Prometheus: Fire & Stone


By Paul Tobin, Juan Ferreyra & various (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-650-1

Spinning out of the movie Prometheus and its comicbook iteration, Fire and Stone was a bold and ambitious publishing event begun in 2014 designed to link four separate franchises into a coherent – if rather time-distanced – universe.

A quartet of 4-part miniseries featuring core concepts from Prometheus, Alien, Predator and AVP: Aliens Vs Predator was conceived by scripters Paul Tobin and Kelly Sue DeConnick, with the calamitous clash of cultures and creatures culminating in one-shot Fire and Stone: Omega.

The first of those pocket series is now available as a sleek paperback collection scripted by Tobin and moodily designed and illustrated by Juan Ferreyra, opening the time and space shredding saga in 2219 AD above the third moon of the Calpamos planetoid in the Zeta 2 Reticuli system.

Four Earth craft have rendezvoused there, seeking answers to the question of what happened to a long-lost research ship.

Historian and filmmaker Clara Atkinson aboard command ship Helios ponders the ongoing mission as the crews of engine core vehicle Geryon, military patrol ship Perses and salvage vessel Kadmos slowly shake off the effects of deep space hibernation and get reacquainted.

Captain Angela Foster is cranky but seems exhilarated at the prospect of hugely valuable salvage and effusive medical officer James Weddel is his usual grabby self, but apparently affable astrobiologist Francis Lane is hiding something. He’s coincidentally in charge of maintaining and servicing the service humanoids such as meek-seeming synthetic assistant Elden – the only being aware of the secretive boffin’s failing health…

What nobody except Foster knows is the true purpose of the mission. She is hunting legendary exploratory ship Prometheus and chimeric, inspirational leader Sir Peter Weyland. Moreover, when Weyland was lost on LV-223 in 2090 he was seeking to prove a crazy theory that a race of giants he called “The Engineers” had seeded the universe with life. He wanted to find the creators of humanity, and now so does she…

Leaving Geryon in orbit, the smaller ships confidently head for solid ground. Foster takes the Helios down and soon discovers that the supposedly barren moon is rich with weird, superabundant, aggressive and extremely ugly lifeforms. Strangely, most of it seems to be concentrated in a single implausible and very forbidding micro-rainforest…

Discoveries come thick, fast and increasingly disquieting. A strange, viscous black goo which seems to be the very essence of raw life. Bizarre corpses and skeletons crushed, torn apart or burned by acid. An ecosystem of fauna filling every biological niche and all looking as if they were patterned on the same creature…

Lane is particularly taken with the omnipresent black ooze and he and Elden are missing when the main party discover a lost human-colony ship somehow shifted to the wrong planet and submerged by a wall of overgrown undergrowth.

They are utterly unprepared for the marauding xenomorphs hungrily waiting inside for fresh prey…

It all goes pretty much as you’d expect (and, I suspect, hope) after that, but whilst the Aliens begin their hideous and inexorable dance of death, other things that will impact the succeeding story-arcs come into play too.

Whilst Foster’s party is searching, a wave of the big-headed bugs swarm the Helios, leaving it locked down and besieged…

Lane begins experimenting with the black goo in a cave, seeking a cure for his cancer. When he injects poor, passive Elden with a sample, the astrobiologist is appalled to see rapid and terrifying forced evolution in action, transforming a harmless and completely docile programmed servant into a monster with a ruthless will and deadly agenda of its own…

Others explorers find a crashed craft of incontrovertibly alien origin and dependable, staunch and fun-loving ebullient military man Galgo grabs up extraterrestrial weaponry. Later, seeing the way the winds are blowing, he promptly abandons the science teams and the Helios to fate…

None of the wide-ranging humans are prepared for the consequences when a long-dormant Engineer begins checking his planetoid-sized laboratory again and, seeing assorted specimens and unidentified creatures running riot, starts dispassionately clearing up the mess and shutting down the chaos…

Soon only three humans are left cowering in the dark but refusing to give in…

To Be Continued…

Fast-paced, intensely gripping and closely following the tried-and-tested formula of the film franchises, this is a superb horror/sci fi romp to delight fans of the cinematic classics and breathtaking thrill rides in general, which also offers a cover gallery and chapter-break art by David Palumbo plus a potent and beguiling selection of designs and notes from illustrator’s Juan Ferreyra’s ‘Sketchbook’.

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