Author: Alex Good

Aliens: The Original Years

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Aliens: The Original Years

I loved this collection of what originally ran as three Alien-themed miniseries, with an additional prologue and double-barreled coda added to the mix. But before I get to praising it I should give some of the backstory.

First off, despite being a Dark Horse comic this is part of the Marvel Epic Collection line-up because Marvel bought the comic book rights to the Alien franchise in 2020. So I guess they own all this stuff now.

Second, the comics themselves have been “remastered” in various ways over the history of their publication. So if you pay attention to these things you’ll note that the credit for colorist on the first series is given as “Dark Horse Digital.” That’s because the first series originally appeared in black-and-white and was later colorized. Also, the series launched in the wake of James Cameron’s 1986 movie Aliens and follows up with the further adventures of Newt and Hicks (Ripley took a bit longer to appear because of legal issues). As the film franchise went on, however, we found out that Newt and Hicks died at the beginning of Alien3, so in reissues of the comics they went back and changed the names of Newt and Hicks to Billie and Wilks. But for the trade edition they changed them back again, which is how they appear here. Then the final series, Earth War, was renamed Female War and then changed back again to Earth War. Got that straight?

The major change from the original publication is the colorization of the first series (most of the other changes being reversions back to the initial version). I think they did a fair job with the colour, but if you’re a purist you might wonder if it doesn’t take something away from Mark A. Nelson’s underground art, since black-and-white isn’t just an art form that is without colour. It’s its own thing. As with movie colorizations, there’s an artificial feel to these pages and I think something of the original atmosphere is lost. But it didn’t bother me that much.

There are different artists with very different styles in each of the series, but the writer – Mark Verheiden – is constant and there is a strong through narrative. And it’s the story here that I really grooved to, with the arc that takes us from the Xenomorph home planet to Earth having lots of little curves and details along the way. For example there’s one twist that plays off the reveal of who is a cyborg among the ship’s crew that I thought was brilliant. It surprised me and still made perfect sense. Then there’s the cynical video reporter from INS who has been sent out by her boss Kolchak (get it?) to cover the opening of a pyramid with Xenomorph guardians. Going along with the tomb-raiding team is the only known survivor of an alien chest-burster, which is such a cool idea I can’t understand why no screenwriter thought of it. I also loved the idea of how the aliens, who are basically just killing machines or space sharks, have all this meaning projected onto them by humanity. Of course the military-industrial complex is looking to make a weapons program out of them but they’re also worshipped as gods by a bunch of cultists that had me thinking of the plot of Cullen Bunn’s The Empty Man (if only because I’d been reading that title recently).

None of this has much to do with the mythology of the film franchise. And it’s way better than the mystical mumbo-jumbo Ridley Scott gave us with Prometheus. Verheiden was basically off doing his own thing while continuing on from Cameron’s movie and I thought he did a terrific job. Even the “mistakes” turn out to be a lot of fun. Verheiden thought the “Space Jockey” figure from Alien wasn’t wearing a mask but was actually a kind of giant humanoid with an elephant head. And so that’s another alien race that puts in a disturbing appearance here.

I could go on. This was a joy. It’s the Alien franchise that should have been. Just leave the scary monsters as scary monsters and concentrate on the human story. There’s a leitmotif throughout the series that has it that the aliens are basically only props and that humanity is more than capable of destroying itself. That’s the sort of thoughtfulness and liberty toward source material that you don’t get in a lot of comics, and like I say, it’s not even a major theme. It’s just a point that comes up several times in passing.

Though it really diverges from the official Alien canon I think fans of the movies may be the most appreciative audience for this book. As I’ve said, it holds on to the original two movies (the two best, by a long shot) and then goes in a totally original direction that I thought was superior to where the movies ended up. Sure it’s still bubble-gum stuff at heart, but it’s a really nice package that presents a thrilling alternate Alien reality that’s like some giant franchise Easter egg. Or maybe one of those leathery eggs with creatures inside them.

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Taking flight

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

Some people, even people living here, don’t know that the major metropolis I call home does in fact have an airfield. I’m not sure if it counts as an airport. Probably not. Though there are hangars.  And of course planes and runways.  And a café.  (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Looking backward

/ Alex Good / 21 Comments

Over at Good Reports I’ve added a review of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. I found this a real nostalgia trip, leading me into all sorts of reflections on what the meaning of that decade might have been.

I’m sure everyone who lived through the nineties will have a different idea or impression of them. If you try to stand far enough back though I think the big changes had to do with the coming of the Internet (social media came later). That would literally change everything, and I think most people understood that, at least somewhat, at the time. I still find it a point of wonder that I’m a member of the last generation to have grown up without the Internet or computers in the home. And overall I consider that a blessing.

