Tripwire Reviews Scarlet Traces Volume Three By Ian Edginton And D’Israeli

Is There Still Life In Mars?

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes casts his eye over Rebellion’s Scarlet Traces Volume Three by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli out now…

Scarlet Traces Volume Three
Writer: Ian Edginton
Artist: D’Israeli
Rebellion

The most recent storyline from Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s War Of The Worlds expansion Scarlet Traces sees all of the story’s worlds very much at war. Starting right in the middle of things, it has the Martian tripods slaughtering their way across the Earth, while an underground network of humans and immigrant citizens from Venus attempt to survive. Elsewhere a desperate appeal to other planets for support against the Martian war machine leads to a space battle between multiple armadas and several alien races, a full scale orbital apocalypse.

There’s no denying that Edginton has been happy to make his Scarlet Traces story increasingly complicated, and there are few concessions here to anyone not up to date with Volume Two. The narrative has always been dark, with several species not just under the threat of a new war but constantly carrying the psychological burdens of the last one against the same enemy. Characters stew over rumours and half-truths of the previous conflict before finding out things were actually worse than they had heard. There’s a lot of playful UK nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s in the story and art – characters modelled on the cast of UFO occupy a familiar-looking Moonbase, and the BBC’s old Birmingham studios from Pebble Mill at One put in an appearance – but those decades were more directly under the shadow of World War II than our current one is, and it’s that sense of history shaped by conflict that the series is going for.

D’Israeli’s art, always strikingly individual in previous Scarlet Traces volumes even when characters were just sat talking to each other, now tackles vast space battles and decrepit alien civilisations and a double-page spread of malicious Yellow Submarine hallucination. Once an armada from Jupiter engages another war fleet from Mars the drama going on outside is matched by the tension in the Jovian ship’s bridge, where D’Israeli has worked out how to draw and energise on paper the exact lighting effect that old TV series achieved for real when someone said Red Alert and the set’s flood illumination swung way over into longer wavelengths. The artist is great at effects in black and white too, but understands colour as well as any modern comics artist ever has. You wouldn’t mistake a panel of Scarlet Traces for the work of someone else.