Lowering Higher Ed

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

In a story out of England that has gotten a lot of attention online a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday resigned last week after it turned out that he had plagiarized some of his work, including his Ph. D. thesis, and was a fantasist in telling the story of his life.

There’s no good way to spin this story for Cambridge University. Arday is both Black and claims to be neurodivergent, though I doubt the latter diagnosis. (I’ve used this site as a soapbox in the past to point to the shameless way that autism, a very real affliction and disability, has been turned into a scam by grifters.) As a dual threat in the game of victim credentialism, these were used by Arday to advance his career in a predictable way that I still found a bit surprising. I hadn’t thought the rot had progressed this far.

From the accounts I’ve read, Arday’s research was thin and he wasn’t highly regarded as a teacher. In the video clips I’ve watched he either talks in jargon or seems lost. And yet he impressed the faculty at Cambridge so much with his unimpressive qualifications (unimpressive even if true) that he became the youngest Black professor in the university’s history and went on to receive several honorary doctorates (!). Then, when exposed, Arday made things worse for himself by claiming he was the victim of racism in all this. Apparently calling people out on their bullshit is white privilege.

As an aside, and lest anyone think this is a left-wing mind virus, the playbook here was written by the Whiner-in-Chief with his incessant cries of “witch hunt.” Avoiding responsibility for one’s actions is an imperative today, no matter what your politics.

It seems academia is intent on digging its own grave by doubling down on all of the worst excesses that its critics (mainly on the right) have been accusing it of. What was the hiring and celebration of Arday but virtue signaling? And to what end? What I’ve never been able to understand about the death spiral higher education has gone into is why they are following this course when there isn’t any public or student demand for it. I’ve nothing against teaching critical race theory if that’s what students want to learn about. But it isn’t. In a long essay appearing in The Atlantic, “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” Tyler Austin Harper observes “I had long privately believed that the specter of student demand was being used as justification to pass legislation that only senior administrators and a few tenured radicals were excited to see put in place.” Exactly, and it’s been that way since this started.

Things were already going downhill when I was in university, back in what I think of as the first wave of political correctness. The old guard of the professoriate, stuffy white men who fell asleep sometimes in seminars (honest!), were being replaced by modish tenure-hungry radicals who were, like Arday, seen as “stars” because they were media-friendly and always said the right things. Professionally, they may not have been great scholars but what they were good at was networking and exploiting the academic spoils system. Gender, race, or (now) neurodiversity were just part of their toolkit for getting ahead and milking higher education for its few remaining rewards.

If you have a system that rewards this kind of thing, more of this kind of thing is what you’re going to get. Which, in turn, makes universities look even worse at a time when their public reputation is already in free fall. It also smears the otherwise commendable goal of achieving diversity, inclusion, and equity with the taint of wokeism.

Arday, once the poster boy for diversity, has now become “professor plagiarism”: the poster boy for the sort of cynical careerism that, always a part of academia, has metastasized in universities everywhere under the false flag of progressivism. This is what end-stage higher education looks like: as the ship goes down the last on board will be the worst products of the system, trying to grab anything that’s left of value and still be on the last lifeboat. I don’t like saying it, or reading about it, but there’s no turning away from the miserable sight.

Asterix and the Banquet

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Asterix and the Banquet

Or Le tour de Gaul d’Astérix, as it was first published in French in 1965. But either title works, as the plot has to do with Asterix and Obelix making a circuit of Roman-occupied Gaul to pick up foodstuffs from all the different cities they visit so that they can then take it back to their little village for a banquet. This is to win a bet with a Roman inspector (Lucius Overanxious) that a palisade built around the village would never be able to fence them in. I only mention the change in title to note the free hand translation can take. On a couple of occasions in the text this also came up. A version of a Roman tow-truck (a tow-chariot) arrives at one point and it’s called TOWSRUS TOWS, which I doubt the French said, even though Toys “R” Us had been a brand in the U.S. since the late 1950s. Then on the last page, at the banquet, Asterix launches Lucius Overanxious with what he calls “the village specialty,” which is PUNCH! I take it this was a reference to the ad “How ‘bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?” which first aired in the early 1960s, so again it’s possible. But I don’t have the original French-language versions to compare. I could probably find them in the library but I’m too lazy.

