Alien: Bloodlines

In my notes on Aliens: The Original Years I said how much I loved the writing. The way that Mark Verheiden took the story in so many interesting new directions put what happened to the film franchise after James Cameron’s Aliens to shame.

I don’t think what writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson does in this six-issue story arc is on quite the same level as Verheiden’s work, but it’s very good. A tough-as-nails security chief named Gabriel Cruz has to go back to a space station orbiting Earth when his son joins up with an activist group that wants to throw a monkey wrench into what the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is doing up there. Unfortunately, what they’re doing up there is breeding a bunch of Xenomorphs, so of course things get out of hand. It seems that despite all the time spent studying them we’ve never learned how to handle these critters.

Throw in some Bishop-model cyborgs that all look like Lance Henriksen, a super “Alpha” Xenomorph and a mysterious dark queen of the hive, and a strange subplot that has the Xenomorphs forming a psychic bond with Gabriel because he’d survived incubating a facehugger (it was cut out of him before it matured and made its own exit), and I thought there was a lot of interesting stuff going on here, most of which I enjoyed.

What I didn’t like was the art by Salvador Larroca. To give him some credit: the aliens look good and some of the action sequences, like the guy getting his head blown off with a shotgun, are nicely done. But where Larroca really falls down is in his drawing of the human characters, and particularly their faces. Everyone seems made of plastic, or like they’re the product of an AI art-generator, and not a very advanced AI program either. (I also thought the colorist was a program, as the credit is to Guru-eFX, but apparently that’s a real person.) Emotion doesn’t register at all, even when characters are yelling or screaming, and there’s little sense of movement in the way the figures are drawn. From what I’ve been able to gather, there’s a lot of strong opinions on Larocca out there in the comic community and I can only say that while I can see some people liking his style it’s not my thing and it took my grade on this comic down quite a bit.

But if you’re a fan of the franchise I’d definitely recommend this just for the story. You may not like the art any more than I do, but it’s something you’ll be able to put up with.

Graphicalex