War of the Worlds?

Wed, Jul 26, 2006

Pendragon, the movie company I blogged about last year who produced a more faithful to the book adaptation of H G Wells’ classic War of the Worlds than the (in my opinion OTT and silly) Spielberg movie are having a go at Dark Horse’s recent graphic novel version, reports the Newsarama blog. Pendragon are alleging that the Ian Edginton and D’Israeli comics version copies from their film version.

Now obviously they are both drawing on the same book (which is public domain, being long out of copyright) and trying to be faithful to the source novel, so certain similarities are bound to occur, wouldn’t you think? Ah, but Pendragon alleges that Dark Horse’s version actually replicates images from their film. In fact they have put up a website showing comic panels against movie frames to illustrate (pun intended) this charge.

As someone who has read the book many times I’m somewhat surprised at all of this, more so when I looked at their ‘evidence’. Hmmm, green ’shooting star’ in the sky in both versions. Guess what? That’s in the book. Heck it is in Jeff Wayne’s musical version. The other comparisons also strike me as utterly ridiculous. Newsarama ponders if this is perhaps not a legal matter at all but a method for trying to secure some publicity, which the site’s use of a voting button would tend to suggest. If it is a PR stunt then it is a rather nasty and distasteful way to do it in my opinion.