By Archie Goodwin & Walter Simonson from a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and a story by Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett (Heavy Metal/Futura)
ISBN: 0-7088-1559-6
Alien was released in 1979 and utterly refreshed the science fiction cinema genre. Creeping in on the back of the jolly adventuring romps of the Star Wars phenomenon and its shiny, happy rip-offs, Dan O’Bannon’s dark tale and Ridley Scott’s grimly meticulous vision reintroduced the vital element of apocalyptic terror that had been absent from the medium since the headiest, most paranoiac days of the 1950s B-Movies.
You know the plot: a bunch of interstellar miners are diverted by their untrustworthy bosses to a lost planet where they find an extraterrestrial shipwreck. One of the humans is infected and brings aboard a horror that grows and picks off the crew one by one and cannot be stopped, escaped from or killed…
Lots of films have had comics adaptations: good bad or indifferent. Very few have ever come as close to capturing the stunning, senses-overloading feel – rather than the plot or look or detail – of the source material, although all of those too are well-catered for in this slim but superb graphic extravaganza from the award-winning creative team of Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson (see Manhunter: the Special Edition for perhaps their ultimate moment of comics collaboration).
Spectacular, engrossing, visually innovative (in both storytelling and lettering/calligraphic effects) and absolutely absorbing, this hard-to-find gem (either in the original US edition from Heavy Metal Productions or the mass-market UK edition from Futura) is a true lost landmark of comics, long overdue for a new release – but only in the original large, square European Album format please…
© 1979 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, All rights reserved.