the compressed storytelling format of the comic, this seems oddly placed, coming immediately after he speaks of his lingering emotional scars. And his scars aren’t only emotional. The final panels find George and Catherine paying a sombre visit to a tripod erected as a monument in a park. Though his burns have healed, George still bears severe scarring from them.

He also seems to have inherited his late weird-eyed neighbor’s hat.

The Dark Horse version of War of the Worlds is a very good graphical adaptation of the story. If you’re looking to just get the original novel in comic book form, it covers all the bases without really adding much of its own. But it does a good job of adapting the style and pacing of the narrative. Adapting literature to serial art isn’t necessarily a straightforward process, especially one like War of the Worlds where a lot of the drama comes in the form of long periods of fearful waiting. The art for anything Martian is fantastic. It’s otherworldly yet recognizable. And I just love the pumpkin thing the tripods have going on.

The other part I really like is the artilleryman’s musings. I’ve often said that it’s a big deal for me how the artilleryman is handled, and it’s interesting here that the narrative very straightforwardly makes the right choice of being very clear that the artillerman is kinda useless and wrong, but the matter seems largely irrelevant to the art. The art isn’t in tension with the narration here, but rather, the art is entirely focused on his dreams, while the narrative covers his abilities, and the gulf between them is left largely for the reader to discern. So we get these wonderful panels not just of the artilleryman’s brave new world, but also of these clone armies of praying priests and toiling salarymen to represent the artilleryman’s contempt for the masses.

Ordinary human characters are… Weird. In many cases, so weird that I assume it’s deliberate. The curate has this squished quality to him, and George’s neighbor looks like he was left out in the sun too long. George himself sports burn blisters for most of the story, which is a real nice touch. On the other hand, there’s so much variation in his character model that I’d have a hard time telling it was meant to be the same person if there were more than the one character who appears throughout the book. Maybe this is trying to show him becoming increasingly injured and broken by his ordeal, but it doesn’t work for me.

All the same, I really like the art. The thick lines keep the panels easy to understand even when they get crowded, and it somehow manages to seem very bright despite a palette heavy in browns and dark reds. And though there’s a minimalism to the range of colors used, the use of light and shadow really comes through well. I’d say it has a sort of cel shaded look, but I know that’s basically explaining it backwards.

I liked this, and I’m looking forward to Scarlet Traces to see how Edginton and D’Israeli use these techniques in more original material.

Dark Horse’s War of the Worlds is available from amazon.

Deep Ice: They don’t die pretty (Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s War of the Worlds, Part 1)

It is May 2, 2006. I’m working on building a cat condo for Leah’s cat. Louis Reukeyser, host of Wall $treet Week (How I pray that some day when she gets too old to be cool, Ke$ha discovers a hidden talent for economics and takes over that show), dies. Puerto Rico is forced to close their Department of Education due to an ongoing budget crisis, but I’m sure they’ll turn it around. Silvio Berlusconi resigns as the Prime Minister of Italy, to spend more time with, I assume, sex workers. Surely, he will never be heard from again. Bjoern Hoen, Petter Tharaldsen, and Petter Rosenvinge are sentenced to seven, eight, and four years in prison for their roles in the 2004 theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Madonna. The paintings will be recovered in August. This week also sees the Great American Boycott, also known as the “Day Without an Immigrant”, a protest by US immigrants against the broken and frequently racist immigration policies in the United States. I’m sure that’ll get sorted out soon too.

Well, this has been kind of a bummer. Let’s look to the world of entertainment… Doctor Who wins the British Academy Television Award for Best Drama this week. Saturday, it’ll air “The Girl in the Fireplace”, a Steven Moffat tearjerker in which the Doctor romances Madame du Pompadour in 18th century France, but is unable to adopt her as a traveling companion because a faulty time window has him show up after her death. This past Saturday gave us “School Reuinion”, the return of Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. The episode would lead to Sladen being given her own spin-off, which would run for five seasons until… Well fuck. Every damn piece of news this week has ominous foreshadowing, and I haven’t even mentioned that this is the week 7th Heaven airs its series finale (Then goes on to get renewed anyway because we don’t yet know about Stephen Collins).