In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of things that have gotten better since the nineties. We’re more aware of environmental issues, but nothing significant has been done to address any of them. Politics has become angrier, stupider, and far more polarized. The economy has become more dysfunctional. Culturally the nineties were not a golden age, but they stand up well against what we’ve seen in the twenty-first century.

Sure, this is an old guy grumbling. But I don’t have any complaints about young people, who I like pretty well. I think people my age, and even more the dreaded Boomers, have to answer for most of what’s gone wrong. And I don’t think ignorance is any defence. We knew what we were doing.

Wallpaper: The glory years

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

This weekend I visited an open house in my neighbourhood that had just been listed. The owner, a 102-year-old man, had moved into a retirement home. I guess it was time, as they say. From the looks of things inside, I don’t think any work had been done on the place since the early 1970s. The layout of the house was fabulous, but the wallpaper not so much. Submitted for your approval.

On our way down to the basement we have this lovely brickwork. But it’s not brick! It is, in fact wallpaper that looks like brick. Does this count as trompe l’oeil? If you run your hand over it, it even has a rough, pebbly texture.

You can really enjoy your trip to the washroom with this fun and friendly wallpaper. Who would want to leave?

This is the wallpaper in the upstairs washroom. Some people might think it’s a bit too much, but it matches nicely with what we get in the large sitting room just outside . . .

Can any words to justice to this? And it covers all four walls of a very large room. I felt I’d stepped onto the set of an Argento film.

Bone Parish: Volume Two

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Bone Parish: Volume Two

Better than I was expecting. I’d enjoyed the first Bone Parish volume but had just recently read BRZRKR: Volume Two and it was a big letdown that I thought typical of the middle stretch of most series/trilogies. Meaning it was a bore where the story was just marking time. There’s some of that here, but Bone Parish: Volume Two mostly builds quite nicely on the original story, sort of like the second season of Breaking Bad (which is the obvious comparison to make), with the Winters family having to face ever greater threats to their drug business. I also really liked the idea of cooks for other gangs trying to reverse engineer their own brand of Ash and coming up with a bad batch that melts people into composite monsters reminiscent of The Thing. That was a great, and necessary, step up in the horror.

The cover is actually a variant cover for issue #3, as found in the bonus material for Volume One. It’s a good one, and pairs nicely with the cover for Volume One. The art still struck me as being hot and cold though. I still don’t like the faces, which seem further neutralized, at least in some ways, by geometric planes of shadow. But I did get a kick out of signature moments like the fly on Brae’s hand when he enters the mutant flophouse, or the biker’s face reflected in the pool of blood. Those get high marks.

A good story then, which moved things forward nicely if along predictable lines. I can really see this as a cable series now. I was only a little disappointed with how things broke off, with a series of cliffhanger moments. Again, that’s very cable series, but none of the plot points being introduced seemed very important, or were at all surprising. Still, I’m definitely on board for seeing how it wraps up.

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Mythbusters

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

In a review I wrote recently of the book Corruptible by Brian Klaas I talked about the problem of kakistocracy, or “rule by the worst,” and saw it as “the complement to the failure of meritocracy in our time. As many recent commentators have pointed out – see, for example, my reviews of Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes and The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel – meritocracy, which from the get-go was a hard sell (with roots going back to a dystopic satire), has conclusively failed in the Age of Trump.” Near the end of my review I related the following anecdote:

Thirty years ago I was chatting with a professor friend of mine who was sitting on a committee overseeing applications for tenure-track appointments to the department he taught in. I mentioned the long odds that candidates even then were facing and that the successful ones would have to be truly remarkable. What he said has always stayed with me: “You’d think with so many people applying for so few jobs, the people we’d be hiring would be great. Only the best. But they’re not. We’re hiring the worst people. I don’t know why that is.”

This anecdote came to mind yesterday when reading an essay online by Hamilton Nolan on the low quality of thought coming out of opinion columnists even at prestige publications. His main example is Pamela Paul, who writes a column for the New York Times.

There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of the sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?

This is a subject that interests me, and I quote from Nolan’s piece only because it chimes so well with what I (and many others) have been saying. It never ceases to amaze me how in so many fields today we see people who are scarcely even competent at what they do being lionized as geniuses or an “elite.” As Nolan’s example suggests (and I’ve made the same point several times over the years), about the only field where the term “elite” can still be assured of meaning anything is sport.

This might signify a more dangerous shift in public thinking than at first seems. We often decry the current lack of trust the masses have in “expertise,”  but the fact is that the institutions that we have traditionally looked to for guidance and to lead public opinion (the media and academia) are now so compromised and even corrupt that you can understand people turning away from them. In order to have faith in elites or experts you have to believe in the process that elevated them to that station. With meritocracy exposed more and more as a myth, that faith has been lost.