Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Martians regarded this Earth with envious eyes

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These are illustrations used in the 1906 French edition of H.G. Well's War of the Worlds. They were done by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa. He did early examples on spec and took them to London where he got Well's approval to go forward. 

They are taken from the Public Domain Review article Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s Illustrations for The War of the Worlds (1906) which has more information about Corrêa. There are more images after the jump, and a few more at the link.

Henrique Alvim Corrêa

2 comments:

Chuck Pergiel said...

Funny how some of those pictures reminded me of scenes from the Tom Cruise movie, especially the scenes in the basement.

ambisinistral said...

The Cruise movie made some odd changes to the story. They changed the beginning of it from desperate Martians coming to Earth because their planet was dying to that goofy business about the Martian tripods being hidden underground for thousands of years. I guess that all was dreamed up so's they could have their early CGI laden action scenes of the tripods popping out of the ground and running amuck.

However, burying them for millennia didn't really make sense. It made them too technologically advanced, albeit rather knuckleheaded in their strategy. In the book it was a much more balanced fight, in that the humans destroyed some tripods and repulsed some attacks.

Plus, they added the familiar disaster movie trope of a fractured family trying to reunite in the midst of all of that. I guess that's for human interest or something. In the book the narrator just hooks up with random people he travels with for a bit.

The movie did keep the terraforming and capturing humans, and of course they kept the much copied end of the Martians due to germs and what-not. Altogether it was an entertaining movie.