Madeline Albright is Jon Stewart’s guest tonight. Paul Reikoff is Stephen Colbert’s. We’re approaching the Police Procedural Event Horizon, with three CSIs, four Law & Orders, and the first of the NCISes. Power Rangers Mystic Force is off this week, returning next Monday with “The Gatekeeper, Part 1”, an episode in which the actual rangers themselves are tangential at best, a frequent weakness of this season, with its unusually large supporting cast. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse premiers this week, reuniting classic Disney characters in banal, toddler-friendly adventures as creepy, soulless CGI constructs, and forcing parents to learn something called the “Hot Dog Dance”. Mission Impossible III is out in theaters this week. Goodfellas comes on on HD-DVD.

Almost two thousand guitarists converge in Poland to simultaneously play Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe”, setting a Guiness world record. Pearl Jam releases the Avocado album. “Bad Day” is the top song on the Billboard charts.

I’m not overly literate when it comes to comics. I never really got past the fact that in terms of minutes-of-entertainment per unit cost, comics fall somewhere between hard drugs and sex workers. But I’m not disinterested. I’ve watched every episode of Atop the Fourth Wall, and studiously never bothered to read my copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

The upshot of all of this is that my knowledge and background into comics is sort of haphazard and lackadaisical. Which is how I ended up with a copy of the Dark Horse adaptation of War of the Worlds. Because, although this comic is just a very straightforward, very direct adaptation of the novel, it’s also something else: it’s a prequel to Edginton and D’Israeli’s 2002 series Scarlet Traces, about the imperialistic ambitions of an early 20th-century England, bolstered by reverse-engineered Martian technology. Edginton and D’Israeli’s War of the Worlds was published a few months before Scarlet Traces‘s direct sequel, The Great Game, with a fourth series, The Cold War being published a decade later. And I will probably get to those eventually, but it turns out that I’ve got a ton of these comics to get through, and I haven’t worked out what the minimum number of things I have to buy to get the whole thing.

Oh, and remember Pendragon? The folks who put out one of the ~~most~~ painful adaptations I’ve tried to fight through? Well, right after this adaptation came out, they took a stab at insinuating that Dark Horse had ripped them off, putting up a poll on their website comparing art designs from their “movie” to the comic. This was eventually settled, with Pendragon posting an apology on their website for giving the impression that they thought Dark Horse had ripped them off just because they pretty much said exactly that.

So with the ringing endorsement of having been accused of looking too much like a shockingly cheap-looking film, how’s Dark Horse’s adaptation? S’okay. It sticks close to the novel, despite being deliberately positioned to lead into Scarlet Traces. If there are direct references to Scarlet Traces, they’re subtle and don’t really change anything from the book. But I think it makes an interesting contrast to the Saddleback version in how it translates the story to the less verbose style of sequential art. And I find the art style cool in a lot of places, and… interestingly weird in others. So let’s take a look…

I like the art style here. It’s kind of a medium between the oddly over-detailed look we saw in the Saddleback version and the old-timey simplified style of the retro-Superman story. There’s also something unusual about the use of color that I don’t have the vocabulary to describe. It’s a limited palette with a small number of colors and exaggerated contrasts, but it doesn’t have the same harsh flatness of most comic art. Something like a pop art chiaroscuro that has a bit of an art deco quality to it.

It’s good to see the AskJeeves logo guy get work these days.

Whenever space is shown, even the night’s sky, it has this reddish nebula effect on it. It livens up panels which would otherwise have a lot of empty blackness. And if it sometimes seems a little excessive, at least it’s clear that D’Israeli has actually seen the night sky before, which gives him a leg up on both Pendragon and whoever did the covers for Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II.

Continue reading Deep Ice: They don’t die pretty (Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s War of the Worlds, Part 1)

Deep Ice: Cut across their lines of magnetic force (Elseworlds: Superman vs The War of the Worlds, concluded)

Previously…

Clark wakes up weeks later to find himself a Martian prisoner. He finds himself restrained inside a Martian prison camp, where Lex Luthor is conveniently present to deliver some exposition. Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt and the British royal family have all been killed by the Martians, who have completely conquered the Earth.

