ALIENS 30TH ANNIVERSARY: THE ORIGINAL COMIC SERIES

Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comic Series
by Mark Verheiden (author) and Mark A. Nelson (illustrator)
Dark Horse Books
2016, 184 pages, 8.3 x 12.4 x 1 inches (hardback)

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Aliens is one of my all-time favorite movies. A perfect mix of action, sci-fi and horror, which I would argue hasn’t been replicated. Then there’s Alien 3, and everything that came after it. I don’t like to talk about that. But, in 1988 after Aliens came and four years before the next movie would come out, this comic series ran which gave me the followup story I wanted.

The series has been published as Aliens: Book One, Aliens: Outbreak, and in novel form as Aliens: Earth Hive (a lot to keep track of), but since these publications were made after Alien 3 came out, names were changed to avoid confusion from the films continuation of the story. So Wilcks = Hicks and Billie = Newt. Thankfully this comic doesn’t do that. This printing features the comic as it was intended to be read with the characters we’re familiar with.

The story picks up a few years after the film ended. An adult Newt and aged Hicks are struggling to deal with the horrors they witnessed, and Ripley is ominously missing. The black-and-white comics really capture the gritty world that the movies take place in, expanding on it in the best way. Although the comic ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, the story is continued in Aliens: Nightmare Asylum, but you will have to deal with the name change of the main characters.

The book itself is beautiful. And black. Very black. It feels like something that was designed by H.R. Giger himself. Why I’m most excited about this rerun of the series is because it gives me some hope at seeing a movie that truly succeeds Aliens. There’s been a lot of back and forth, but Sigourney Weaver, Ellen Ripley herself, has been in talks with Neill Blomkamp (director ofDistrict 9), and the two are championing a new Alien movie. One which might retcon everything that happened in the later movies. This would mean that the cinematic world might very well line up with these comics. It’s a stretch, and might never happen, but I like to dream. Aliens fans will definitely appreciate this one. – JP LeRoux

WHAT AM I DOING HERE? EXISTENTIAL ABSURDIST CARTOONS FROM THE 1940S

What Am I Doing Here?
by Abner Dean
New York Review Comics
2016, 168 pages, 7 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches

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In the 1930s and 1940s, Abner Dean was a highly sought-after illustrator who drew covers, cartoons, and illustrations for The New Yorker, Esquire, Time, Life, and Newsweek, as well as advertising illustrations for insurance companies and product manufacturers. In 1945, Dean quit his day job and drew the first of seven books that have been described as “existential gag cartoons.”

What Am I Doing Here? is Dean’s second book, and is generally regarded as his best work. It was originally published in 1947. This facsimile edition just came out today and contains about 100 single panel drawings, rendered in India ink and graytone washes (in the classic New Yorker style of gag cartoons).

Dean’s drawings look like cartoons but they aren’t very funny, at least not in the traditional sense. They’re absurdist and disquieting. Everyone is naked and the action takes place either in decrepit urban settings, living rooms filled with grinning desperate characters, or barren surrealistic wastelands. Each drawing features the same hapless character, a lonely youngish man who questions his role in the human race, represented by a crowd that changes its form and behavior from page to page. The people are sometimes club-swinging brutes, other times they are blinkered sleepwalkers, insincere mask-wearers, bloodthirsty mobs, hysterical celebrators, suicidal lemmings, or guru-seeking fools. They often look more like animals than people. The protagonist is at times foolhardy, delusional, disappointed, fearful, proud, insecure, ruthless, or bewildered.

In the introduction, Clifton Fadiman (chief editor of Simon & Schuster in the 1920s and 1930s, and editor of The New Yorker’s book review section for ten years after that) wrote:>

It is pointless to try to “explain” Abner Dean. His pictures are trick mirrors in which we catch sight of those absurd fragments of ourselves that we never see in the smooth glass of habit. Formulae for the art of Abner Dean are irrelevant. What is important is the fact that it jolts you into sudden awareness of your own pathos, your own plight, your own unending and gigantic laughableness.

– Mark Frauenfelder

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.