Aliens: Dust to Dust

/ Alex Good

Aliens: Dust to Dust

In my thoughts on Aliens: Dead Orbit I offered up the opinion that sometimes with comics where one person does double duty as artist and writer you end up wishing they’d split the labour with someone else. In that case I loved the art by James Stokoe but had trouble following the story. Dust to Dust reverses this, as I thought Gabriel Hardman’s story was solid, if pretty basic, while his art wasn’t to my liking.

First the story. In his Introduction Hardman expresses his (in my opinion, correct) understanding of the mission. “You have to bring in different ideas while still fitting the tone of the Aliens universe or you’ll end up with a stagnant pool of a franchise.” This is what I meant when I said of the Aliens: The Original Years Volume 2 omnibus that the stories have to deliver fan service but also “just enough stuff that’s new that every story has its own character.” And in fact this is the challenge faced by every genre writer.

So in most respects Hardman presents us with a classic Aliens story here. On a planet that’s been undergoing an only partially successful terraforming program there is a Xenomorph outbreak. And, as is the nature of these things, pretty soon the nasty creatures have overrun the human colonies, leaving everyone scrambling to get on the last escape shuttle out. Two such people are 12-year-old Maxon and his mom, the latter having recently had an intimate encounter with a facehugger. So yeah, she’s expecting. After Maxon and mom get on a shuttle, mom gives birth in the usual way, and within a couple of minutes the chestburster is a full-grown adult Xenomorph. How do these things grow so fast?

Anyway, the shuttle has to crash land back on the planet, which is an inhospitable environment riven by dust storms. The passengers all survive the crash, but so does the Xenomorph, minus an arm. This is significant because it brings in the “different idea” that jazzes the story up. You see, as one character puts it, “everybody says the Xenomorphs take on the traits of their hosts.” And since this particular Xenomorph was born of Maxon’s mother that means there’s still a kind of shared bond. She (the one-armed Xenomorph) may kill everyone around Maxon, but she’ll leave him alone. Or even protect him, as needs be.

The idea that Xenomorphs borrow something from their hosts had, I think, been suggested in the Aliens mythology before this, but the step taken here goes quite a bit further. These aliens even take on the personality of their hosts. That’s new, and it’s an interesting twist in what turns out to be, as promised on the back cover, a story “equal parts the horror of Alien, and the action of Aliens!”

But then there’s the art. It’s very much the sketchy style of drawing (and lettering) that I’m not a fan of. The work of Jesús Hervás and Vanessa R. Del Rey on The Empty Man series being a good example. I like the art here better than in that title, but it suffers from the same drawbacks of being hard to read at times. There’s one fight with the Xenomorph, for example, where it gets knocked off its feet when attacking Maxon. How? I can’t make it out. I think a giant robotic arm is swung at it, but I had to wonder how that would work. It’s just not clear.

Now to be fair I do like an individual artistic style, and I’d rather see a comic drawn this way than in the plastic visuals of the mainstream Marvel manner. Also, the scratchy quality of the images goes with the fact that a lot of the time the characters are caught out on the surface in a raging dust storm. But still, it’s not my thing.

Graphicalex

14 thoughts on “Aliens: Dust to Dust”

  2. So is the cover not as indicative of the art inside then?
    Your continued reviews keep tempting me to track down a bunch of the alien comics in e-format, but then I look at how much work it would be just to figure out what goes when and I throw my hands up and am like “Its all Alex”. So your reign as Alien Expert shall continue unabated 😀

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  3. I’m glad you liked the twist in this one, but I can tell you it would have had the opposite effect on me. It’s a step toward making the monsters sympathetic and I don’t hold with that as a general rule. Now, that said, it would have been funny if some corporate goon had sacrificed a suicidal lackey hoping to kill two birds with one stone!

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    • This is apparently something they took a lot further in the new Alien: Earth series, where they have a xenomorph they even turn into a kind of pet. Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t have been on board with that. This was more just an interesting twitch in that direction and it didn’t bother me as a sort of one-off thought experiment. I wouldn’t want it taken any further.

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      • I hadn’t heard about Alien: Earth. I looked it up. Looks like an propaganda pitch for all the futures I detest. Now I’m depressed. I can only hope it doesn’t get renewed for a second season….

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      • Yeah I haven’t seen any of it. I just heard some stuff. Sounds terrible. Don’t understand why they didn’t just make movies out of the different comics, as they are all pretty darn good. Some of them are excellent.

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