Aliens Outbreak Comic Review
“What’s a queen without her subjects”
Aliens Outbreak is a comic series set 10 years after the events of the film Aliens and is part of Dark Horse Comics’ expanded universe. It’s actually the first set of expanded universe comics, running for six issues and I would say it’s pretty important to do a good job when handling the Alien universe and by this point the only movies out were Alien and Aliens, two very loved movies. I’m a big fan of Dark Horse in general and would trust them to do a good job, let’s see if they did. I’ll quickly note that I’m reviewing the reprinted comics with added colour and with *the names of Hicks and Newt being changed to Wilks and Billie since the comics were meant to follow those characters but were changed because of Alien3.
Wilks* is sent back to face the aliens again because of his experience with them, this time he’s sent to the home world with a marine crew but there’s still enough time for him the break a distressed Billie* out from a mental institution because she’s being mistreated and hide her on his ship. Earth is dealing with its own problems with religious nuts and a queen alien of its own, the earth might never be the same again. It’s actually a really cool story and I had a lot of fun with it, it’s long enough to be reasonably well fleshed out and it’s short enough that it’s not dragged out and I found myself pretty involved.
The artwork is by Mark A. Nelson and is mostly great…mostly. It’s pretty effective at least and the aliens and the queen look awesome in his style, the artwork does fail here and there but all in all it’s pretty great. The added colour can be effective but also fails in a few places too, I still think it’s cool addition to new prints since it was originally black and white but does colour make it automatically better? Not exactly but I’m happy both versions exist.
The layouts are all pretty good and strong but there aren’t really any pages that are that experimental or interesting, they are all correct and easy enough to follow but sometimes you need some crazy shit. Which in all fairness, is used in the dream like parts but the book feels too safe but I don’t think I’ll take off points simply because it’s done right. The lettering is pretty great too, I don’t have any issues with that.
All in all, Alien Outbreak is pretty damn fun and I think it’s a really good expansion of the Alien universe. Following known characters was fun and I will say that this comic actually has the first representation of the engineers long before we actually find out who they are in the movies. I’ll just say that it’s very different to the more canon engineer but it gives this series a little bit more of an intrigue even if I’m not a big fan of the design.
Rating: ****
Better than > Evil Dead 2 Beyond Dead by Dawn Worse than > Hellboy
Main Pros
-Story
-Artwork
-Great seeing all this extra alien stuff
-That chest buster scene (You’ll know if you’ve read it)
Main Cons
-Colour is lacking
-A little redundant now
All I can end with is, if you’re an Alien fan then you should really enjoy this.