Predictably, Luthor has sold out, offering his services to the Martians in exchange for his life. Despite their victory, the Martians are dying. Luthor quotes Wells, but also gives their affliction the cute nickname “Earth Flu”. Of course, the logic here is a little dicey; Luthor’s agreed to serve as the Local Knowledge for the invaders, helping them cure the Earth Flu, because he reckons the human race is finished and working for the invaders is his only chance. But… He also knows that the Martians are dying. So… Wouldn’t it make more sense to just, like, not help them? You’ve got to figure that Luthor would stand more to gain by making a grab for power as humanity tries to rebuild after the Martians are defeated than he would as a Martian Quisling. Even if he’s focused on his short-term survival here, there’s no hint that he’s planning to double-cross the Martians, and he is earnestly working on the cure. The only hint we get is, admittedly, a nice one: it’s a challenging scientific problem, so perhaps it’s imply his vanity pushing him to prove he can hold his own against these otherworldly intellects.

I have an irrational love of this image of Luthor Dope-Slapping himself.

Luthor has Lois brought to them, not for any clear reason, and asks Clark about his extraterrestrial origins. Because of the golden-age setting, Clark knows nothing about it, but easily admits that, yeah, he might well be an alien, having been found as a baby in a crashed rocket. When Lois mentions that the Martians in the lab are the only ones she’s seen that aren’t afflicted by disease, Luthor realizes that Kent’s alien immune system is protecting the Martians. We get the comic’s one and only use of the word “Superman” when Luthor compares Kent to a Nietzschean ubermensch, a comparison which doesn’t actually hold water since Kent’s value system is pretty staunchly opposed to Nietzsche’s, but I don’t consider that a writing flaw since pretty much everyone badly misunderstands Nietzsche and the ubermensch.

Lois is predictably horrified by Luthor’s villainy, and rejects his amorous advances, though Luthor takes it in stride. Within a few hours, he’s isolated Kent’s antibodies and developed a cure for the Martians… Whereupon they suddenly but inevitably betray him, as he is of no further use to them. Lois saves Luthor by stabbing the attacking Martian, and Luthor, declaring himself to have been “temporarily mad” to have sided with the invaders, frees Kent just in time to beat the crap out of more Martians, telepathically summoned to assist.

Okay, I’ll take destiny into my own hands. Just so long as you don’t expect me to spell “Clark” with an “S”

Escaping the lab, Clark dispatches the Martians to whom Luthor had given the cure, hoping they haven’t yet telepathically communicating it to the others. He also frees the humans imprisoned in the camp, pausing to explain about the S on his shirt to a bystander whose most pressing concern is why he spells “Clark” with an “S”. They also pause for Luthor to reflect on the humans who refuse to flee, preferring to be “tended to” as livestock than to take control of their own fate — way closer to Nietzsche than anything to do with Clark.

When Clark tries to shepherd Lois away, she instinctively recoils from him. I like this response, and even more, I like that she owns it. “I know I shouldn’t feel that way, after all, you just saved our lives, but I can’t help it!” She qualifies her instinctive discomfort in light of the fact that, y’know, fifty percent of the alien races she’s met this month have tried to exterminate humanity, and hopes she might be able to get past it in time. She’s genuinely ashamed of herself, and Clark, though clearly hurt, clearly gets it.

Also, it’s the thirties, so technically it’s illegal for me to love an alien.

One thing that’s really interesting about this exchange to me is that while Lois is repulsed by Clark on learning he’s an alien — the exact reaction Pa Kent had cautioned young Clark about — Luthor never shows any such revulsion. He never shows any animosity toward Clark that’s greater than the general disdain he shows toward everyone else in the world. If anything, this Luthor seems oddly trusting.

A few Martians are still healthy enough to operate their tripods, and they rain heat rays on the escaping prisoners. Luthor and Lois are shocked when Clark picks up a wrecked car to defend them, Lex remarking, “The man isn’t human! But if he isn’t, then what is he?”

The answer comes in the form of a half-page spread recreating one of the most iconic images of the golden age.

“Guy in the lower left who loses his shit at the sight of Superman picking up a car” is one of the most unsung visual icons of comic book history.