Anyway, as I said in my notes on Asterix the Gladiator, the template for these stories had already been set, “with Asterix and Obelix (the latter still without Dogmatix) leaving the village for some foreign adventures and then returning home for a banquet.” This is, as I’ve already outlined, the whole story here, with the difference being that it is in this volume that Dogmatix is introduced (though not named yet). Dogmatix decides to tag along with the two outside a deli in Lutetia, and is a silent presence throughout all the rest of the comic, always visible but completely ignored by Asterix and Obelix. That is, until the final page, where he finally lets loose a “Woof! Woof!” at Obelix, who notices him for the first time. Picking him out from the goings-on is a bit of fun throughout, and makes the point that you have to spend some time with Albert Uderzo’s art, seeing as there’s so much put into every frame. When they visit Nice, for example, they’ walking along the seaside promenade and, despite their being central, it’s easy to miss the two very modern and stylish blondes walking past in their miniskirts, but they have a little white dog that’s barking at Dogmatix while a Gaul twirls the ends of his long Gaulish moustache and looks at them. The final panel, now becoming a signature sign-off, also has a checklist of items to see: the banquet in the distance, Cacofonix bound and gagged so he won’t sing, a centurion trying to revive the punched-out Lucius Overanxious, and Dogmatix running away with a bone and winking at us.

There’s lots of action here, though I didn’t think this was one of the better Asterix stories and there are no interesting new characters, aside from Dogmatix. It’s still a good time though, and even as the series was becoming more familiar it was far from growing stale.

Graphicalex

TCF: Empire of Orgasm

/ Alex Good / 18 Comments

Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult
By Ellen Huet

The crime:

Nicole Daedone, a Californian entrepreneur, began a movement in the early 2000s that centered on a practice she called Orgasmic Meditation (OM) and that eventually became a business known as OneTaste. Members of OneTaste took courses and workshops on OM and often lived communally in a manner that observers likened to a sex cult. What OM mainly consisted of was women having their genitals “stroked” to orgasm, most often by a man. In 2023 Daedone and OneTaste head of sales Rachel Cherwitz were indicted and after a lengthy trial both women were found guilty of federal forced labour charges, with Daedone being sentenced to nine years in prison.

The book:

At first this book seemed like it might be a near clone of Blazing Eye Sees All, as both were stories of female-led cults based out of northern California that emphasized lifestyle makeovers, with Love Has Won being more New Age while OneTaste tapped into the wellness market. And, needless to say given that I’m talking about them in the True Crime Files, they both ended badly. They even came with similar political footnotes, with a shift to the right and the convicted women here complaining to “right-wing media outlets” about “prosecutorial overreach” (the “witch hunt” defence) and courting individuals with access to Donald Trump to see if they could swing a pardon.

The differences, however, are instructive. As the famous line from Eric Hoffer put it, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” We may well ask though if OM and OneTaste didn’t begin as a racket. This isn’t to say that Daedone was wholly cynical, just that she went into it with a business plan. Her earliest discussions with an older fellow sex communard and mentor took the form of “long, meandering conversations about advanced clitoral stroking and how to build a commercially viable following around it.” The sales pitch would have to get with the times: “Since we are not selling the god hustle,” she was told, “what do we do? What we have to sell is an organically healthy lifestyle with sensuality and intimacy. . . . Sell sensuality, sex, good communication, hot ass, any ass, etc.” Since Daedone had a background in the sex industry she had an edge. She’d also had previous experience in similar sex movements whose followers were frankly described as “marks.” I don’t think she was ever under any illusions about what the point of all this was.

But the wellness angle wasn’t the only thing that made OM a timely project. This was San Francisco and Silicon Valley at the dawn of the tech boom, and Daedone

was surrounded by bright-eyed tech founders who believed that the most effective way to change the world and to improve people’s lives was to build a company. By the mid-2000s, even being a guru was a professional pursuit, something that required branding and business savvy.

Now as those bright-eyed tech founders turned into the current oligarchy of tech bros we have all begun to wonder just how idealistic they were about creating a better world, and the point I want to make is that Daedone should be judged by the same standard. In the environment of the time, faith and gold weren’t just hard to tease apart, they were seen as being the same thing. There was a new law of physics contained in Daedone’s philosophy that “money is just energy.” “The universe is made of love,” Deadone would tell her sales staff. “Sales is love. Therefore the universe is made of sales.”

