A Bridge Between Worlds
When McGregor and Russell finally get the chance to return to the second War of the Worlds in their 1983 graphic novel (seven years after Amazing Adventures was cancelled), Killraven’s disconnection from both the past and his family pays off. The Freemen are confronted with two new characters: an old woman named Jenette Miller, the last human astronaut before the Martian invasion, and Killraven’s brother long-lost brother, Joshua. Joshua proves evil through and through (a surprise to most of the Freemen, but not to any long-time reader who had been paying attention), but Jenette is charming and resilient—if Ruth Gordon’s character in Harold and Maude had been about 20 years younger and an ex-astronaut, she would be Jenette. [1]. Where Joshua’s promise of a reestablished connection with Killraven’s past proves false (not only is Joshua evil, but he insists on recasting what few memories Killraven has of their childhood in a negative light), Jenette’s tales of the pre-war past strike a romantic chord.
Indeed, her mention of the name “Kennedy” sparks a kind of psychic seizure in Killraven, and he suddenly starts remembering details of an assassination that took place decades before he was born. When Killraven is forced to kill his own brother, the shock brings on another fugue state, in which Killraven is confronted with virtually all of human history and culture. This is a result of the experiments performed on him as a child:
It was Whitman [the scientist] who made him this repository of human history. It was Whitman who injected him with fluids that would advance his physical prowess, sot that a child might survive the bloody Martian arenas.
“It was Whitman who implanted Earths’ human past, carved it with psycho-electronics into his psyche. It was Whitman who knew from the beginning that Malians would attempt to dismember humanity from its heritage.
Whitman also made sure that this knowledge would not come this until adulthood, and until certain other metrics were met (more on this in a moment). But the result is that Killraven is not just an action hero liberating his people from physical oppression; he is the repository of everything that humanity stood to forget. He is not just the hero of the story; he is story itself.
McGregor’s Killraven stories always had their share of optimism, which was refreshing, given the long odds the character faced, but now, with Killraven poised to restore humanity’s lost heritage, that optimism feels earned. But Killraven’s new function as a bridge to the past does not exhaust his capacity to forge bonds across seemingly insurmountable gaps. Throughout the original Amazing Adventures run, Killraven had been slowly developing the other power Keeper Whitman implanted within him: the disorienting, radical empathy McGregor calls “clairsentience.”
In one of his earliest visions, in Amazing Adventures 27, Killraven witnesses the degradation of a captive breeding couple (“Adam” and “Eve”) at the hands of Atalon, a human overseer. But it is only at the end of the vision that we get a sense of a first-person camera angle, when a Martian lays a tentacle on Avalon’s shoulder. But the ramifications of this shift in perspective only become clear in the next issue, when Killraven stabs a Martian:
“It is as if he has stabbed…himself!
"Killraven begins to quake, much like his victim, quaking with an undeniable knowledge.
"That he is dying!
"No!
“It was dying!
“He comprehends in that searing moment. It has never been human minds he has infiltrated. "
This was a power granted to him to help in his fight against the Martians, but it also has the potential to forge an understanding between the conquerors and the conquered. This was not meant to be, but McGregor spends much of Amazing Adventures 36 (Red Dust Legacy) setting up the possibility for cross-species empathy, only to dash it in a moment of low-key tragedy.
For most of the series, the Martians have been thoroughly generic villains: tentacled, cthulhoid creatures who eat human babies and have their human and humanoid thralls do most of the dirty work. For all that they are the prime movers of the series, they are notable more for their absence than anything else, while it is their servants who get names, backstories, and actual personalities. The only exception is the High Overlord, and it is telling that he is a Martian in a giant, human-shaped exoskeleton (complete with mouth). He stands in for the Martians as a race, but does not “read” as Martian.
Red Dust Legacy is a powerful corrective to the otherwise one-dimensional human/Martian war, made possible entirely by Killraven’s superhuman empathetic/telepathic connection his alien foes (clairsentience). We have already seen that Killraven’s power places his mind within Martian bodies (and the climax of the graphic novel sees him gain the ability to control Martiains rather than simply observe). Now it seems that Killraven’s power has brought him to Mars itself. The splash page declares the story’s initial location to be “Nix Olympia Volcano, Mars—December 2019!,” and shows Killraven kneeling in red dust before trying to get his bearings. He is caught up in a Martian tournament, and is, of course, hitchhiking inside a Martian mind, but he is not actually on Mars. The Freemen are in Georgia, near a facility in which the Martians have created a simulacrum of their home in order to breed and raise their offspring.
Red Dust Legacy echoes the earlier “Deathbirth” storyline (27-29, 31) about the breeding of human babies as Martian food. Not only was that the setting for Killraven’s discovery that his clairsentience is a connection specifically to Martians, but the contrast between the melodramatic, pathos-infused tale of young parents-to-be and the dispassionate reproduction of the Martians is effective. The “Eve” of “Deathbirth” goes through a painful labor that never distracts her from her love of the baby about to be born, while the parturition among the asexual Martians is simply a “removal”:
“A pear plucked from a tree!
“Uncomplicated!
“The tree does not celebrate!
“The tree does not mourn.
“A simple transaction has taken place. That is all.” [2]
Killraven shares this experience, which only confirms him in his hostility towards the Martians. Everything about the entire set-up of Red Dust Legacy initially confirms how irreconcilably alien humans and Martians are. It is not just that the Martian landscape is so strange; it is the fact of the Mars simulacrum that reminds the reader of the distance between the two species. Just four issues ago, we were immersed in the human propensity for losing oneself in fantasy: Killraven’s elders used the Mural Phonics System to experience worlds that never existed. But the Martians are dispassionate and literal, using even more advanced technology to create a perfect replica of the world they left behind.
Killraven resolves to let the Martians know “that fear…is an emotion we will teach them!” Ironically, the next panel features the young Martian whose consciousness he previously shared: “The young Martian’s thoughts seek the replica moon Phobos”. The parallels continue. The young Martian questions his older companion about the elder Martians’ determinate to exterminate the human race, while Killraven and Carmilla Frost, upon discovering the Martian creche, nearly come to blows over Kilraven’s plan to kill the Martian babies. As the Fremen escape, Killraven throws a blade at the younger Martian, chopping off the top of its tentacle. But by the end of the issue, Killraven has gone back into the Martian’s mind, and realized his error: “we have lost more than we have won.”
The final panels show the wounded Martain waving his tentacle, under a caption that reads:
“red dust legacy…blown in the wind…we bequeath you, our descendants, the ability to hate…it is a heritage you will perpetuate with little difficult at all.”
The entire issue is a missed opportunity, built on metaphors of reproduction and infection. The Martian babies die anyway, victims of the Earth microbes that killed their ancestors during the first invasion. Killraven has been briefly infected with compassion, and the young Martian, who might have grown up to argue against his species’ policy, is now simply part of a chain of generations that have succumbed to the pathogen of hate.
Empathy is the key to the Killraven stories optimism, but it is not all-powerful.
Notes
[1] She flirts with Killraven shamelessly, and their banter on the last page could suggest that they will move beyond flirtation.
[2] McGregor is unremittingly sentimental about natural human childbirth. The female lead in Sabre, Melissa Siren, is the first “test-tube baby,” and has always felt a sense of profound loss due to her “artificial” conception. Her birth of Sabre’s baby later in the series is an issue-long scene of pain and celebration.