From the moment I picked up this sophomore issue of Dark Horse International’s Aliens comic with Paul Johnson‘s (Legends of the Dark Knight, Spinechiller Collection, Janus: Psi-Division) cover I was excited. Not just because this last month has felt like an age and I’ve been looking forward to it, I was excited to see a third strip has been added. Inside it’s explained that there were meant to be three strips last time but an issue with resizing Newt’s Tale for the larger pages of the UK comic delayed it. So here we are with the proper format now of two main Aliens strips and a Predator back up, plus all the extras of course.
One of those extras leaves a nasty taste in the mouth this month (and contradicts the comic itself) and I’ll get to that further along in the review. There’s also the first letters page, the next Technical Readout and the latest Xenomorph news. There’s also exciting Alien³ news which will mean more blog content too. But we’ll start with that new story, written by Mike Richardson and credited as “Based on the screenplay by James Cameron”. This is because it’s a retelling of the movie’s story but from the perspective of a different character, which is rather special.
Anyone who’s seen the Special Edition of Aliens (which is the default version today) should recognise this scene. We’re on LV-426 near Hadley’s Hope and Newt’s prospector dad has struck gold. Sent by the Wayland-Yutani company to a specific spot he’s taken his whole family along for the ride. Finding the massive alien ship from the first movie they think they’ve struck it rich, and the company has given him the rights to whatever he finds! Of course they knew what he’d find, and that he won’t be around long enough to claim anything.
So far, so familiar but this moves beyond a basic movie adaptation pretty quickly as we see Newt and her brother creep into the air ducts of the settlement they call home to find out if their dad is alright, since they haven’t been allowed near him while the doctors fail to get an unknown (to them) creature detached from his face. But in trying to protect them it’s just led to the kids being kids, and now they’re about to be witness to something much more terrifying.
The artwork here is by Jim Somerville (The Walking Dead – not that one, Maelstrom, Warlock 5) on pencils and Brian Garvey (Transformers, Gunfire, The New Gods) on inks with colours by Gregory Wright (Elephantmen, co-creator of the 90’s Deathlok, co-writer of Sensational She-Hulk) and the lettering is by Pat Brosseau (Hellboy, Wonder Woman, Wolverine). It reminds me of Stephen Baskerville’s inking (especially when working with Andrew Wildman) on The Real Ghostbusters and as such it feels a bit too cartoony for the subject, especially for this scene.
But I do love the idea behind it and I’m intrigued to see the rest of a story I know so well played out from a different viewpoint, even if one of this very publication’s feature writers thinks otherwise. I’m getting to that. Up next though is our back up strip. In between the two Aliens tales is Predator: Cold War written by Mark Verheiden, with pencils by Ron Randall, inks by Steve Mitchell, colours by Chris Chalenor and Rachelle Menashe, with letters by Clem Robins. In this chapter we continue getting to know Arnie’s apparent brother, Detective Schaefer as his drugs bust goes wrong.
This takes up pretty much all of the strip’s eight pages, although to be fair to editor Dick Hansom the chunks of story presented were originally meant to be different until that technical fault last month. What we end up with here as a result is a rather clichéd 80s police flick, but it ends with Schaefer being kidnapped by some Men In Black-types for the general and then we head back to Serbia and the rig workers are getting panicked that there’s something out in the snow coming for them. They’re not wrong.
As someone who has only seen the second film many decades ago (I’ve decided I’ll get around to them this Hallowe’en) this comic is basically my introduction to the Predator and so far I’m just getting impatient to find out exactly what we’re dealing with. That’s not the strip’s fault obviously, it’s my own, and I’m sure fans of the original movie would get a kick out of this.
The Aliens Special Edition video had proven to be a huge success for 20th Century
Before we move on to the funnier (no, really) of our strips we’ll take a look at some of the extras. On the news pages it’s Alien³ release season with news on dates and box office numbers, a special mention for the poster design and (alongside a spot of Batman) the Aliens Special Edition video had proven to be a huge success for 20th Century. This particular news item and the inclusion of Newt’s Tale make another page in this comic even more surprising.
Quite a lot of my friends were huge fans of the Alien films and not a single one of them had anything but utter love for James Cameron’s Special Edition of his sequel, happily contributing to the sales figures above. (Then happily buying it again several years later in widescreen, then DVD, BluRay, iTunes 4K… you get the idea.) At the time of writing this review Disney’s new Star Wars series The Acolyte has proven very successful but there are some dark corners of the internet that I’ve heard are attacking it and this page reminds me of that to some degree.