Clark smashes one machine with a car and destroys a second by throwing its own black smoke rocket back at it. But when he tackles the third machine’s legs, the hood of the machine separates from them, hovering in the air. Luthor speculates that the tripod legs were akin to training wheels, assisting the vehicles while they learned to compensate for Earth’s gravity (Later, it’s implied that the tripod legs can’t even hold the machines up on their own, but are purely to assist with balance).

This is one of the few adaptations to keep the detail of the heat ray being held in the tripod’s manipulator arms rather than mounted on the fuselage. Though it kinda makes it look like Mr. Burns saying “Excellent…”

Clark takes two direct heat ray shots leaping at the flying machine, but makes a key discovery, which Luthor conveniently explains to us: when something passes between the flying machine and the ground, it interferes with their anti-gravity. Clark takes a third hit tossing one of the disabled tripods under the flying machine and it crashes to Earth. Though mortally wounded, Clark proceeds to hammer on the crashed machine, but suddenly holds back, realizing that “war fever” is taking hold of him. He collapses, and as he lays dying, he explains that he recognizes the basic similarity between himself and the Martians: that he too comes from a dead world (he’s guessing), and Lois’s reaction earlier demonstrates how easily it might be him and not the Martians that has humanity running in terror.

I like the sentiment, but maybe he’s laying it on a bit thick here? This is like all those scenes in Doctor Who where they set up this moral challenge between the Doctor and the Daleks, like, “But isn’t the Doctor on some level just as bad as they are?” Actually no, because they’re the Daleks. And here too, though the narrative does a good job of setting up the fact that it’s natural and reasonable for humans to fear Clark the same way they fear the Martians, and though the first few pages do set up the basic similarity between Krypton and Mars, only one of the alien species in this story has actually attempted genocide. Moreover, the moral arc of the narrative seems to land firmly on the side of “Humanity is right to fear the Martians, but wrong to fear Clark.” Yet it almost seems like the narrative isn’t quite clear on why. It seems at times implicit that it would be natural and entirely justified for a Kryptonian to look down on humans exactly the same way Martians do, so it’s hard to justify a message of “Fearing aliens because they’re different is wrong,” in the face of it actually being the right thing to do half the time. It’s even worse when you consider that no one acted with immediate fear and revulsion toward the Martians; they only freaked out later once the Martians had demonstrated hostility. So the good message of not rushing to judge Clark is in some sense twisted into a bad message of “Don’t learn from your mistakes.” (That’s not the only message you could take, and there’s a perfectly good “Don’t let bad past experiences lead you to misjudge someone else later,” but the comic doesn’t put in the work to take the moral the rest of the way there).

Continue reading Deep Ice: Cut across their lines of magnetic force (Elseworlds: Superman vs The War of the Worlds, concluded)

Deep Ice: Strong men, no weak ones (Superman: War of the Worlds, Pages 19-38)

Previously…

I tell you, it feels really good that they went all-in on the Golden-Age costume here. Notice, though, that there’s no bullshitting around with a secret identity. Clark doesn’t even seem to have had time to think about such a thing. It’s obvious to Lois who he is and he doesn’t deny it. There’s no time for anyone to coin his moniker either; he’s just Clark Kent for the duration. Or occasionally, “That guy in the pajamas”.

In fact, Lois and Clark meet up with the army on the next page, and Captain who greets them asks whether he’s a foreign agent or with the circus. Which is an interesting combination of possibilities, and even better, Lois vouches for him by saying he’s her photographer. I could kinda see how this might actually carry some weight, with Lois being a general’s daughter, but Sam Lane wouldn’t be introduced until 1959, and it wasn’t until the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot that he was a military man. As it is, a random woman just told an army captain that the random dude with her in a weird costume is trustworthy. You can’t even suppose that Lois has clout as a famous journalist, since they’ve established that Lois has been stuck writing the agony aunt column waiting for Taylor to give her a break.

