So there it is, a project I've had in mind since I joined the CCF ranks. It will take some time until I manage to get this rolling as most of my comics still are in boxes, but this will hopefully entice me to start the ground work of building new shelves etc. The easy part is that those should be easy to find as I filled my comics in numbered boxes, sorting those alphabetically, so I hope I'll be able to get started soon.
But first, why an Aliens comics review thread?

Let me give you a little background on my relation to the franchise : I probably first saw the original 1979 in the mid 80ies, around 10 years old, through VHS rentals. Me and my sister probably managed to sneak that one into our home on a saturday evening our parents where out and let us rent a couple of movies. My parents always were very much carefull about what they were leting us watch, even censoring certain scenes they deemed to explicit for our young age, which resulted in some very confusing screenings of movies such as The Name of The Rose. Anyhow, they had the best intentions and subjected our minds to the best of Chaplin, WC Fields, Hitchcock, Welles, Keaton, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and lots of Jean Marais caper movies and Louis DeFunes comedies. But for some abstract reason, they decided to let us reign free or our choices in those little time capsules that friday and/or saturday nights were. Boy if they knew...
My little sister and I carefully roamed the horror/SF/action racks for many many years, thus becoming fans of the only real big John (Carpenter!), the early works of Peter Jackson, Lynch, Clive Barker, Stuart Gordon, Cronenberg, Lucio Fulci, Brian Yuzna, George Miller, Romero, John Woo, etc... Throughout those formative years, the two first Alien movies of course went through heavy viewing, setting our minds on fire with their original concepts and twists.

The first movie is a special case : a three act pieces, I only really care for the first one, a spectacular chapter which ends with the infamous chest-burster scene. After that, it more or less becomes a story of the hunter becoming the hunted, nothing that original... I later learned that the true creator of the movie concept was none other then Dan Obannon, one of my favorite B-movies creators (Dark Star with John Carpenter, Dead and Buried with its superb twist ending, Return of the night of the living dead with its very cool Amblin take on the zombie movie genre, and Reincarnation, probably the best Lovecraft adaptation ever, even if it craved a much bigger budget).
I guess that first third still was inventive enough to eternaly burn down our retinas and minds some very heacy ideas.
A the time of the release came a rather nice comic book adaptation of this initial story, but as they had access to arough cut of the movie, the work of Goodwin and Simonson is so faithfull (maybe two small added scenes) that it doesn't really fit this thread.

The second movie is a much simpler horror actioner. Yet, I strongly believe it stands as a whole as a better film, and the scene where the surviving members of the missions are barricaded in a rest room with motion detector machinegun tourrets defending every entry points, them monitoring the situation with their own motion detectors before realizing the aliens moved towards them in the fake ceiling right above them, that scene remains in my top three ever of scary/tension scenes.

The very first Dark Horse alien comic is a direct continuation of the second movie, in fact the three first series are following each other, which renders the Dark Horse series non-cannonical as the third movie clashed with where the comic had gone.

I first heard about it before I even discovered american comics, through a role playing game club in my childhood town : older guys were exchanging issues and talking about it, but appart from a few glimpses, I never really had access to it. It looked exciting though. flash forward a couple of years later, I'm spending summer holidays in Sweden and fighting boredom buying swedish repackages of US comics, one which included the last chapter of the first DH series. I didn't really know where it fit (the comic also featured thefirst chapter of the Alien vs Predator comic that partly inspired the first "movie"), but it sure was better than what I had expected : it was gory, full of surprises, high on Sci-Fi, had very lush black and white grey-toned artwork, all in all it had suspense and thrills.

It took me over a decade to finally identify which story this was a part of, which gave me enough time to start buying new Aliens comics before I got to the start.

That is one of the great aspect of the comic franchise : after the third movie negated the previous comics, Dark Horse decided to approach this world in a much looser way, sometimes addying deep concepts to the mythos, sometimes just telling good stories throughout time and space, which means that most of the books can be read on their own.
What really prompts this thread today is the global high quality of the series, one which makes the reading experience autonomeous, just enough so that you'd forget about the movies, much more so then with almost every franchise adaptation I've been exposed to.

So I here is how I intend to grill series in this thread :

1 - Presentation of the creators involved
2 - How it connects to the movies/comics
3 - Plot summary
4 - A critique of the writing/art/relevancy with a grade

Every now and then, I will probably also include some images or articles about abondonned projects or thinly related publications.

So now before I start, I humbly ask the community what they think about all this and if you could think of something else you'd like me to include in the reviews?