This page of the comic reads like one of those Threads posts bulked up to a full article
Of course, a lot of the hate for the Star Wars show is because of ‘reasons’ from some very horrible types that we won’t get into here, but some others are just complaining because it’s adding to the lore. Surely that’s a good thing? It reminds me of when Doctor Who had mystery injected back into the character with The Timeless Child (when we found out they’d led many more lives than we’d thought, which even brought a lot of classic episodes/scenes back into canon). Some fans online don’t like not knowing everything about whatever they’re a fan of, and will instead say something “isn’t canon” and is an example of “bad writing” instead.
This page of the comic reads like one of those Threads posts bulked up to a full article. It also doesn’t sit well within a comic that has a strip (Newt’s Tale) that takes scenes from that very same Special Edition to explain more of a character’s backstory, the exact scenes that are being complained about here. If I’m not mistaken, while buying these comics for the blog I’m sure I noticed a future cover promoting a competition to win this video! This really is rather strange and not what I would expect from an otherwise quality comic. So let’s get back to the good stuff with part two of Aliens: Hive.
Regular readers of the blog may be familiar with how the Jurassic Park comic’s editorial recaps of previous chapters were described as ‘What Has Gone Before’ and here we get a full page of this for each strip, using cover images from the original US comics. I really like these. It’s like they’re announcing the next strip’s arrival as I read through the issue. As the crew leave the Dolomite for the surface we see Norbert has been able to keep its name after all and this produces some of the lighter and, surprisingly, funny moments. At least until we meet Gill, a synthetic human the likes of which is synonymous with the Alien films.
Always drawn with shadows covering his face, Gill is suitably creepy. As they move towards the 1000-meter high alien nest on the surface, the main ship has been scanning the debris encircling the planet and they’ve detected the remains of a ship, so of course they send a couple of people to recover the black box. Shockingly, they make it back safely. The recording shows the captain warning another ship of criminal trespass before the tape just stops. The Dolomite commander contacts Gill to tell him said criminals could still be about so to watch out, but instructs him not to tell the crew, not even the expedition leaders. This back-stabbing between humans who all have their own agendas fits perfectly into the Alien universe; human greed is basically the cause of all the horrific events in the movies.
Down on the planet we get to see their landing disturb one of the sleeping residents. As you can see this is a very stylised version of the alien, its head isn’t one long smooth curve for example. I do like this style of art though by Kelley Jones (with colours by Les Dorschield and letters by Clem Robins), and in the years since we’ve seen how the alien species can adapt to whatever living being its transplanted into by its facehugger (beginning in Alien³) so we can always describe it away.
I’m eagerly anticipating the gruesome moments (if last month is anything to go by) and action-packed scenes we’ll see drawn in this very particular way in the following chapters. It’s very 90s, isn’t it? I love it. The strip ends with Doctor Mayakovsky in another alien slime-induced trance while Julian Lish looks on and thinks about the two of them together. It appears, contrary to the impression given last month, that they’re very much in love. Or is one using the other? More intrigue.
There’s another Technical Readout and this time it goes into a lot of detail about the drop ship we saw in the film before the issue rounds off with the first letters page, Bug Hunt. It might seem very quick to have this in the second issue but that’s because the last comic of volume one (all of which we’ll get around to eventually, I promise) saw Dark Horse come in and shake the comic up before their full relaunch. There’s the explanation about Newt’s Tale, a brief description of how setting up their UK office has opened the doors to talent in this part of the world working on their American comics, and there are hints about future Dark Horse International titles.
One isn’t just a hint though, backed up as it is with a back page advert.
While I’m not usually a fan of comics adaptations I’m looking forward to this regardless, especially the extra features. Just like Jurassic Park’s first few issues this had a three-weekly release schedule so of course that’ll be the case on the blog too. I’ll talk more about the movie itself during those issue, however I’ll just say that those friends of mine I mentioned above weren’t that crash hot about it on its initial release but I always enjoyed it.
However, the Collector’s Edition released since then has turned even them into die-hard Alien³ fans and in my eyes it puts the film on a level peg with the first two! So it’ll be interesting to see what the adaptation includes and you can come along and find out from Monday 5th August 2024 when Alien³ #1 hits the blog. Then it’s not a long wait at all until Aliens #3 (this could get confusing) arrives on Tuesday 20th August. See you then.
OiNK Blog 