<Montgomery Burns Voice>Excellent.</Montgomery Burns Voice>

The obligatory scene of the army not believing this “Martians” nonsense is cut short with the reveal of the tripod, eliciting a shout of “Holy Crow!” from the captain. I assume this is a golden age comics thing, but all I can think of is Bella Swan. The tripod itself is a letdown after the really creative look we got from the Saddleback version, but it’s certainly consistent with the ’30s comic aesthetic. There’s not anything wrong with it, mind, it’s just the most straightforward interpretation possible; essentially a flying saucer on stilts. In one interesting choice that is true to the novel but rarely carries to adaptations, the heat ray isn’t built into the fuselage but is instead held in the manipulator arms.

I’m thinking the captain is modeled on Les Tremayne

When the army is slow to heed Clark’s warning to back off, he throws himself into the path of the heat ray to save them. At such close range, the blast is enough to stun even Clark, causing him to experience pain for the first time in his life. He recovers in time to shove a cannon and its operator out of the way, then lifts the heavy field piece over his head and fires it like a bazooka. When this fails to affect the tripod, Clark grabs the canon by the barrel and just clubs the Martian with it, knocking it over.

He’s able to pry open the fallen tripod, extract the struggling alien, and pitches it. Not all the way back to Mars, mind you; he points out that he’s not strong enough for that.

Superman can’t throw a Martian clear to Mars. But Ralph Kramden could probably punch one to the moon.

This is one point where the writing style can get a little annoying, and the artifice can show through a bit. This is Golden Age Superman, so his powers aren’t what they’d creep up to in the silver age: he can’t fly, only “leap tall buildings in a single bound”; he’s not immune to all injury, but only strong enough to withstand “anything less than a bursting shell”. He’s not faster than the speed of light, only as fast as a speeding bullet. And this story stays true to that. But in an actual Golden Age story, they wouldn’t feel the need to remind us of it. The real Golden Age Superman would not, as this Clark Kent does, tell people, “No, I can’t fly, but I can jump really far.” He wouldn’t tell a Martian, “I’m just sorry I’m not strong enough to toss you back [to Mars].” This Clark Kent — on his very first outing in tights — seems unrealistically aware of his limitations.

It’s a similar kind of misstep to when the opening scene of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie started out inside the TARDIS and spent several minutes there before showing the Police Box: it botched “It’s bigger on the inside” by showing us “It’s smaller on the outside”. Just like here, Clark’s repeated mentions of his limitations changes the message from “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” to “Slower than a fighter jet, weaker than an atom bomb, not able to fly.”

Clark arrives at Metropolis not far behind the Martians, just in time to rescue a pilot who’d managed to ditch before his plane was incinerated, but lost his parachute to another heat ray.

But even with Clark’s reassurance that he’s not flying, just jumping, the rescued airman still panics, begging the non-human Clark to keep away from him. This might seem ungrateful, but that airman has had a hell of a day, and in any case, we’re really edging in on our major theme for the piece. Presaging Man of Steel, we see that Pa Kent had been right to warn his son against displaying his powers, that, at least in the context of an alien invasion, humanity’s instinct is to fear Clark rather than idolize him.

Lois makes it back to the train station, but it’s destroyed halfway through her call-in to the office. Lex Luthor knows better than to drive into Metropolis, but offers Lois a ride as far as his laboratory on the outskirts. They have to make the last leg on foot once the roads become impassible, and at this point, Lex and Lois are separated before Lex gets clipped by the outer edge of a heat ray, and I think you know where this is going…

Brylcreem! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Clark’s luck runs out when the Martians release the black smoke. Though he can hold his breath for minutes, he’s eventually forced to make a blind leap out of the smoke and takes two heat ray hits at close range. His unconscious body is scooped up with the others harvested by the tripods.

I used to just toss my action figures loose in a big bin too. That’s how so many of them got broken.

George Taylor witnesses the Man of Steel’s defeat via telescope from his office at the Daily Star. Though the height of the building protects them from the black smoke, a heat ray catches the building. Taylor shoves Jimmy Olsen out of the way, but is killed when his office explodes.

