Empire to Empire: Why H.G. Wells Still Matters.
Little Book of Horrors: War of the Worlds.
“Inspired by HG Wells.”
Written by Steve Niles.
Painted art by Ted McKeever.
Published by IDW Publishing (2005).
Released: July 2005
Largely self-taught, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) worked his way up from humble origins to become an influential, teacher, journalist, a radio commentator, author, critic and historian. Despite these accomplishments, we remember him best today for a relatively brief period of astonishing creativity, which took place around the turn of the last century. Concerned about the consequences of empire on the souls and future prospects of Victorian Englishmen (and women, he would no doubt hasten to add, being an early exponent of women’s rights), Wells produced a series of ‘scientific romances’, which secured his place as one of the founders of modern science fiction: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).
There were others of course. Wells’ contemporary, Jules Verne celebrated the possibilities of technology in [i]20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [/i] and[i] Around the World in Eighty Days[/i], and Mary Shelley preceded them both with her [i]Frankenstein: a Modern Prometheus [/i] (published in 1831). However Verne did little more than celebrate what the Industrial Revolution made possible. For Shelly’s part, some of her themes were certainly in sync with Wells’ preoccupations, notably the temptation to ‘play God’. However neither Shelly or Verne evinced anything resembling Wells ambition to serve as a Victorian Cassandra, warning Englishmen about the dark paths that arrogance can take a people propelled to unprecedented wealth and power by the engines of industrial might, economic influence and military power. And while there are very real differences between the British Empire of the turn of the 1890’s, and our own “American Century” (especially now that America’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Bear is no longer the threat it once was), I would argue that Wells’ messages are more apropos to our times than we might initially imagine. And I would be the first to submit that comic book adaptation of his work, and comic book stories written in the similar spirit are as good as any vehicle, for transmitting his message. Sometimes better.
In The Time Machine (1895), an inspired scientist builds a wondrous chariot that is able to take him forward and back through time. He advances into the far future, and discovers that technological advances have not brought ‘the greatest good to the greatest number’ but resulted instead in the degradation of the human race as a whole. Pre-industrial class divisions are compounded and reinforced by the industrial division of labor. This leads to a rise of in living standards for an elite and the development of an underclass of unskilled laborers. Over the centuries, the division between “haves and have nots” ossifies. Fat, complacent, decadent ruling class decays into slothful, mindless and nearly helpless creatures, preyed upon by laborers turned violent and bestial from centuries of degrading hard labor. Worst of all the underclass is revolting, and the descendants of the upper classes face imminent and utter extinction.
Otto Binder and Alex Nino preserved and gave due this emphasis to Wells vision (and cautionary intent) in their early adaptation of The Time Machine (published in Pendulum Illustrated Classics, and later reprinted by Marvel in Marvel Classics Comics #2 in 1976). Beautifully illustrated by the great Filipino artists of the 70’s: Redondo, Alcala, Nino, Nebres, these adaptations are often better written than Albert Kanter’s venerated line of Classics Illustrated Comics which dated from the forties and were often a bit simplistic). Select issues of Marvel’s brief reprint series were valued by grade school kids of my generation as the next best thing when you can’t get the Cliff Notes. (I predate the VCR, so renting the movie wasn’t an option. Come to think of it, we couldn’t ‘Google’ anything either. School was much more labor intensive back then.) They wouldn’t help you write a paper requiring citations, but you could BS in class readily enough.
The post-Cold War American Empire faces many of the challenges that faced England’s Empire in Wells’ day. Wells didn’t foresee the advent of advanced communications and computers, a revolution that seemingly makes the manipulation of information more important that the means of production. We tell ourselves this revolution will change the world, but the fact remains the “new economy” is still based on the old one. The old industrial division of labor is now an international one. Underpaid, dehumanizing labor is farmed out to “developing” nations with far lower standards of living to take advantage of cheap wages. Combined with free trade policies, ruinous development loans (the monies from which find their way back to US-based engineering and development interests, and the pockets of local elites), and the contradictory and threatening spectacle of our foreign policy, has resulted in a rise in Anti-American sentiment across the globe. Well-fed and educated, blessed with high standards of living, civil liberties, a complacent neighbor in the North, an impoverished neighbor to the South, and protected by two oceans besides, Americans may not have to worry about Morlocks cresting the hill anytime soon. Yet there remains a very real and widening conflict of interest between a disenfranchised, oppressed and exploited underclass in many ‘developing countries’, and those who benefit from that development, whether we are among the local elite in those countries, or live in one of the First World, G-8 nations. I would hope the events of September 11th would have disabused us of illusions that the situation is otherwise.
In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the American people asked, “why?” and, among other things, their attention focused briefly on how our Government has used the armed forces to defend and advance American economic interests abroad, esp. during the Cold War era. Writers like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson have regaled us again and again about what we’ve done in the name of democracy (and against the nationalization of mineral and petroleum resources and protected markets) in the Philippines, Panama, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia…the list goes on. In these writer’s view, what happened on September 11th 2001 is often viewed as part of a backlash for decades of our internationalist economic and foreign policies.
It’s worth remembering that we are hardly the first. The British Empire of Wells’ ear fielded its share of police actions against indigenous populations, and suffered its fair share of retaliatory strikes and insurrections. Wells War of the Worlds was written and serialized during the Queen’s Golden Jubillee Year (1898) for a reason. Wells hoped his narrator’s awe-struck and despairing account of the destructive path cut by Martian invaders through the English heartland would make British subjects think twice about the use of British power abroad and it’s results-in particular the genocide in Tasmania, and the massacre of British colonials in Central Asia.
Of course, when writers seek to adapt older works for contemporary audiences, some changes are inevitable. In Steve Niles single-issue adaptation of Wells’ War of the Worlds, Niles pares down Wells’ original to bare-bone essentials. As one might expect from Niles’ previous adaptations (Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Richard Matheson’s I am Legend) and his own titles (30 Days of Night, Wake the Dead) the passages he gleans from Wells text, are selected to emphasize the horrific. Placed over Ted McKeever’s charged, expressionistic, painted two-page spreads (composed to lead the viewers eye in arcs through a burning, blasted England), these passages evoke the breathless eye witness accounts of the 1937 Hindenberg disaster, the 1991 aerial bombardment of Iraq, and the 2001 air strikes on the Twin Towers.
Though Niles adaptation is faithful (most of the way through at least), by omission, Niles ends Wells’ story a different meaning, tailored perhaps, for the post-9/11 era. Wells’ Martians were driven to invade Earth by their depletion of resources at home. No reason is given for the assault described here. The climax capping Wells’ original, was the narrator’s chastening discovery, that where all the Imperial Power or the British Army failed, invisible microbes and bacteria had succeeded, finally halting the invaders bloody progress. Niles glosses over that moment (it surely deserves longer treatment), and closes with is the laudatory statement that, “we have lost our innocence as a planet” (better read perhaps as ‘empire’), and the admonition that we must, “forever watch the skies, and be prepared” (perhaps, to reap the whirlwind). Where Wells original implicitly criticizes the use of genocidal power and evokes the horror of being on the receiving end of such power, on the fear of invasion, Niles adaptation comes off as a one sided admonition to steel ourselves for more attacks.
Reading Niles adaptation, I couldn’t help wondering, “who is this edition for?” The layout and the full title, Little Book of Horror: War of the Worlds suggests this is the first of a series of books aimed at children. Advertising on the last page tells us that Niles and Richard Sala’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is due out next. I wondered if this is supposed to be a “tongue in cheek” offering, a novelty childrens book really intended for adults. Like Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey, or Johan Vasquez’ Johnny the Homicidal Maniac it might’ve been aimed squarely at the Goth-at-heart if it had gone far enough in that direction, but it doesn’t. It’s neither as gory as Keith Giffen and Simon Bisley’s Lobo stories (which certainly traumatized little Jenny Quantum in their hilarious Lobo/Authority X-Mas Special parody) but isn’t as light-hearted and neutered as a real children’s book treatment would be. One gets the feeling, in the hopes of appealing to the broadest possible audience, we ended up with the equivalent of a toothless Disney-fied (and financed) action film.
While the format allows for spectacular vistas, it also has the effect of limits the artist’s storytelling options. Ted McKeever provides great dramatizations of Nile’s parsed reportage, like well-composed photographs from the front, he can’t effectively give due emphasis to the narrator’s dark moments of realization, as shame given how effective his pen and ink storytelling is in the [i]The Extremist, Toxic Gumbo [/i] and [i]Industrial Got[/i]hic miniseries for Vertigo. Comparing those stories to [i]War of the Worlds [/i] (and his [i]Metropolis – Nosferatu - Blue Amazo[/i]n trilogy for DC Elseworlds) I have to say his black and white pen and ink work (colored perhaps by flat planes of color) would have been much more effective here than his paintings. While his color and compositions successfully convey the fevered horror of the invasion, I missed the striking contrast one gets from pen and ink, and I think that treatment would’ve lent this retelling of Wells’ tale much more impact. It’s like comparing Goya’s etching set, The Disasters of War to the paintings made of similar scenes. The contrast between black and white give the prints have a striking power that the larger paintings lack, for the centuries of fading pigment and browning shellac laid over them to protect the images.
