Tag Archives: xenomorph

Review: Aliens Dust to Dust #1

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In time for Alien Day (April 26), Dark Horse Comics has released a new xenomorph featuring miniseries Aliens Dust to Dust #1. Unlike the recent films, Gabriel Hardman and Rain Beredo’s story has no philosophical pretensions, convoluted backstories, or characters acting dumb for the sake of the plot. Like pair of mad alchemists, they bottle the pure terror of Alien with the explosive action of Aliens and craft a tight thriller about a mother and her son, Maxon, evacuating a planet that has been terraformed by some representatives of Weyland-Yutani, and of course, everything has gone terribly wrong. In a similar vein to the 2014 survival horror video game Alien Isolation, it makes an argument that the true spirit of Alien has been kept alive through ancillary media rather than the big budget, “canonical” movies.

Hardman frames his story through the POV of a child linging on full body shots of xenomorphs and chestbursters and then cutting to the wide eyed terror of a young boy, who is trying to process his surroundings as everything he knows is in jeopardy. In his plotting and dialogue, Hardman trims the fat right to his story’s primal core: family, home, survival. These are things that many people take for granted, but they are the forefront of his two protagonists’ minds as Maxon wakes up from a fitful slumber to gun fire and a facehugger. Beredo bathes the panel in shadow, and Hardman uses blotchy inking and sloping downward panels to represent how Maxon’s simple life has been uprooted. Some of the expressions that Hardman picks for his young lead character seem ripped from the unconscious of kids watching Alien or any classic horror movie and being frightened by iconic monsters. for the first time. Except he can’t hide behind the couch or shut off the TV, this is his new normal.

The tenseness of Aliens: Dust to Dust extends from Hardman’s layouts and use of shadow in conjunction with Beredo’s colors to his dialogue. Maxon is plain freaked out while his mother seems perpetually out of breath, and every reassuring word that comes out of her mouth is as much for her as him. Hopped up on adrenaline, she can shoot and drive like a badass, but her actions and reactions seem human, much like Ripley’s seemed to viewers of Alien when it was first released and before she was the Ur-sci fi horror heroine. But by focusing so much on Maxon’s responses to the horror thriller that he has unfortunately become a part of, Gabriel Hardman makes it clear that Aliens: Dust to Dust  is his story, not his mother’s. And this is reinforced by some of the storytelling choices that he makes towards the end of the book culminating in a downright iconic cliffhanger.

One of the Alien franchise’s underlying themes is motherhood, and Alien Resurrection decided to beat viewers over the with that theme a few decades back. On the other hand, Gabriel Hardman’s Aliens Dust to Dust #1 uses the bond behind a mother and son to supercharge a suspense filled story and give it an emotional foundation like the relationship between John and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. He doesn’t beat us over the head with extraneous facts about them, but uses touch, facial reactions, and pauses between quick spurts of dialogue to show that they’re in over their heads like any of us would be if H.R. Giger’s haunting designs made a rude entrance into our lives.

Story: Gabriel Hardman Art: Gabriel Hardman Colors: Rain Beredo
Story: 8.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 8.5 Recommendation: Buy

Dark Horse provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Review: Aliens: Fire and Stone #1

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aliens fire and stoneThis new Aliens series from Dark Horse sets out with the concept to tie the story line of Prometheus into the bigger shared universe. This is alluded to in the preamble to the series, part of which mentions another new series from Dark Horse which focuses on Prometheus (which I have not read). In trying to tie together different elements from the series, this is partially successful, though at times it seems to be paying almost too much homage to other series.

The crowded halls of the movie Aliens is evident here as are a few other major staples of the series (minor spoiler to follow) such as every escape craft ever used having an alien tag along on it, and that is no different here. The end state of this story is a bit of a further stretch as well, as it is almost as if it is alluding to the forest planet from the movie Predators, at least in atmosphere and setting if not in actual plot.

As such this first issue is not so much of anything new, more like a pastiche of every other Aliens films with even a bit of Predator thrown in. This is a bit problematic as well when also adding Prometheus to the mix, as the level of interconnectedness is a bit much to take with all of the continuity glitches that such a merge would make. At its base though, this issue succeeds, if one forgets about all which doesn’t make sense from a continuity standpoint and focuses on the story alone here. It may not be groundbreaking, but fans can’t really get enough of the xenomorphs, who show up too infrequently in pop culture, and this story at least offers something a little new to go along with a lot of the old.

 Story: Chris Roberson  Art: Patric Reynolds
Story: 7.0 Art: 7.0 Overall: 7.0 Recommendation: Read