The destruction of the Daily Star leads into a kinda mediocre two-page spread showing civilians fleeing before smoke and tripods as the Battle of Metropolis ends in utter rout…

Deep Ice: If they’re more advanced than us, they should be nearer the Creator (DC Comic’s Elseworlds: Superman: War of the Worlds, Pages 1-18)

Whatever that is off-panel to the left must be hella interesting if Supes is looking at that instead of the tripod.

It’s two weeks to Christmas and we still don’t have the tree up, so it is a minor miracle that this post is going up at all, which is why I am stretching a 64-page comic book to 3 articles.

It is 1998. Ted Kaczynski pleads guilty to the Unabomber bombings. The winter Olympics take place in Nagano. Disney opens the Animal Kingdom park. Bear Grylls climbs Everest. Matthew Shepard is mortally beaten in Wyoming, the photogenic youngster’s tragic death helping to bring about a wave of hate crime legislation. Actor Phil Hartmann is murdered by his wife. Windows 98 is released. I go briefly crazy some time in November. And, in a statement I may have to revise depending on how long it takes me to write this article, ~~for the last time until the present day~~, a US President is impeached.

Titanic makes a literal billion dollars and wins a fuckton of Oscars. Saving Private Ryan comes out, and will do similar things. The Big Lebowski comes out. So does Wild Things, Lost in Space, Les Miserables (the 1998 one with Liam Neesen and no singing), the killer asteroid movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, Godzilla (the 1998 one with Matthew Broderick), The Parent Trap (the 1998 one with Lindsay Lohan), My Dinner With Andre, Bride of Chucky, The Faculty, Star Trek: Insurrection, You’ve Got Mail, and What Dreams May Come. All these things happened in the same year. Weird, right?

Star Trek: Deep Space 9 enters its final season. Star Trek Voyager… Happens. This is the last season I watched consistently. This year’s Power Rangers is Power Rangers in Space, the finale of the “Zordon Era”, and the last season to be part of an ongoing multi-season storyline until 2011’s Power Rangers Samurai. ~~The reboot of Doctor Who starring Hugh Laurie finishes its second season and starts its third.~~ Doctor Who is pretty much dead again, seemingly forever this time. Seinfeld airs its legendarily bad series finale. Dawson’s Creek premieres, a handy thing if you’re a college freshman who wants an excuse to hang out with all the girls on your floor in the apartment of the upperclassman with a 27″ TV. Other premiers this year include the wonderfully bizarre time travel adventure series Seven Days, the American version of Whose Line is it Anyway, seminal gay sitcom Will & Grace, supernatural craze-expander Charmed, and beloved girl-power cartoon The Powerpuff Girls.

Brandy dominates the Billboard charts all summer with “The Boy is Mine”. Armageddon and Titanic cough up chart-toppers as well with Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”. R Kelly’s “I’m Your Angel” sees the year out, but somewhere mixed among all that, Barenaked Ladies become a household name south of the 49th parallel thanks to “One Week”.

The dude in the lower left who just can not handle this shit is possibly my favorite character in the history of comics.

Meanwhile, sixty years earlier, it’s 1938. I hardly need remind you that in October of 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater adapted War of the Worlds. I mean, I hardly need tell you again, since I’ve told you like a million times already. But you know what else happened a few months earlier in 1938? I mean, you’ve surely worked it out since it’s in the title of the article. But yeah, back in May, National Allied Publications released issue 1 of Action Comics, introducing audiences to a strange visitor from another world who was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

So in 1998, when a whole lot of stuff was going on in the Superman world to celebrate the Man of Steel’s sixtieth, Roy Thomas and Michael Lark put together a story for DC’s “Elseworlds” line, depicting alternate versions of their beloved characters. Superman: War of the Worlds asks us to imagine a world where the intrepid reporter that was first on the scene when a strange meteor lands in a small town near Metropolis (The name isn’t given in the text, but sharp-eyed readers will notice the train station identifies it as “Woking”) isn’t Carl Philips, but Lois Lane, and her fledgling photographer, Clark Kent.

The opening comingles the introduction of War of the Worlds with the classic Superman backstory, with direct homages to both. “No one would have believed,” we are as usual told, of the intelligences greater than man yet as mortal as his own which scrutinized the Earth in the early decades of the twentieth century, but here, it’s not only the Martians, but also the far-distant Krypton. Because this is the golden age version of the story, Krypton’s destruction is caused by it simply having reached the end of its life cycle — a more advanced case of the fate facing the Martians.

