Written by: Dan Abnett
Art by: Moritat
Publisher: Dark Horse
God damn is this what I want from an Aliens comic! Dan Abnett, you are rockin’ my world right now.
Prometheus: Life and Death #4 ended with a monster cliffhanger. Half our cast are stuck on a different ship and maybe miles away, a fourth are stuck on an Engineer ship with a very angry Engineer and no weapons, and the last fourth are stuck on LV223 with six hives worth of Xenomorphs and enough bullets to kill maybe ten percent of them. Not even Ahab is safe, and he’s a friggin’ Predator.
Aliens: Life and Death #1 picks up right where we left off on LV223, with our stranded space marines under heavy attack from all sides. Xenomorphs are everywhere, and their one means of escape is gone. It’s chaos.
If our last issue went from bad to worse to worser, this one takes it one step further. Ammo is short, people are dying or being dragged away towards the nearest Xenomorph hive for impregnation, and Ahab is nowhere to be found. Everyone assumes they’re going to die and are only fighting on out of sheer stubbornness at this point. You can’t take the oorah out of a space marine, even if you kill all of his hope.
It’s wonderful. From start to finish, this book delivers. The beauty of it is spending so many issues building these characters, of putting them through little trials but letting them succeed. This may be issue #1 for this arc, but it’s issue #9 in total, and it’s the one where survival really starts to feel like a fantasy.
In other words, it’s good storytelling.
I suppose where the issue falters is the artwork. We have a new artist, and while he’s not bad, his style is almost a bit too cartoony for my tastes. Outlines are heavy and thick, and while these distort the Xenomrophs in strange ways, they don’t really flatter the people. The violence is heavy here, but it’s cartoon violence. I’d have preferred our older artists, personally. They had more subtlety to them.
Still, it’s not bad. I was jarred for the first handful of pages, but by the middle I stopped caring. There were way more important things to care about, like all of the friggen’ Xenomorphs attacking characters I like. How dare they!
When it came to the Fire and Stone line, I found the Alien section to be the weakest. It started off strong but its setting and strange attempts at philosophy just didn’t work, and I suppose I only cared for one character, if that. When it comes to Life and Death though, it’s starting off strong as hell, and I care about every character. There’s also no philosophy to be found in this issue.
In short: It’s awesome.