In terms of meaning however, Niles and McKeever’s adaptation is still better than the 1953 film version of Wells’ War of the Worlds, which despite great special effects (for it’s day) seemed designed to capitalize on Cold War audiences fear of a US-USSR nuclear exchange, and offered the terrified masses the scant consolation of prayer in the face of an atomic holocaust. Too often Wells successors, the American pulp fiction and science fiction writers of the twenties, thirties and forties, adopted and built on Wells’ ideas, but they also ignored much of his cautionary intent. With some justification, critics labeled many major pulp fiction writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howards, HP Lovecraft, Sax Rohmer (the creators of Tarzan, Conan, the Cthulu Mythos, Fu Manchu), “small town bigots”, whose stories, however imaginative, betrayed their (and their audiences’) unconscious fears of women, black Americans and foreigners. Early science fiction writers fare just as badly. Writers like Robert Heinlein fashioned reactionary heroes, who charged into a final frontier that was military domination, building empires as they went along, and slaughtering any race that got in their way. However exciting, entertaining, and in the rare case, even educational, these stories are far too one sided, and one-dimensional. Wells’ chose to cloak the criticism implicit in his early ‘scientific romances’ in analogy and metaphor, resulting in a fair level of ambiguity. This might have been a partial concession to his time, as well as a desire to avoid simplistic judgements. Despite rhetoric like “the white man’s burden” and other self-serving justifications, his was both an oddly more innocent era, and one that was brutally honest at the moral trade-offs required by empire.
Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate Americans know far more about what American Government has done or condoned in the service of an international economy and empire. I’m almost sure Alan Moore had this “greater knowledge” in mind when he updated Wells’ War of the Worlds for contemporary audiences in his two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen miniseries. It’s easy to get blinded by the sheer charm of his League (reinforced by illustrator Kevin O’Neils treatment of leading characters), their period banter and constant bickering, but the fact remains the League is a secret special operations unit, and it’s membership is loaded with symbolism. While Mina Murphy is hardly helpless, she is also a virtual poster child for British virtue besmirched by “the foreigner”. Allen Quatermain is a parody of imperial will sapped by decadent weaknesses. The League is also an expression of how far the Empire will go to secure and maintain its power. The League employs monsters like Edward Hyde and Griffin, the Invisible Man, and a former anti-colonial terrorists, like Nemo, to take on still others, like the equally dangerous, and in this treatment, anti-colonial Fu Manchu (as well as secure military advantage) in the earlier volume. In Moore’s second volume, MI-5 fields the League to fight a holding action against an all-powerful foreign invader (and retrieve an inhuman weapon of mass destruction, deployed against the foreign foe by their masters). Moore makes it clear that, however costly to English men and women who suffered and died in the assault, the use of superior technology in horrific ways, is not only an act of retaliation. It’s business as usual for the custodians of Empire. It’s strange that we would find such a complex treatment in a comic book. I’d bet serious money, that the Speilberg-Cruise production of War of the Worlds doesn’t touch the complexity of Moore’s update.
In fact it’s interesting how much further comics are willing to go than other media these days. For instance a much more severe indictment of Empire is implicit in Warren Ellis and John Casssaday’s, The Day the Earth Turned Slower, published in Planetary #8. While America hasn’t been invaded in the memories of the narrator, a survivor of “US Science City Zero”, she recounts how, the fear of communist subversion is used to persecute, and excuse, experimentation on outsiders, dissenters, malcontents (and women who, “sleep with the wrong men”) during the Cold War Era. She bears testimony to the excesses made possible, by a government-sponsored climate of fear. A related critique is implied in Ellis’ twelve-issue Global Frequency, a small army of spec-ops veterans and their scientific support staff, volunteers who take it upon themselves to clean up the ticking time bombs left behind by two empires’ fifty-year rivalry for military supremacy. Were it that simple. My honest feeling is that the dual memorial, and celebration of public spirit and resolve, in treatments like Stracynski and Romita Jr.’s Amazing Spiderman, Vol. 3, #36, are more likely to be the reality. More of the energy and resources directed at projecting force abroad and building up security at home, should be channeled to ameliorating the divisions reinforced by the new international division of labor, and sharing more of it’s benefits. This isn’t “pie in the sky” utopianism, but simple common sense. We can’t prepare for every eventuality. Worse things may come out of the sky some day. I am sure Wells would agree. One of his last public acts was to help draft, The Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man, which became part of the United Nations Charter signed San Francisco in 1945.
WonK
Sherman Oaks, California
June 14, 2005.
Note:I would be terribly remiss however, if I didn’t acknowledge that this particular review owes a lot to an article i found on the net, while refreshing my memory about the particulars of HG Wells life and his place in the history of fantastic fiction. I needed a critical context for this review, and Mark Bould’s article, The Shape of Things to Come, covered almost every point (and more beside) that I wanted to make.
”The Time Machine”.
Adapted by Otto Binder
Illustrated by Alex Nino.
Reprinted and Published in Marvel Classic Comics #2 by Marvel Comics (1976).
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol.2
Written by Alan Moore.
Illustrated by Kevin O’Neil.
Published by America’s Best Comics (DC/WS, 2002).
“The Day the Earth Turned Slower”.
Written by Warren Ellis.
Illustrated by John Cassaday.
Published in Planetary #8 by Wildstorm Productions (2000).