Alterna Comics 2015
Written & Lettered by Wes Locher
Illustrated by Eduardo Jimenez
This first issue was kind of fun it’s got this Men In Black vibe mixed with Storage Wars and a good old fashioned Abbott and Costello friend act thrown in for good measure. Wes really manages to take a few things that don’t seem like they should be interconnected and weaves them into this fun story that works better than I thought it should. Eduardo has a very modern cartoon style artwork going on here something higher end of the Cartoon Network, thankfully not the “normal” stuff we see on the channel. This style really enhances the enjoyment factor for me, I don’t usually go for this but there’s a charm to it that I appreciate.
The story focuses on two agents who work at Area 51 who are notified that they will need the Hyper Ion Drive in order to proceed to phase two of a current project. So the senior agent tells the younger one to make the call to the offsite storage unit for retrieval. Only the kid hadn’t realized they still had that off-site storage anymore and well he hadn’t been paying the bill for it in the last eight months.
So this is where we get into the storage wars part of the story as the unit where the drive was stored is a normal storage unit type place and it was put up for public auction just like the television show where people buy it and try to make their money back and then some by selling the contents. Heck the auctioneer even looks like the guy from the show. Chester and Ike bought the unit and they well are quite the pair. Eduardo does a number on with Ike whose hairy ass doesn’t fit in his pants and we are privileged to see his hairy crack and belly. Of course Chester finds a box that is probably what they are looking for.
What happens next is pretty typical blunder of errors that make for a good buddy comedy. The agents have to find the box and their boss well he’s none too happy with them but that’s par for the course. The dialogue is sharp, witty and entertaining, the story itself flows nicely and is humorous and the fact that a place like Area 51 would have a unit like this while seemingly ridiculous just adds to the humor of the situation and the privacy that no one would suspect them of using a place like that to begin with.
I have no idea what the wanted poster and the dude standing next to it was all about but okay let’s go with that just being there and hope that it is an egg in all this and not just some random funny thing happening. So after being at the unit our intrepid pair are looking for the bungling duo it’s kind of like the blind chasing the blind here it’s over the top funny, tongue in cheek humor that is just plain old fashioned fun. Sure the government boys have gadgets and a license to use em but they are very non traditional types and the two stooges who had the box well they are kind of inept it’s like Abbott and Costello chasing/teaming up with the Skipper and Gilligan set in a serious story.
This is fun it’s nicely written the characterization is solid the story progresses at a nice pace and the interior artwork fits the subject matter extremely well. It’s a nice look at the whole Area 51 aliens and conspiracy theory stuff that won’t make you shake your head in either disgust or disbelief because it really come across very tongue in cheek. Thankfully this isn’t stupid humor it’s thinking person’s humor and it’s worth your time to check it out.