[REVIEW] Aliens vs. Predator: Prey
In case you didn’t realize it yet, the media landscape of the Aliens and Predator series is vast. Sure, there are the movies, but there are also games and comics and toys and models and life-sized replicas and, yes, novels. Aliens vs. Predator: Prey is one of those novels.
Most of the early Aliens and Predator novel output consisted of novelizations of previously published comics. Prey is no exception. An adaptation of the original Aliens vs. Predator comic, Prey makes no pretense at trying to be a pathfinding original work. It’s the comic series in prose form and that’s all.
Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair. But let’s lay down the basics first for those who haven’t read, say, the Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1 and aren’t familiar with Prey’s source material.
At some point in the distant future, sometime around the events of Aliens, there exists an offworld colony where the local herbivores (called rhynths) are raised for their meat. After a long few seasons, the colony is ready to ship its rhynths away to be processed in a giant space tug/slaughterhouse thing. Machiko Noguchi is the standoffish administrator of the colony and our eventual heroine.
What the people of the colony don’t know is that their planet has been used many times by the Predators as a hunting ground for the most dangerous prey, what they call the Hard Meat, the Aliens of the Alien pictures. They haven’t been back to the planet since the colony has been established, so when these two cultures unexpectedly collide things go haywire rather quickly. The Aliens infect the rhynth and spread aboard the spacecraft meant to take them off-planet. An Alien Queen establishes herself. Aliens begin to breed out of control.
[REVIEW] Aliens vs. Predator vs. The Terminator
Wow. Just… wow. If you’re not at least a little flabbergasted by the mere title of Aliens vs. Predator vs. The Terminator then I suspect you may be a Terminator yourself, sent back in time to read my reviews and report to Skynet after the Earth has been sundered by nuclear war.
I am an unabashed fan of the Aliens vs. Predator comics released by Dark Horse. Sure, some of them are weaker than others, but for the most part they’re high quality enterprises with plenty to offer. And I’m willing to offer some grudging respect to the various other “Vs.” series that Dark Horse has done over the years, where Aliens and Predators have done battle with the likes of Superman, Batman and the Green Lantern. Heck, the Predator even fought Tarzan once. At the Earth’s core!
Aliens vs. Predator vs. The Terminator? Not good. Very, very not good. As in bad.
You may recall that I didn’t care for Alien Resurrection. Well, Aliens vs. Predator vs. The Terminator spins off directly from that film, which gives you some idea of why I disliked this crossover from the beginning. Maybe there’s a good way to handle the story of Ripley and Annalee Call getting mixed up in the ongoing battle between Aliens and Predators, but the inclusion of the odd-man-out Terminator series blows that completely away.
In this story, Call and her group of (organized offscreen) rebels/terrorists have assembled to fight the Alien menace. With word that Alien experimentation is going on at a distant space station, they’ve come to recruit Ripley, who’s living in the underbelly of “shithole” Earth, to their cause. Battle-weary, Ripley initially demurs, but is eventually convinced to tag along. It’s not the strongest way to get started.
Once they reached their destination we’ve already been made privy to the bad guy’s plans. You see, he’s a Terminator and he’s building new Terminators that use a hybrid human/Alien flesh as their outer covering. This gives them exceptional new powers somehow and Ripley and company are walking right into the center of the storm.
[REVIEW] Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1
While reading Aliens Omnibus, Vol. 1 and Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1, filled with the shaky stories as they are, I was constantly looking forward to Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1 because I knew there would be a wealth of goodies for me. I was almost entirely correct, as this collection features the strongest series of stories thus far. Not perfect, but close enough to make me feel like I got my money’s worth.
The jewel of Vol. 1 is undoubtedly the first story of the bunch, the very first miniseries to bear the Aliens vs. Predator label. This tale takes what is admittedly a less-than-obvious conceit and makes it work with style. Writer Randy Stradley introduces us to a far-flung alien colony whose purpose is producing meat for offworld marketing. Artist Phill Norwood takes his Hollywood-quality art skills and renders everything up with a real sense of you-are-there: the machines look like they could work, the people look like regular folks, and so on.
