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