Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Where Volume 1 of Alien Vs Predator gave the graphic novel fans a taste of what could have been after the two of the greatest film monsters of all time reared their ugly heads, Volume 2 takes it one stage further with the same artistic endeavour but with a truly landmark script bursting within its 458 pages that really gets to grips with the idea of what makes these two franchises tick.
Chris Claremont’s Deadliest of the Species is sensational, a story line so good it jumps right of the page and pokes you in the eyes with a feast of colour and wonderful dialogue. It also brings in to sharp focus why the real hero of these stories is always a woman, the man usually forgettable, inconsequential and often just as dangerous as the two beasts that are being quarried. It takes, as the Liverpool band Space were too point out, that the female is the real deadliest of the species.
In the original films that bought the Alien to life, the story made much more sense because the hero was a woman, Ripley, portrayed by the superb Sigourney Weaver. Deadliest of the Species carries on that winning formula by having a female synthetic hero. Not just a hero but one who starts out as that bastion of male egotism, the trophy wife. In this case, the truest trophy of them all as she undergoes her own metamorphosis from shrinking beauty to fully fledged warrior who takes on the biggest legend of them all, the first Queen.
At a staggering 303 pages, it is by far one of the largest stories by the Dark Horse ownership but it is also amongst its very finest. The way Chris Claremont scripts his hero, Caryn Delacroixis is matched by the pencils of Jackson Guice and Eduardo Barreto and the exceptional inking of John Beatty and Eduardo Barreto who took over the project from Chapter Two onwards and who give the hero a depth of character that was missing from Alien 4 onwards.
Whilst Deadliest of the Species gathers pace throughout and packs a punch throughout the lengthy but beautifully crafted tale, the other stories get the short sharp treatment in which both the Predator and the seemingly endless hordes of Alien bugs battle. The overall effect of stories such as Booty, Pursuit and the equally charming Xenogenesis
It is Deadliest of the Species though that makes Volume 2 of the series stand out. Persistent, and unyielding, it takes the reader down many avenues of conflicting emotions, of the memory of horror and revulsion that stalked the crew of the Nostromo in the very first Alien film and whilst it employs the equally repulsive Predators within its pages, the real question remains just who is the deadliest, the Predator, the Queen Alien or Caryn Delacroix?
Alien Vs Predator Omnibus Volume 2 is available from Worlds Apart on Lime Street in Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall