Story: Mike Richardson
Script: John Arcudi
Penciller: Damon Willis
Inker: Karl Story
Colorist: Arthur Suydam
Cover Art: Arthur Suydam
What a shift in the Aliens series… and how to describe it. I think the word “awesome” aptly describes “Genocide”. I’m definitely glad they’ve decided to stick with titling the mini-series; it’s definitely going to make it easier for us to distinguish between the different series. After being so overwhelmingly disappointed with “Earth War”, “Genocide” is a very welcome follow-up.
At first glance I thought Mike Richardson blatantly ignored the end of “Earth War” to construct his story, but in reading some of the things in the letters column, I’ve found out that they explain what happened in “Dark Horse Presents” #56. So apparently there has been some kind of a reclamation period where humans retook planet Earth. Although, I’m still rather skeptical that they adequately explained away the other alien creature that wanted to terraform Earth. I guess I’ll just have to go read it at some point. Either way, human society seems to have already undergone a heavy rebuilding phase and this feels pretty far in the future. Anyway, “Genocide” introduces the drug that had been developed from the Alien Queen’s residue known as “Royal Jelly”. In an effort to acquire a more stable supply of it they will need to travel to the Alien home world that Ripley led them too in “Earth War”. However, things have changed a little on that world and there are two different strands of the Aliens, so both of them are battling it out in a genocidal battle! There are literally thousands of Aliens in the single location we get to see… it makes me wonder if there are more all over the rest of the planet.
Even though we don’t get to see four issues of an incredible Aliens battle, we do get a fairly interesting story overall. I did like a lot of the human characters that were introduced. I also think the humans knowing a lot more about the Aliens, capturing them and studying them makes for the possibility of a lot more story lines in the future. So I’m glad they pretty much brought back human society as a whole, rather than just have it all die off like “Earth War” seemed to leave us. Here we find ourselves with a humanity that is not only afraid of the Aliens, but also very curious. I think this generates some great tension between characters and sets us up not to really know what’s going to happen next.
Damon Willis’ art works great for this series. He’s a lot better than Sam Kieth in my opinion and I definitely welcomed the change once this series got started. Although I don’t think the art is as good as the art from the first two series, it’s definitely still good quality for comic books. The covers by Suydam are simply beautiful, especially the wraparound cover for issue four. I think his color work was a welcome change as well, because he really nailed the atmosphere for an Aliens comic. It wasn’t too bright, nor was it too dark. It was just perfect.
“Genocide” seriously proves that the Aliens series certainly isn’t going to be dying off anytime soon. With Dark Horse switching out artists and writers I think it will give us readers very interesting insights into the world. It also gives them a lot more varied options to write about all kinds of different things. The fact that it’s in limited series only makes this easier too. As of now I don’t know where things will go after “Genocide”, but with what I see from images on “Hive” we’re going in a totally different direction. “Genocide” was certainly an action packed story and it looks like next time we’ll bring back that brooding nature in some Alien stories.
Overall Rating: 4.3/5