Before we begin this review I have a request: go and look at the Dan Abnett bibliography . A bit intimidating, is it? Odds are, between the time I wrote these words and time this article will be published it could get quite a bit longer. Heck, maybe he managed to sneak in a book while you were reading this article. He’s a fast one. Despite ‘only’ being in the writing business since the late 1980s, he’s got a bibliography to rival writers with decades of work over him.
What’s more, he would write seemingly everything. Like every self-respecting Brit scribe, he’s got a few American superhero comics under his belt. Obviously, he's had his share of 2000 AD work ( Lawless , with Phil Winslade, and Brink , with Ian Culbard are two of the best new serials from that magazine in the last decade). You can also see him pop-up in odd bits such as the Wallace and Gromit strip or even doing a Ninjak fill-in. Oh, and he also writes books, these tend to take more time than comics (or so I am told). Lots of books, so many books. Most of them licensed material, especially in the grim dark world of Warhammer 40K , but also in the grim dull world of Doctor Who; somehow he also found the time to write books he made-up all by himself 1 .
A busy, busy man is Dan Abnett. There is a name for that type of man, popular in the discourse trenches of comics, and it’s not a pleasant one. Dan Abnett, however, is no hack. Dan Abnett is a professional. Like your Stephen King, or Donald E. Westlake or Honoré de Balzac 2 . Writing copiously may be the sign of a careless writer, or of a true pro. Abnett is the latter. This means he has hits ( New Deadwardians , Kingdom , The Punisher ) and misses ( The V.Cs , his take on Judge Dredd ). A good example of a ‘hit’ can be found in this new subject: a collection of the first three Wild’s End miniseries 3 . All three stories use the same basic high concept: what about War of the Worlds , but one of the worlds was The Wind in the Willows? Thus, in an early 20 th century England populated by various anthropomorphized animals (land mammals are the default), a small village comes under invasion from alien forces, which just might be a harbinger of greater horrors to come.
It’s the sort of one-sentence summation that could have easily been a bad joke, but thanks to the work of Abnett, and artist and co-creator Ian Culbard, it’s actually… you know what, stop. I can’t believe I’ve made this far into the piece without talking a bit more about Ian Culbard (sometimes I.N.J Culbard), a British writer-artist, who’s style tends to stick out in his home scene 4 . As previously mentioned, he’d worked with Abnett on Brink as well (which is still ongoing), and it’s obvious the two 'click' in just the right way.
More important than being in synch, Wild’s End shows that if the two keeps working together they are not locked-in into a singular storytelling mode 5 , the green and pleasant land, later scourged by war, of Wild’s End , looks like nothing like the cramped spaced of Brink . Likewise, the sickly human figures that inhabit Brink look nothing like anthropomorphized beings inhabiting Wild’s End . Portraying anthropomorphism well is a skill by itself, one these things that, in the past, served a large chunk of the audience in the English-speaking comics world, but now has seemingly been banished to either Europe or the World Wide Web. It’s unfair to expect Stan Sakai to hold this all by himself.
Culbard can do it. Specifically, he can do the type in which animals are physically recognizable as animals, while the story treats them as human beings, not pressing too hard on the animal stereotype motif. Yes, there’s a fox who’s crafty, and a dog that is loyal but these aren’t their sole deciding personality traits. Culbard makes the animals cute enough so that when bad things start to happen it’s just the right amount of horrifying, without crossing the line into comedic grotesquery. We are, after all, meant to take this story seriously.
And that’s the thing about Wild’s End . For all the inherent absurdity of the concept, it is played with deadly earnestness, it’s not a satire of War of the Worlds , nor is it a direct adaptation 6 ; it’s something familiar, but not wholly indebted to the source. Really, the plot is familiar but characters are not, no one is taken directly from The Wind in the Willows or from the nonentities of H.G. Wells. It’s the characters that keep one invested in the story, the old soldier with PTSD is cliché, but an extremely well-written one, especially as he avoids taking over the story and solving problems through sheer machismo. He’s just as much in the soup as the rest of the cast.
Other protagonists are less expected: a serious literary author in a midst of writer’s block with a natural hate for all things science-fiction, a black-marketeer forced into unexpected heroics, an intelligence officer who’s a bit too nice for her job. They are not written as tools simply to advance the plot, but as genuine personalities. The message of the original War of the Worlds , "what if the colonizers and conquerors got to experience the boot from the other side?" has been discussed for a century now; Wild’s End takes it as a given and doesn't seek to make the characters express what can be understood. The characters are not just mouthpieces, which is for the best. Yes, it’s story about the dangers of military rule, about how paranoia can tear apart a nation just as much as outside invasion, about how squirrels sometimes just suck. But, like a good science fiction yarn, it also works on its own terms, within its own fictional construction. You come to care about these people… animals… these beings.
Eventually, the characters overtake the plot: I ended up caring more about what would happen to the protagonists than to the story as whole 7 . The ending, after all that build-up felt a little rushed and a little… little. ‘That’s it?", I said to myself after the final page. But, in retrospect, it makes sense. Wild’s End is not about the big things, it’s about the little things caught between the mighty forces that fight and destroy. You don’t have to save the world, or even to be the best kind of person, to deserve peace and life.
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