A big thumbs-up to Dark Horse Comics for using it’s hardcover novella line to showcase shorter work that deserves a better format than the “floppy”; Their recent Hellboy novella “House of The Living Dead” was a great example of the best way to use the format. Their latest, Aliens: Fast Track To Heaven, unfortunately, is a great example of how to alienate customers by offering poor quality at a (much) higher price.
Artist Liam Sharp pulls double duty here, writing AND illustrating a tale that offers nothing new to the ALIEN mythos. A team of Ecologists researching newly discovered life forms on Jupiter’s Moon, Europa, runs afoul of an Alien. They’re shocked, they’re scared, they run, the Alien kills them off one by one, they stand and fight, the end. Given the format, I was expecting something new and innovative, and was disappointed to find the same old story that was tired a few years after Dark Horse started publishing ALIENS comics in the late 1980’s. There’s so much fertile ground that could be covered with these creatures, and to see the same hunt-and-kill space operas over and over again is just sad. Sharp’s usually brilliant art looks muddy and bland here, and he falls into the same trap as a lot of Artists-turned-Writers by making what should be a simple story so wordy that it becomes virtually unreadable.
Aliens: Fast Track To Heaven would have been barely acceptable as a $3.50 comic. As a $10.99 hardcover, it’s robbery.
- The Scarlet Gospels - March 9, 2015
- Inspector of the Dead - February 23, 2015
- The Boneyard - February 23, 2015
- The Deep - February 2, 2015
- Pumpkin Cinema: The Best Movies For Halloween - November 20, 2014
- The Wake - November 20, 2014
- Dark Screams, Volume One - November 20, 2014
- Horror Library, Volume 5 - September 16, 2014
- Ghost Heart - September 16, 2014
- Monster & Madman - August 6, 2014