“One look at her face,” Huet adds, “told you she really believed it.”

Was this attitude “uniquely Silicon Valley,” as one reporter covering the OM movement averred? I wouldn’t go quite that far, but OneTaste really was of its time.

A key quality of a cult is its ability to adapt with the times. Just as cults in the 1960s reflected the era’s countercultural movement, today’s cults don’t look like they did in the past. Now, they look like mission-driven startups and Fortune 500 companies with demanding schedules and rigid corporate practices. They look like fitness fads, YouTube celebrities, altruistic nonprofits, therapeutic psychedelic guides, and executive leadership training seminars.

Wellness is an industry; spirituality is a commercial product. There will always be people with a hole in their heart – and someone willing to sell them a cure. Those cures will be constantly evolving, and the characteristics of cult leaders will modernize as well.

This leads me to a second point that I saw as setting OneTaste apart as a cult.

Devotees of OM weren’t suffering from a hole in their hearts so much as a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. Meaning, purpose . . . and excitement. Were they seekers of enlightenment, or just bored? Boredom is like a refrain in the lives of OneTaste’s members, their main point of vulnerability. Daedone’s first husband is described as being drawn to her because “he wanted to avoid a boring, off-the-rack life.” The “best marks,” Daedone had learned, “were eager to hand over cash in exchange for the promise of more sex, vigor, and fun in their lives.” Her earliest followers were “the perfect marks” because they “had money to burn and yearned for a more thrilling life.” Even after quitting OneTaste one former follower confessed to fantasizing with another ex-member about going back, only because they both felt “bored and lonely.” It’s all kind of sad. One 29-year-old member was drawn to OneTaste because she’d never experienced an orgasm. We are also told that this same woman had been on antidepressants for fifteen years. So since she was 14? And from some of the other pocket bios Huet provides it’s clear this woman was far from the most messed up person to join the movement.

Ironically, even Daedone herself wasn’t having a lot of fun. As OneTaste expanded she grew tired of the responsibility of running the company. Her cultivated detachment led to feelings of loneliness, and people in the organization at the end “noted how she seemed to get impatient and bored, even when OneTaste was thriving.”

It seems that even becoming a god was no cure for this emotional brownout. “Against boredom,” Nietzsche wrote, “even gods struggle in vain.”

The cure for boredom, however, turned out to be worse than the disease. (Much worse, if, like me, you don’t consider boredom a bad thing in the first place.) Looking at it from the outside, OneTaste had the appearance of a gathering of sex addicts, only it was a movement that sought to deepen rather than diminish the effects of addiction. Participants were engaging in four or five “stroke sessions” per day, which I would have thought wearing after a while, even given the canonical time limit of 15 minutes per session (which I’m sure was rarely strictly adhered to). But then that’s the way most addictions work. Huet makes the link to edging, but I think the even more recent coinage “gooning” better applies. One woman explicitly compared the experience “to a drug-induced high,” while another never wanted it to stop. “When the fifteen-minute bell rang, she didn’t want to get up and go about her day, she said: ‘I just kept wanting to do it again, and again, and again.’” What is this if not a form of addiction? As every cult leader knows, sexuality is “the most intimate way you can control someone,” and who could resist a communion that made women’s genitals feel “like warm, buttery liquid caramel”?

Needless to say, there’s something depressing in all this. OM practitioners, who often did their thing publicly at training sessions, seem like the sex positives in the dystopian blue movie Café Flesh: putting on massage-table performances for the repressed or impotent. And everything about the movement fits with today’s porn culture, which is (to state the obvious) a mass masturbation cult. I’m not a prude, but I found the OneTaste commune to be a bit disgusting, like some kind of perpetual, onanistic orgy in a bawdy house hopping with bed bugs. There are people whose kink is exhibitionism though, so whatever turns you on . . .

And I think it’s the exhibitionist angle that made OneTaste as typical of its time as the Silicon Valley start-up ethos. One strong connection between Daedone and Carlson of Love Has Won is that both were extreme narcissists, obsessed not so much with attaining wealth and power as simply always being the center of attention. And in an attention economy, narcissists have a clear competitive advantage.

