Titan Comics 2016
Written by Victor Gischler
Illustrated by Alex Shibao, Ivan Rodriguez
Rodney Ramos & Tazio Bettin
Coloured by Stefani Rennee, Thiago Ribeiro
Max Flan & Rodrigo Fernandes
Lettered by Rob Steen
While the world celebrates humanity’s apparent victory over its extraterrestrial invaders, another alien vessel - quite unlike any seen before - has been discovered deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, prompting a top-secret investigation by the US military. Following a violent skirmish with alien forces aboard the downed vessel, Captain Joshua Adams and his team brought back an extraterrestrial corpse for study, along with a cache of high-powered extraterrestrial weapons. To prevent the extraterrestrials from using the vessel as a staging ground for a counterattack, Adams and his team returned to plant explosives and permanently cripple it. But things didn’t go as planned, with several human casualties. Worse, one of the creatures has followed them back to the sub…
I wish this had been the first sequel to the original movie. Though let’s be honest it probably would have shown that up as this is much more exciting to me. I love the idea of them being on the ocean floor and getting to actually fight the aliens more directly so we get a lot more intense moments. That the creativity and imagination in seeing the inside of their ship and how the move, fight and communicate all make it a much more fascinating in-depth look at what the war should have been.
Victor does an incredible job here with the story and fleshing out characters and presenting us with this viable reason as to what they are doing. Then taking it a step further as a reader you have to wonder were there other ships with similar strategies in other parts of the world? Meaning this doesn’t have to be his last mini-series there could be plenty more opportunities to see this conflict continue. That’s exciting to me since it’s rare that a series like this will come along and totally eclipse the original source material.
Adams is a great character and his limited mind-meld with the alien has left him a changed person. We saw what that was capable of doing in the movie but not to this extent, though it did kill Brent’s character didn’t it (though if i’m not mistaken he’s in the sequel) then used his body to talk to the President. So all it takes is a minimum of insight for a man like that to take action. I have to say though the best thing that happened was when no one would follow him and how he was told why! Dang son that was good stuff.
I was surprised to see how many people were working on the interiors here. I will say there are moments that I enjoyed more than others simply due to the stylings but overall they work together nicely to tell the story without feeling any disturbance in the flow. Also i’ll never get tired of seeing these aliens in these monstrous suits fighting it’s become almost as iconic as the Xenomorphs in the Alien franchise.
This a great continuation of the franchise and can be a perfect stand alone story as well for anyone not familiar with the original material. Hard to believe it was that many years ago, and it makes me feel old lol.