The parallel between Mars and Krypton adds a slightly sinister note to the arrival of Kal-El on Earth. Though we learn nothing concrete of Jor-El (the narrator seems to be speaking from the viewpoint of a human historian in the near-future, though even knowing the name “Krypton” is inexplicable in that case), the narrator presumes that he must have views humans “as inferior animals…. as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.”

I am surprised that they decided to model Pa Kent on Melvyn Douglas, but I wholeheartedly endorse this decision.

Baby Kal is found by the Kents, a slight divergence from Superman’s earliest appearance; in the earliest comics, he was said to have been raised in an orphanage. The Kents aren’t given first names, consistent with mainstream Superman history, where the Kents don’t get their canonical first names until the 1950s. As he grows, the Kents discover young Clark’s abilities, which are the reduced Golden Age power set: the ability to leap an eighth of a mile rather than fly, skin that is impervious to anything short of “a bursting shell”, and the ability to outrun a train. His powers are attributed to a million years of evolution beyond that of Earth humans, rather than any particular influence of a yellow sun.

Pa Kent warns Clark to hide his powers, lest humanity be scared of him, while Ma encourages him to help humanity, “when the proper time comes”. Again, this all tracks with the various versions of Clark’s upbringing in this era. It is the death of his parents (Until the ’70s or so, the Kents were generally depicted as already elderly when they adopted Kal-El) which prompts Clark to head out to the big city to try to find a way to use his powers to benefit humanity, and by an amazing coincidence, this occurs simultaneously with “The great disillusionment”, as the Martians launch their invasion fleet.

A montage of Clark taking in the splendor of Metropolis makes for some nice syncretism with the “infinite complacency” of man going “to and fro about this globe about their affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

Continue reading Deep Ice: If they’re more advanced than us, they should be nearer the Creator (DC Comic’s Elseworlds: Superman: War of the Worlds, Pages 1-18)

Deep Ice Addendum: More Saddleback

It’s almost Christmas, and also almost my son’s birthday, and also just past my wife’s birthday, so here’s a filler article: more fun panels from the Saddleback illustration of War of the Worlds.

Here’s the text from the back cover, by the way:

Do UFO’s really exist?
Could creatures from another planet visit Earth?
In The War of the Worlds they do exist and the visitors from the planet Mars come to Earth with not so friendly intentions—to destroy our civilization!

Greengrocer’s apostrophe theirs.

I love that this abridgement included “Dude who is mostly concerned about the insurance.”

I wasn’t exaggerating when I said there were an inordinate number of panels about horses.

I love this unnamed military guy. Very GI Joe.

Continue reading Deep Ice Addendum: More Saddleback

Deep Ice: Anything that would serve the image emerging onto the canvas (Saddleback’s Illustrated Classics: The War of the Worlds)

Weirdly, this is a better interpretation of the Thunderchild scene than is actually in the book.

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.

The iPhone X’s built-in projector performed better than expected, but it was still panned for being uncomfortable to stick in your pocket.

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

I feel like they were going for Vincent Price as the narrator and Rex Harrison (circa *The Ghost and Mrs. Muir*) as Ogilvy. But somehow they ended up with the love child of Vincent Price and Ian Marter as the narrator and the lovechild of Rex Harrison and Edward Mulhare (circa *The Ghost and Mrs. Muir*) as Ogilvy.

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.

Ogilvy majored in astronomy, not geometry. That’s why he somehow has no idea what a cylinder looks like.

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.

Thinking the cylinder contains friendly visitors in danger of burning to death, Ogilvy seeks the help of sad Amish Farmer Abraham Lincoln.

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.

Or, y’know, the Krang. It looks a lot like the Krang.

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.

And then for some reason, the zombies surrender.

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.

Though it kinda looks like he got close enough to the heat ray that his face melted.

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.”

Meanwhile, in a cheap Van Gogh knockoff…

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

Also, why is he dressed like a gambler in a western? He’s even got a bolo tie.

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)

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