The attention economy at OneTaste was always in effect: “In OneTaste, attention was a powerful currency. Receiving someone else’s undivided attention felt amazing, and giving it to someone else could make them melt in your hands.” Literally melt, like warm, buttery liquid caramel.

It seems both weird and strangely familiar. A woman on a massage table, her legs spread and being stroked while a crowd of approving onlookers gaze in rapt attention, offering up their own commentary on how this makes them feel, is only a more sexually explicit form of the attention seeking of any Internet personality or podcaster chasing views, likes, and dopamine hits. That attention then being highly monetized. Today we’re all members of this broad church of engagement.

Noted in passing:

When OneTaste was starting out and they were looking for a San Francisco headquarters/communal residence, Daedone found “a dingy, newly vacant warehouse” that was available.

It was full of construction debris. Upstairs, there was some office space, and on the main floor, concrete floors and high ceilings. It looked like an industrial cave, and it was hard to imagine people living there.

Of course some renovations were necessary, but while a group shower area seemed to pass muster people were so unimpressed with there being only two toilets, side by side without stalls around them, that they went elsewhere. Most residents slept in a large main space that had beds packed in rows with thin curtains between them.

It sounds grim to me, like an urban summer camp for horny grown-ups, but the question I had was how it was legal. I could see setting up some apartments, maybe, but turning a warehouse into a commune housing fifty people would seem to involve some significant zoning and safety code issues. I don’t think anything like this would fly in my hometown. At the very least there’d be a year or more of public hearings. But maybe things are more relaxed in SF.

“To lead her defense, Nicole had hired an aggressive advocate: Jennifer Bonjean, a high-profile attorney who had represented Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and the NXIVM leader Keith Raniere.” I think a client list like that establishes that you’re the go-to lawyer for cases involving sexual exploitation that come with a lot of media exposure, but didn’t all of those guys go to prison? Though I don’t know what role Bonjean played, at what stage, in their defenses. Apparently in Cosby’s case she got the initial sexual assault convictions overturned, but then she lost a later case where Cosby was sued for sexual assault so that might be considered a wash. In any event, it’s a line-up that speaks to Bonjean’s experience and I guess by the time these people were calling her things had already come to a desperate pass.

Takeaways:

If you have trouble getting yourself off you may need help, but you should first ask if maybe you’re just being lazy.

True Crime Files

The Island of Dr. Moreau

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

The Island of Dr. Moreau

During his real spurt of genius, when he was turning out classics like The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds all within the space of about three years, H. G. Wells showed himself to be a master at blending heady philosophical themes and scientific speculation with stirring action in a way that few writers have matched since. Now condensing The Island of Dr. Moreau into a 58-page graphic novel meant that something was going to be cut, and given the nature of the medium that something was likely going to be the more intellectual discussions that take place. Which is what happens here, throwing Wells’s balance of thought and action out of whack and leaving us with what is basically a straightforward adventure story.

You might have suspected as much just from the cover, with a heroic-looking Edward Prendick posing with machete while a muscular Beast Man looks down from the trees. Artist Fabrizio Fiorentino has a background in superhero comics, working for both DC and Marvel, and that’s really the style he’s working in here. Montgomery goes from being a pathetic, gay-coded alcoholic to a rough cowboy, while Moreau is Kingpin, or Marlon Brando. All of the big action scenes are included, and embellished, but the philosophical debates and moral of the story are dropped. While a more thrilling and better looking comic than the Classics Illustrated version, that book did preserve more of Wells’s ideas, kept the dark ending, and had I think a more credible Moreau. Or at least a hairier Moreau.

In other words, this is a comic that stands well on its own but is very limited if taken as an adaptation of Wells’s story. In fact, as a crib I think it could be quite misleading and get students who are looking for a shortcut into trouble. If you’re just here for the adventure part though it’s pretty good.

Graphicalex

Bookmarked! #157: A Rose in Winter

/ Alex Good / 19 Comments

We’re back with another promo bookmark, this time a classic from a 1981 bodice-ripper. I must have picked up the bookmark at the same time, as it’s been in my collection forever. How could I throw out such a beauty? It’s ravishing!

Looking at it again made me curious about the book. Was it even still in print? I did some digging and found out the following.

