CSBG Archive
John Seavey’s Storytelling Engines: The War That Time Forgot
Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.
Storytelling Engines: The War That Time Forgot (or “Ya Gotta Have Faith”) The central concept that drives the storytelling engine of “The War That Time Forgot” (a perennial back-up feature in ‘Star-Spangled War Stories’) has to be one of the best ideas in comic-book history. There’s a mysterious island in the Pacific during World War II, perpetually shrouded in mist. US soldiers scout the island, believing it to be held by the Japanese, but it turns out that the island is actually overrun with dinosaurs. So it’s World War II soldiers versus dinosaurs. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ meets ‘Jurassic Park’. If there’s anything more high-concept, I’ve never heard it. But writer Bob Kanigher (a long-time stalwart of DC’s war comics) seems to worry that the idea isn’t enough on its own to catch his audience’s interest. He certainly never develops the premise–the island is “discovered” some dozen or so times in different stories, each time recounted as though nobody had ever heard of it before. (This is as much a function of the series’ back-up status as anything else; the tales were never meant to be the main attraction of the book, and given the general belief at DC at the time of high reader turnover, they weren’t about to spend time burdening the series with an abundance of continuity.) There’s no attempt to develop any real story beyond “Soldiers wind up on the island, find out there are dinosaurs, try to get back off.” And it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that Kanigher didn’t think the dinosaurs were enough to get the reader excited; he spends an awful lot of time developing “exciting” backgrounds for the soldiers who discover the island. And by “exciting” I mean “ludicrous”; it’s discovered by amateur paleontologists, circus acrobats who’ve enlisted as a unit, a soldier testing out his robot sidekick, giant albino gorillas, stunt skiers, and a tobogganist and the brother of the man he accidentally killed in a sledding accident. Admittedly, this does keep the story from getting dull, but at the same time, you do wind up wishing that the focus could be a bit less on the angry tobogganist and more on the giant dinosaurs. Did this harm “The War That Time Forgot”? Probably not; it was, after all, a popular back-up for the better part of a decade, and is still well-remembered enough to this day that DC released a ‘Showcase Presents’ volume for it. But it’s hard not to feel that it would have wound up being a better series if it had surrounded the one unbelievable premise, the dinosaurs, with a host of very believable human soldiers to lend it verisimilitude. When your writer is ignoring the giant dinosaurs to focus on the disgraced cop and his gangster brother, you can tell he doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in the premise of his series.Leave a Comment
8 Comments
Stephen
May 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm
“after all, a popular back-up for the better part of a decade, and is still well-remembered enough to this day that DC released a ‘Showcase Presents’ volume for it.”
Chuck Dixon also wrote a Birds of Prey (guest starring Connor Hawke) story based on the same concept. Not sure if he threw out a credit to the original creators, but it was pretty clearly supposed to be the same island.
Evan Waters
May 28, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I think Kanigher got bored easily. It would have been interesting to see a group of GIs stranded in dinosaur land over the long term (I understand the new mini is focused on that), but apparently he wanted to do other things.
To be fair, Morgan and Mace (the tobogganist/brother combo) are fairly entertaining, mainly because of how psychotically single minded Morgan is.
Scott MacIver
May 28, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I adore the “The War that Time Forgot”, but my main nitpick is that the dinosaurs often looked more like fantasy creatures than dinos. It’s a pet peeve, yes, but it still nags at me.
The Mutt
May 28, 2008 at 3:37 pm
THE favorite comic of my childhood. For a back-up feature, it sure made the cover a lot, unless my memory is failing me. I actually had a subscription to S-SWS back in the sixties, when they were mailed folded in half, creased and slipped into a paper sleeve.
The accuracy of the dinosaurs depended on the artist, but even those drawn “correctly” were usually drawn over-sized. All the websites I can find that mention TWtTF only mention Ross Andru as the artist, by I remember more variety. And as I recall, not all of the stories took place on the island. I remember a story set in the Antarctic, as well as some set on and under the open sea. I recall a few instances of characters reappearing, but it was mainly single shots.
If I had to pick the one single comic that made me the life-long fanboy I am today, it would be S-SWS #129 by Howard Liss and Russ Heath. “The Navy pilot was reared by Flying Giant Creatures only HE could call… My Brothers with Wings!”
A Joe Kubert cover of a man in a loin cloth, riding a Pteranadon, firing a Tommy Gun at a Jap Zero. That’s just… perfect!
http://www.comics.org/coverview.lasso?id=128284&zoom=4
Matthew E
May 28, 2008 at 7:33 pm
And of course this series was a tremendously important ingredient of Cooke’s _New Frontier_.
John Stanshall
May 29, 2008 at 6:36 am
As far as not having faith in the premise, well… keep in mind the idea of a lost island/valley/crater to the center of the earth with dinosaurs was not unique by any standards (I can think of at least three movies from Mystery Science Theater 3000 built around the idea just off the top of my head), and while it seems like dinosaur islands would be enough, the wide assortment of human characters could be Kanigher trying to put his own unique stamp on the idea.
The Mutt
May 29, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Star Spangled War Stories was first and foremost a War comic, so Kanigher stuck with the model that was working very well for DC at the time. The Sci-Fi and horror aspects played second fiddle to tales of men at war.
John Seavey
May 29, 2008 at 5:26 pm
And I have no problem with that–the concept isn’t “lost island of dinosaurs”, it’s “World War II soldiers versus dinosaurs”, and the soldiers should be important. But I think it would have worked better if they’d been plausible, believable soldiers and the story had built from issue to issue, instead of Kanigher trotting out a bunch of gimmick characters and hit the reset button every issue. (I think the circus acrobats discovered the island three times?)