"War of Eden" Part 4 Battlestar Galactica: War of Eden #4 (Maximum Press) Story: Rob Liefeld and Robert Napton Script: Robert Napton Layouts: Karl Altstaetter Penciler: Hector Gomez Inker: Hector Gomez November 1995

Adam and Eve are awakened; Baltar and Iblis make their move.

Story Summary

Read the story summary of "War of Eden" Part 4 at the Battlestar Wiki

Didja Notice? 

On page 4, Baltar implies that he had the previous versions of Lucifer recycled as scrap metal.

On page 6, Adam tells Adama that he and his family were living in Kobol's capital city of Eden. In "A Death in the Family" Adama had speculated that the city they entered on the deserted planet Kobol might be Eden. Later, in "The Enemy Within" Part 1 it is revealed that the ark of Adam and Eden is also named Eden.

Also on page 6, Adam relates how a being resembling Anubis attacked the arks of the Thirteenth Tribe while they travelled to Earth. A footnote tells the reader that Anubis was a malevolent Kobolian god who ushered the dead to stand judgment. This is similar to the god Anubis who was the jackal-headed god of the afterlife and mummification in ancient Egypt.

Adam also reveals that the Thirteenth Tribe had its own encounters with the Beings of Light, who assisted them against Anubis. Presumably, the Anubis met by the Thirteenth Tribe was actually Count Iblis in disguise.

On page 11, one of the Galactica bridge personnel reports that the Celestra has taken heavy damage in the battle and all passengers are abandoning ship. The Celestra previously appeared in "Take the Celestra".

On page 14, Apollo talks to John about the time Count Iblis promised Sheba she would see her father again. This was in "War of the Gods" Part 2.

In this issue, the Pegasus returns, now with gigantic twin laser cannons mounted at the front of the ship. Of course, in our BSG chronology, the Pegasus was destroyed in Resurrection, and Commander Cain and his crew went down with the ship. In order to fit this story into our current continuity, it might argued that the Pegasus was indeed destroyed at that time and Cain now commands the Daedalus instead. With the Richard Hatch series of novels left incomplete (thus far), we don't know the fate of the Daedalus or if anything was to come of the unknown readings of life that Dr. Salik detected in Cain's otherwise dead body at the end of Rebellion before his burial. So, we might argue that Cain somehow returned alive to the fleet some time after the events of Redemption, was given command of the Daedalus at some point, and then Cain and the battlestar were separated and lost from the fleet for a couple of yahrens until this time. And in that interval, Cain and the crew built the laser cannons on the front of the ship. Admittedly, this is a convoluted way of fitting these disparate stories together; obviously Hatch and his co-writers on the novels were not concerned with maintaining continuity with a comic book series published years prior and may not have even had the rights to refer to stories produced by other licensees.

Commander Cain is depicted with a beard and long hair, pulled back in a ponytail. What is it with the long hair?? Cain, Baltar, and Starbuck have all decided to grow long manes in the 20 years since the end of the series!

As he did in "The Living Legend" Part 1, Commander Cain refers to Adama affectionately as "that old modocker", "modocker" still being an unknown term.

After one baseship is destroyed by the Pegasus, Baltar's baseship falls back behind the other remaining one, just as it did in a similar situation against the Pegasus in "The Living Legend" Part 2 (though Baltar is not onboard the baseship at this time, still returning from his encounter with the humans on Earth).

The last panel of the issue, ending this particular arc of the ongoing story, is dated with a personal journal entry by Commander Adama from the Colonial yahren 7342, and features Adama's closing monologue from most of the episodes, "Fleeing the Cylon the tyranny, the last battlestar, Galactica..." etc. However according to the BSG Timeline on the Battlestar Wiki, 7342 was about 6 yahrens before the destruction of the Colonies.

Unanswered Questions

Has the fleet arrived at Earth millions of years in our past? The lack of human settlements and the presence of dinosaurs would seem to indicate so. But then, how could Apollo have detected the transmission of the United States' historic first landing of men on the moon as seen in "The Hand of God" (and Bojay and Sheba's detection of the FDR World's Fair transmission of 1939 in "The Infidel Basestar")? The issue is never resolved within the course of the Maximum Press BSG comic books before the series was dropped. There are hints from the editor in a couple of the comics, including within this very issue, that the prehistoric time period is not what it seems. In this issue's lettercol, letter writer Scott Taylor points out the discrepancy and the editor replies, "The Apollo XI transmission...would not make sense if this was indeed earth's distant past...unless it's not earth's distant past." This would seem to suggest that it is actually far in the future, when Earth has, for some reason, become primordial again or the planet at which the fleet has arrived is not really Earth (though the partial outlines of continents seen throughout War of Eden look remarkably similar to our own).

With Commander Adama dead, who is now in charge of the fleet? Nominally, it would seem that Cain should outrank Commander Apollo by seniority. Yet, Apollo seems to remain the command figure in later storylines, though Cain can always be counted on to offer a dissenting opinion.