H G Wells and War of the Worlds

[I started writing this before I’d read McScotty’s blog entry about Amazing Adventures #18 over at his blog  which is well worth a visit].

© Marvel

H.G. Wells - © Public Domain

My home town of Portsmouth and its seaside resort Southsea has many historical heroes with links to the Bronze Age of comics, of which famed SF & Fantasy writer and visionary Herbert George Wells is but one.

It is hard to imagine if HG Wells, while working in a Draper’s Bazaar in Elm Grove, could have foreseen that one day he would be teaming up posthumously with Stan Lee and Don McGregor on Amazing Adventures #22, wherein Killraven battles the Human Squid, but I’m sure that he would have found the Marvel adaptation “inspired” by his War of the Worlds in tune with many of the ideas of his vast portfolio of SF creations.

Wells’ connection to Southsea stems from the time between 1880 and 1883, when he had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at Hyde's Drapery Emporium in Southsea. His experiences at Hyde's, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and most appositely Kipps, which portray the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth.

It was soon after leaving Southsea for Woking in Surrey that Wells enjoyed his most creatively fertile period, when  he planned and wrote The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine and completed The Island of Doctor Moreau, (all of which would inspire later Marvel comics adaptations).

Slightly more than a generation later, in the United States in April 1926, famed editor Hugo Gernsback would reprint much of Wells's work in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, regarding Wells's work as "texts of central importance to the self-conscious new genre".

And so a further generation after the pulp Amazing Stories, it was fitting that Wells’ work was featured in Marvel’s own Amazing Adventures comic in the guise of Killraven - freedom fighter Jonathan Raven - depicted in several post-apocalyptic alternate futures. Created by co-plotters Roy Thomas and Neal Adams, under the auspices of scriptwriter Gerry Conway and initially penciller Adams himself, the character first appeared in Amazing Adventures vol. 2, #18 (Cover-dated May 1973) .

© Marvel

The cover was very clear on the basis of the source material “Amazing Adventures featuring “WAR OF THE WORLDS” based on concepts related in the prophetic novel by H G Wells!” .

Co-creator Neal Adams' early ideas for Killraven involved the character being the son of a Doc Savage archetype. (Ref: Comic Artist #3). This concept had been reworked by the first issue in which co-creator Adams penciled only the first 11 pages with Howard Chaykin completing the remaining nine. The second issue was fully written by the debut's scripter, Gerry Conway, followed in the third by Marv Wolfman.

On the alternate-future Earth designated Earth-691 by Marvel Comics, the Martians from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds return in 2001 for another attempt at conquering the planet. With humanity enslaved, the men forced to battle gladiator-style for the Martians' amusement, Jonathan Raven (dubbed Killraven as his gladiatorial nom de guerre), escapes to join the Freemen, a group of freedom fighters .

As the series progressed, the link to Wells’ original vision became more and more tenuous, as reflected in the constantly changing book’s title across 22 issues (Amazing Adventures #18-#39 inclusive).

#18 "Amazing Adventures featuring “WAR OF THE WORLDS” based on concepts related in the prophetic novel by H G Wells"

#19 (Note “Prophetic” was dropped) "Amazing Adventures featuring “WAR OF THE WORLDS” based on concepts related in the  novel by H G Wells"

#20-#27( New tagline “The Most Widely Acclaimed Science Fiction Series Ever!”) "Amazing Adventures featuring “WAR OF THE WORLDS” based on concepts related in the  novel by H G Wells"

#28 (All reference to H.G. Wells dropped from the cover) "Amazing Adventures featuring “WAR OF THE WORLDS” - featuring Killraven!"

#29-#34 (rebranded - and H.G. still gets the boot!) "Killraven…WARRIOR OF THE WORLDS”

#35-#39 "War of the Worlds"

While the series was running, Marvel UK had developed a headache over content for their Planet of the Apes weekly, as they were running out of US Planet of the Apes content to reprint.  They hit upon the idea of repurposing Killraven as “Apeslayer” for the UK Planet of the Apes fan base as an emergency measure. The US Killraven stories were partially redrawn and re-lettered to create a new story that would fit into the Marvel version of the Planet of the Apes continuity. (Fun Fact: technically Apeslayer is the first ever Marvel UK-originated character).

Apparently, the UK team felt that Apeslayer, by way of Killraven, was so far removed from the original source material that H G Wells did not require a credit in the UK P.O.T.A. weekly. In fact, the credits for “The Birth of Apeslayer” do not even mention Neal Adams himself as either co-creator or contributing artist despite integrating artwork by the great man himself

© Marvel - enbiggen this to read !! Comparison of Killraven and Apeslayer

As H.G. Wells’ books were still within UK copyright at the time, rebranding Killraven as Apeslayer in the UK, and removing any reference to H G Wells on the US comic covers, may have been a move to avoid any legal issues.

The UK Apeslayer adaptations appeared in just 8 issues of Planet of the Apes weekly (#23-#30) , running from March 29th 1975 to May 17th 1975.

What was strange is that Marvel did not choose to stop distribution of the US Amazing Adventures in the UK during this period, which would have been the May-September 1975 cover issues (#30-#32),  but they had previously stopped the distribution of US issues #23-#25 a year earlier in 1974, with those issues not being available in UK price-variant guise.

Amazing Adventures was eventually cancelled with issue #39. I don’t believe that I owned all of the issues. I certainly collected issues #18 and #19 in 1973 (bought from Simpsons in Osborne Rd), and was again buying later issues in April 1976 from See's newsagents in Copnor, but it was not a regular purchase by that time. The overlap with Planet of the Apes weekly had caused me to put the US Amazing Adventures comic far down the list of US Marvels to buy each month. 

Marvel tried some innovative pricing approaches with their UK price variants; issues #18-#22 were 8p each ; following the “non-distributed” hiatus of issues #23-#25, issue #26 was priced at 7p, before returning to 8p pricing with the next issue. In that time of rampant inflation, the price quickly rose from 9p to 10p, and became too rich for my blood. However, if HG Wells had miraculously survived into the 1970s, I suspect he would have sought out and enjoyed every issue.

Killraven would later resurface in his original incarnation in the UK Star Wars Weekly a few years later.When Marvel UK eventually began reprinting the original Killraven series in Star Wars Weekly, one reader complained that they had 're-drawn Apeslayer, with Martians'.