Aliens: Aftermath #1 by Benjamin Percy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In Aliens: Aftermath, writer Benjamin Percy and artist Dave Watcher offer up a sequel to Aliens in which a renegade terrorist group track down the site of Haldey’s Hope where their leaders aunt, Private Vasquez, was sent on a mission by the Weyland-Yutani corporation and never returned.
Vasquez’s nephew is supposedly hunting for answer to what happened to his aunt, but in truth his working for a rival corporation, tasked to bring back the cryogenically frozen body of the first colonist to be implanted with an alien embryo by a facehugger and then frozen on company orders. Because, as I have said before, the real monsters in this franchise are the people. After all, you don’t see the aliens screwing each other over for a percentage…
Of course, things go horribly wrong, because of course they do.
This one-shot starts really well, but the ending feels really rushed. It’s over before you know it and has the feel of a mini series that’s been cut down heavily so that it could be released as a one shot. There’s not enough time to get to know the characters, and the slow build that’s a necessary part of any Alien story results in there being no real time for action and not nearly enough of the actual alien. The Cryo-Alien is a really good concept, but Percy doesn’t have the time or space to do anything interesting with it.
This certainly isn’t a bad comic by any stretch of the imagination, and is definitely recommended for fans of Aliens, but it could have been so much more.
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