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.

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Asterix the Gaul

This is the first of the Asterix comic books written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo, and was published in 1961. I grew up reading these in English translations, and I think I had a French edition of one of them too. But this time I wasn’t the English version I remembered, as it was an “all-new more American translation” done in 1999. Back when I read the comics the village druid was named Getafix, but here he’s Panoramix, which is actually his name in the original French even though I don’t like it as much. And I wondered if, when Panoramix says he can make soup in various flavours, including “bacon cheeseburger,” this was a literal translation or something more “American.” Did they have bacon cheeseburgers in France in 1961?

For being the first in the series they hit the ground running with Asterix the Gaul, as the series was basically born full grown with everything in place. Except maybe for Dogmatix. I might have missed Obelix’s little dog but I don’t think he was here. And they even let Cacofonix sing at the final feast, which wasn’t going to happen again very often.

The story has a nice a mix of goofiness (the Romans playing musical chairs to see who will be the secret agent sent to the Gauls’ village), wordplay, and basic moral instruction. When Panoramix explains to Asterix that he doesn’t need the magic potion to beat the Romans but only has to use his native wit, it’s a point that a lot of superhero comics like to make.

The real star though is Uderzo’s art. It’s what impressed me the most when I was a kid and it still does today. And it’s all the more impressive because I can’t think of any comic artist who has created anything quite like it in all the years since. One panel here that really stood out has a Roman troop marching beneath a tree, with Asterix and Obelix perched in silhouette on a branch overhead. There’s so much action and information put into that one drawing, not to mention just how beautiful it is to look at. There aren’t many books you can return to after so many years that hold up so well.

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Bone Parish: Volume Three

The last volume – or is it just the season one finale? – of the Bone Parish saga. And up to the final issue I was wondering how they were going to manage to wrap everything up in the few pages remaining. Well, much to my surprise Cullen Bunn managed to pull it off. It’s a quick ending, and feels a bit rushed, but it’s satisfactory and does manage to tie up most of the loose ends while holding out the promise of the story continuing. Colour me impressed. I didn’t think it was going to work.

There were no big twists or revelations, while the action seemed bloodier than usual even though the regular gang violence was toned down and the mutants created by the bad batch of Ash weren’t back. I was getting used to Jonas Scharf’s art, and while he has a real weak spot for faces, especially in profiles that he tends to just repeat, he does some good action scenes here, including a couple of nice fights and one great explosion drawing.

So that’s a wrap, with most of the Winters family now deceased and bottled up. But what might be going on in the land of the dead is left a little vague. Is there a voodoo king of the underworld, or is it all just hallucinations? Maybe if the series is continued things like this will be explained, but I’m fine if they just leave it the way they did. Solid work all around.

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