Welcome to the First Issue Bin, where I — Ethan Kaye — randomly grab one of this week's comics that’s just starting up and give you the details on whether it should get added to your collection … or remain on the comic shop shelf.
Alien vs Captain America #1
Writer: Frank Tieri
Art: Stefano Raffaele
Color Artist: Neeraj Menon
Letterer: VC's Clayton Cowles
Editor: Mark Paniccia
Hey friends! You're asking, "Ethan, WHERE YA BEEN?" Well, I've been here. And I've been reading comics, like usual. And like usual, I have a backlog! I'm a month behind on reading my books!
But that shouldn't stop me from writing about new issues. After all, the point of this column is to see if any new titles are worth ongoing reading, which should mean that everything with a #1 issue is fair game. And what I've discovered is…they're not!
Most of the Marvel first issues have been tied to the Age of Revelation storyline in the X-books, which I covered in a recent column. I didn't think it made sense to keep going back to that well when all the books are that interconnected. DC is gearing up for its big 2025 "DC K.O." crossover, but as I'm a month behind on my DC books I didn't think it would be right to skip all the lead-up to it and spoil it for myself (that one's on me being selfish).
So I looked outside of the Big Two and found…well, a lot of licensed stuff. Hell, Dynamite and IDW are virtually life support systems for other companies' intellectual property these days. And there are good books there! I'm not saying there aren't! But from what I learned with Silverhawks, if you're not already a fan of the licensed property in question, it's kind of a nonstarter to write a review of it. These books will attract fans and rarely outsiders.
I tried reading Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 and, hey, it was a good read. But I don't follow Ninja Turtles, so I wasn't familiar with the ancillary characters at all. I figure it would be something fans of the Ninja Turtles would be interested in, but the rest of the world would shrug and pass by. Kind of the same for the second series of Dynamite's Maleficent, a gorgeous book that deserves eyes on it, but those eyes would probably be Disney fans only, and who probably wouldn't have picked up the first series, which I felt to be pretty lackluster.
(That said, of the two books mentioned above, Maleficent is the better read, as it tells the story of what the title character did in between cursing Briar Rose's birthday party and her reappearance on her 16th birthday. Seriously beautiful art and intriguing new characters, even if the pacing was a bit off.)
And yeah, despite Disney owning the Alien franchise, Alien vs Captain America is still marketed as a licensed crossover comic. Marvel has its own Xenomorph-type aliens, they're called the Brood and they're pretty awesome. But the financial incentive for pitting Marvel legends against established outsiders like Aliens (and Predators) is just too strong, so there have been a few of these minis over the last year or so. They're all multiverse-elseworlds-imaginary stories, so they're fun for what they are, but they're not going to be referenced outside of these books.
Luckily, this first issue is really good. Although it exists in an alternate Marvel U, it brings together many familiar faces: Cap, Bucky, Red Skull, Baron Strucker, the Inhumans, Hydra, Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos, Arnim Zola (as played by Toby Jones), and…Aliens.
Baron Strucker is looking for a super weapon the Inhumans buried so he can get in good with the Red Skull, he digs up Alien eggs. It plays out nicely, with some fun Indiana Jones-style swashbucking archaeology, Face-Hugger attacks on Hydra goons, and Red Skull's experiments filling POWs with Chest-Bursters to create an army of Xenomorphs. Cap and Fury stumble upon a town full of corpses, kill the one alien they find, and then it's off to the races.
I downplay it, but ultimately I enjoyed this first issue, even though I wasn't considering pulling the book monthly. I'm going to, now that I tasted the first installment. I was too young to enjoy Aliens when they first hit the scene and the only Aliens film I've seen is Alien: Resurrection and that was more because I enjoyed director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children so much. It's not that I don't know what the franchise is about, it's just not one that resonates with me as much as say, He-Man or Thundercats.
So it puts me in the position I was in at the beginning of this article: does the writing and art propel a book that's leaning on the two-franchise-mashup trope? And yeah, it does. The art by Stefano Raffaele includes a lot of great detail work, especially in backgrounds like the Inhuman tomb in the Himalayas, or the European village that's been exterminated by Xenomorphs. Usually when you have a cover by Lenil Francis Yu, the quality drops off once you get to the interior pages, but not here. It holds up through the story and hopefully continues through the arc.
I think this is a safe one to recommend for a fun out-of-continuity story. You'll get a little gore, some familiar characters, some big deaths that you only get with non-continuity stories, and a narrative that moves briskly across the WWII Marvel Universe. Color me surprised.
Story: 4/5
Art: 5/5
Ancient Aliens Mentions: 3/3
Nazi Stomping: 5/5
Xenomorph Stomping: 2/5, but just wait.
Verdict: This one came out of nowhere in a season of few new titles and wowed me. I'm interested to see this one keep going!
