Okay, do you remember a couple of months back when I said you needed Ian Edgington and D'Israeli's Scarlet Traces: The Great Game. Well, this week the third installment of the miniseries was released, and I'd like to point out one page in particular. If you've been following instructions, you can play along at home, but I'm posting images for the benefit of everyone who doesn't rush out to the comic shop the first thing every Wednesday (and, I suppose, for those few who don't purchase absolutely everything I plug).



I won't go into the details of the plot, except to say that photographer Charlotte Hemming has gone undercover to Mars, in the middle of the war with the Martians (familiar to most readers as the invaders from H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds). Check out Dark Horse Comics' website for a preview of the first few pages, if you're curious about the context. The important moment, though, comes halfway through the issue, as Charlotte investigates the strange structure in which she finds herself. She's told, at one point, that it isn't a building, but a city.

"Runs the entire length of Valles Marineris, two and a half thousand miles from end to end. It supposedly predates the Martian hives by over a million years. We only use a fraction of it. The rest's derelict. A ghost town."

As Charlotte rambles through the empty city, abandoned now even by the British occupying forces, she comes upon a top secret chamber. Inside, she finds a domed ceiling, covered by a map of the solar system.

Except, it isn't quite the solar system she recognizes.



Clearly, this depicts the condition of the system and the planets during the time of the city's original occupancy. We have no way of knowing how long the Martians have resided on the planet, but as the city predates their hives by a million years, suffice it to say that this map is more than a little dated. The Pangaean continent on Earth, for example, is a dead giveaway. Oh, and the fact that there's a terrestrial planet between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroid belt is nowadays.

But what about those figures depicted around the planets themselves, hmm? Don't some of them look a bit familiar?



To the right of the Pangaean Earth, unless I'm seriously mistaken, is a Silurian from Doctor Who. And to the left of Luna? Well, that looks to me an awful lot like a Watcher. And the little bug fellow on the other side looks more than a bit like one of the Selenites from Wells's First Men in the Moon. The green, toga-wearing dude on the left side of the Earth looks tantalizingly familiar, but I just can't place him. The same for the figures around Mercury and Venus.

Then we come to Mars.



Well, the four-armed guy is undeniably a green-skinned Barsoomian from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars series. That's a gimme. And the long-legged silverskin opposite him may be a Martian from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, but I'm not sure. As for the other two, I haven't a clue. (That this suggests that ERB's Barsoom lies in the distant past of Wells's Mars is an intriguing idea, one similar to a number of fan notions I've come across over the years

So how about it, internets? Anybody got an ID on the unidentified aliens?