(1) The fact that I’d never heard of the author only betrays my ignorance of the genre. Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (1939-2007) “is credited with spawning the modern romance genre” with her 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower, which introduced sex into historical fiction (this comes from Wikipedia). Apparently her novels sold more than 36 million copies and were translated into many different languages.

(2) This particular book is still in print. I found it listed on Amazon, along with a half dozen other historical romances also titled A Rose in Winter. I guess you can’t copyright something so generic.

(3) The Amazon page has the top three “selected highlights” by readers of the Kindle edition. These are the passages that readers thought most worth flagging:

From a time long ago, when her dreams had held such grand illusions of a prince offering a single rose to vow his love to his lady fair, she recalled a legend that a rose found in winter brought the promise of true love found.

“Were a twisted, scar-faced, hunchbacked cripple the only other man on earth, I would surely choose him over you!”

“There is revenge, then there is justice. Sometimes the two are met as one.”

It does my heart good to see that great writing is still being appreciated in the digital age.

Book: A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Marple: The Jade Empress

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

A slow boat to China (or Hong Kong, which wasn’t quite the same thing at the time) isn’t where you’d expect to find Miss Marple, but aside from the setting Jean Kwok’s pastiche is well grounded and plays out in a familiar manner.

On the ship Miss Marple strikes up a friendship with a Chinese man who is returning to Hong Kong to visit his son. The man is soon found murdered in his cabin. The list of suspects is quite short (this is a short story), with the most prominent and suspicious-seeming being the man’s daughter. So we can feel pretty sure she’s in the clear. And the old man’s nurse with the one bad eye is a little too obvious as well. Which leaves the gossipy English couple, and while they’re obvious too they’re also very un-PC in a casually racist sort of way so you can’t count them out.

This throws us back on the one big clue or reveal scene, which I was happy to have interpreted correctly, having read more than a few of them in my time. I didn’t think the murder made a whole lot of sense, but in Kwok’s defence it held together a bit better than most of Christie’s plots. I haven’t read many successful Marple pastiches, but this one can at least be described as comfortable.

Marple index

The zombie Internet

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Over at Alex on Film I recently had two comments that appeared on my review of Escape Room that I suspected were not written by an actual human being:

Spot-on analysis. The room designs looked interesting on the surface, but the puzzle solutions felt far-fetched and the alternate/cliffhanger endings were definitely disappointing. It’s a shame it didn’t push the boundaries of the genre further.

Great analysis. I completely agree that Escape Room relies heavily on familiar ‘Game of Death’ tropes seen in films like Cube and Saw. While the premise is intriguing, the contrived character conflicts and weak, open-ended conclusion definitely hold it back from standing out in the genre.

The tip-off, of course, is that both these comments were posted together at the same time. Plus the fact that the email attached was just a random collection of letters at a gmail address. Also, the website they linked to was a professional football betting site.

Still, the reason I bring this up is that either one of these comments I would have allowed through and probably even responded to on its own. They are well expressed and do respond directly to the points I was making in my review, even using some of my own language (like calling this the “Game of Death” genre). Gone are the days of trash spam like “Best free pharmaceuticals!” and “Free pr0n!” This is good stuff.  I assume it’s being produced by AI. AI that has actually “read” my reviews!

Still, it is spam. And as spam gets better, both in how its written and how its targeted, I feel like it’s going to get harder and harder to identify. This will lead to a “death of the Internet” situation where nobody will even know that the zombie apocalypse has happened until it’s already run its course.

Absolute Batman Vol. 1: The Zoo

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Absolute Batman Vol. 1: The Zoo

Another reboot, another universe? Well, yes. But credit Scott Snyder for coming up with something that’s very new and really good, at least for the most part.

So in this version of the Batman story, part of DC’s Absolute Universe (launched in 2024), Bruce Wayne isn’t a rich orphan but comes from a middle-class background (father a teacher, mom a social worker). His dad is killed when he was a kid but his mom’s still alive. He trains himself to be a one-man crime-fighting unit, and I mean unit because he’s a really big dude, and so strong he can knock the stuffing out of a heavy bag with a single punch. He’s also a mechanical engineer and so has designed an impressive suite of toys to go with his suit. In fact, the suit itself is a machine, capable of firing spikes and with a cape that has claws he can grab things with or even walk on.

