Alien #6 (2022)

Let's engage in some pure speculation. Phillip Kennedy Johnson was going to have a new Alien Queen. She's in the dreams of the main character in his first arc, she's still on the cover of the last issue of his second series. There's something in a sort of cocoon at the end of this final issue, so maybe she was still on the horizon. She was going to talk to humans, she'd tell us how much better she and her brood are, it would all be very boring and pretentious. It would reinforce what he's done across 18 issues which is to try and get away from the Alien mythos and write his own because his own is better.


To him.


It reminds me of Dick Jones talking to Bob Morton in the executive washroom in Robocop. I'll paraphrase since the language can't be repeated here in a family newsletter-

We may have called the boss a name or two behind his back, but there was always respect. We knew where the line was.


And that's the problem with Marvel's Alien so far. No respect.


Its not any worse than the worst of Dark Horse's Alien titles, but those had respect for the source material. Yes, there are plenty of ways to butcher something, but if you don't understand what you have in the first place, its not butchering (a fine art form, well and true) but slaughtering (random slashing, to and fro).


The first Alien series wasn't received well by the former Fox people. There weren't enough xenomorphs they said. There's too many androids they said. (ALWAYS too many.) What's this Species-lite thing walking around that has nothing to do with Alien they said (in my head, fully speculating again.) Why is the artist tracing photographs of action figures he stole off the internet, and why is he leaving the joints in so he can be caught? Since there weren't good answers, they requested a fresh start, a new number one, fanfare and all that, but we need there to be aliens in the alien book, and we need this valuable property to be treated well. By this time, 'Prey', the excellent Predator film from last year had been released, and the long waiting to be published Predator series from Marvel was going to see the light of day after a year. They already knew that series was excellent, and thought maybe the Alien comic should be too.


Jump ahead six issues.

We had more aliens, but mostly we had more androids, doing "oh, humans are terrible" android things, with a Bishop avatar to try and show that not all androids are bad, and just enough humans to show that maybe all humans DO actually suck. The art for that second arc by Julius Ohta was at least not traced, had some fun movement in it, and fans of Pepe Larraz and Daniel Warren Johnson would probably find things to like in it. But, unfortunately, it was another dud. Not from a sales perspective, not by a long shot. Marvel's 18 issues outsold the last 10 years of Dark Horse Alien books combined at my store. Call 'quality control' the issue.


Where does that leave us?

Alien #1 by Declean Shalvey and Andrea Broccardo will be on shelves in April. Let's see if they get it right this time around.