The Predators are introduced as having access to fresh Alien eggs laid by a captive queen. They use the eggs to seed worlds with the bloodthirsty xenomorphs of Alien and Aliens and then hunt them. This is the core conceit of all the stories in the book, so it’s worth pointing out. The Predators take steps to exclude queens from the egg mix, but sometimes one slips through, opening things up for a world of hurt.
What’s most interesting about “Aliens vs. Predator” is that it focuses primarily on the human actors in the story. We get some stuff with the Predators, but for the most part we’re with recognizably ordinary people being confronted with a no-win scenario: aliens on one side and alien-hunters on the other. The only character who emerges as a warrior-type able to engage both sides is Machiko Noguchi, who returns a couple of times during the course of Vol. 1.
After the slam-bang opener of “Aliens vs. Predator,” the omnibus follows up with a quiet story called “Blood Time,” focused entirely on the Predators as they hunt the Aliens. A young warrior tries to claim the glory of a kill from another warrior and pays the consequences for his lies.
[REVIEW] Predator Omnibus, Volume 1
I’ve read a lot of books, especially when I was young, so many times that they were about to fall apart, but I’ve never have one fall apart on me on the first read. That happened with Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1. The cover came loose of the spine and I was left holding 400 glued-together pages that were readable enough, but right on the verge of scattering at any moment. I’m not sure if this affected my enjoyment of the collection or not.
Vol. 1 contains stories of about the same vintage as Aliens Omnibus, Vol. 1: late ’80s and early ’90s explorations of a licensed character, in this case the Predator from the film of the same name. We were still a ways away from Dark Horse Comics’ landmark franchise-blender Aliens vs. Predator and in fact Predator 2 hadn’t even come out at that point. As with Dark Horse’s Aliens comics, they were working from the middle of a film series without any idea of what was coming.
Like The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 1 and Aliens Omnibus, Vol. 1, Vol. 1 of the Predator stories is dominated by a group of interlinked miniseries with the same main characters. We begin with “Concrete Jungle,” which is something of a presaging of what was to come in the film series, as it takes place in the heat of summer in a big city, involves gangs and a no-nonsense policeman whose interest in a Predator-driven slaughter leads him right to the heart of Predator country.
Predator 2 took place in LA and starred Danny Glover, as you may recall, but “Concrete Jungle” sets its action in New York City and its main cop character is the brother of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s from Predator. If you can swallow that little bit of relationship mapping then you’re doing one better than I am, because I always found that part fairly ridiculous.
[REVIEW] The Terminator Omnibus, Volume 2
I left off talking about The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 1 by saying that while the storytelling was a little rough here and there in the collection, there was at least plenty of Terminator action to be had. If I wanted to write an extremely short review of The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 2, I could say the exact same thing applies here. The plotting may be a touch askew at times, but if it’s Terminators you’re looking for then it’s Terminators you will get.
Vol. 2 is actually much more of a mixed bag than Vol. 1. For one thing, the narrative isn’t dominated by a single through-line, broken up instead into smaller bites that don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. The books starts out with a story called “Hunters and Killers” that’s set in post-nuclear Russia and involves a group of special-forces types battling against Mir, an artificial intelligence “birthed” by Skynet to assist in the prosecution of the war against humanity. It seems Mir has figured out a way to make Terminator duplicates of actual humans, all the way down to knowing their favorite jokes, which adds a touch of The Thing to the proceedings.
The story of “Hunters and Killers” isn’t bad, but I was a little disappointed with the art. The special forces group has matching white and red armor that comes across as very standard-issue superhero-y and is otherwise rough in spots, though this might be due to the overly bright ’90s coloring palette.
“Endgame” finishes off the continuing storyline that began all the way back in “Tempest” in Vol. 1 and moves the tale firmly into “alternate timeline” territory. I won’t say more than that, but I will say that it’s not a wholly satisfactory end to that plot. The art is quite good, which carries it a ways, but it’s just not there.
The next segment of Vol. 2 is called “Suicide Run,” a one-shot set in the war-torn future. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, the art is less than inspiring and it’s easily the weakest portion of the book.