Then there are the other familiar names and faces, not transformed. Alfred Pennyworth is a hard-nosed MI6 agent who basically adopts Bruce. He’s also the narrator of the story. Jim Gordon is now Gotham’s mayor. The Joker is some billionaire psycho, called Joker because he never laughs. And Bruce’s poker buddies are Waylon Jones (Killer Croc), Eddie Nigma (the Riddler), Oswald Cobblepot (the Penguin), Harvey Dent (Two-Face), and Selina Kyle (Catwoman). You see, they were all friends together back when they were kids and they haven’t turned into their alter egos yet.

The plot in this first volume of the series (collecting issues #1-6) has it that a new gang called the Party Animals is taking over Gotham. They wear these cool masks that make them look like the evil bunny from Donnie Darko. Their leader is Roman Sionis (Black Mask) and he has the usual mission of creating chaos and burning the town down Purge-style. When Batman stands in his way he at first tries to buy him off, but (and this is one thing that is consistent with previous versions of the character), Batman’s not the kind of guy who can be bought.

There was a lot to like, from the great design elements to Nick Dragotta’s clear art. The action is quite violent and the guiding concept refreshingly bold. I loved the new Alfred. You really feel like you’re getting something completely different here, not just a slight divergence in the timeline but a rebuilt Batman from the ground up.

On the downside, I really didn’t like the flashbacks to the pack of superfriends. Even though it’s an entirely new backstory I didn’t find it interesting and the new parts to it, like the way all the supervillains grew up together and are still buddies, seemed silly. Then, in the present day, I was disappointed to find that the Party Animals were just more of the usual chaos agents who want to see the world burn, as that cliché has it.

But the Party Animals are only bottom feeders anyway, a force to get the ball rolling. They’re also the lowest rung on the Joker’s criminal organization and as things leave off here he takes their loss with a shrug and tells his assistant that it’s time to call in Bane. I’m down for that!

Graphicalex

Alien: Paradiso

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

Alien: Paradiso

The Alien titles have become one of my go-to comics for a good time. There are basic recurring elements in each of them, but somehow the stories manage to keep things fresh. A lot fresher and more interesting than the horrible film franchise anyway! And it’s been that way now for forty years.

Reading Paradiso I had to ask (again!) why they don’t just film these storylines instead of the ones they do. What we have here would make, if not a solid feature, at least a very good episode in an Alien cable series.

Smuggler Ricky Valentine, the dude with the golden arm, has arranged a meet-up with another bad guy at the super-ritzy Paradiso resort, which looks like a cross between Dubai and Las Vegas (if those two places aren’t the same thing). A couple of space marshals have Ricky under surveillance. They’re about to make a big bust when this other smuggler Ricky had arranged to meet turns out to have killed the deal with Ricky in order to take on some other cargo. Specifically, a bunch of giant, leathery eggs . . .

And so hell comes to paradise, with Xenomorphs running rampage through the casino and the sauna and the dining halls, slaughtering good guys, bad guys, and guests indiscriminately. The setting is a good example of the kind of refreshing change that makes these comics so much fun. Xenomorphs running amuck on some shithole planet or mining asteroid was getting old. Seeing them at Club Med was great.

Another way these comics keep impressing me is in the reveal of a character who turns out to be a synth. You know going in that somebody is an android, and still every time I’m surprised when I find out who it is. Full credit to the writers (Steve Foxe in this case) for that. Then, for the parts of the story that are unavoidable and that every Alien fan knows and expects, they can just have fun. “It got bigger,” the one space marshal says after a full-size Xenomorph shows up just an hour or so after being hatched. “No shit,” his partner replies. Now as fans we know how fast these things grow, but the people in the comic don’t. “How did it grow so much in just a few hours?” a security guard asks. It doesn’t make sense!

About the only thing I wasn’t totally on board with here was when they switched over to the Xenomorph’s point of view. I guess they were going for a sort of Predator effect, but I thought it was unnecessary and a bit confusing. That said, it’s another example of how they keep trying to throw something new into the mix, and it did change things up visually (the POV parts have a different artist) and I can’t say I minded it that much.

So another great Alien comic! Really, at this point I’ll grab any new one that comes out. They started these back in the ‘80s and I think I’ve read almost all of them without being let down yet.

Graphicalex