Aliens: Kidnapped

Aliens (comics)

by Jim Woodring, Justin Green, Francisco Solano López (Illustrator)

In the dark reaches of the universe lies a remote planet that holds both forbidden pleasures and unspeakable horrors. For three naive smugglers, it`s also a place to unload a deadly an Alien egg. But something about this particular egg is scaring off the black marketeers. And when it hatches, the nightmare will have just begun.

Genres: Comics, Aliens, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction, Horror

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 1999

About the author

Jim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and enjoyed a childhood made lively by an assortment of mental an psychological quirks including paroniria, paranoia, paracusia, apparitions, hallucinations and other species of psychological and neurological malfunction among the snakes and tarantulas of the San Gabriel mountains.

He eventually grew up to bean inquisitive bearlike man who has enjoyed three exciting careers: garbage collector, merry-go-round-operator and cartoonist. A self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called Jim. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992.

He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. The most recent Frank book, Congress of the Animals, was released in 2011.

Woodring is also known for his anecdotal charcoal drawings (a selection which was gathered in Seeing Things in 2005), and the sculptures, vinyl figures, fabrics and gallery installations that have been made from his designs. His multimedia collaborations with the musician Bill Frisell won them a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He lives in Seattle with his family and residual phenomena.

-Walter Foxglove

Reviews

[Gianfranco Mancini · Rating 2 out of 5]

Francisco Selano Lopez, artist of classic sci-fi The Eternaut comic book series, is a master of Ninth Art and I think this is the one and only Alien tale where the chest-buster xenomorph goes inside bodies instead than exploding out of them, but weird, grotesque and misoginist (Boobs! Boobs everywhere!) mess of a storyline seems more something out british 2000 AD magazine than a Dark Horse one.



At last the ending was a real good one, but this could have been a good one-shot generic comic and not an Aliens' franchise one.



Such a shame.

[Chad · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof, this was terrible. It reminded me of something you'd see in a 2000AD comic. Neither the story nor the art was very good. The women are all drawn as large breasted bimbos and the men look like Schwarzenegger. Just all around terrible.

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is why I love Dark Horse's run of Alien comics - they were nuts. They took chances, and sometimes it didn't work, but I still enjoyed myself.

Also fun to see a younger Jim Woodring doing sci-fi horror.

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was not a huge fan of the art in this story but still and Ok read. Recommended

[s · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved this one lol, woodring's script is a ballardian cartoon & its very funny to have an erotic comics guy draw absurdly proportioned bimbos and chads getting gutted by THE ALIEN. great ending too

[James DeSantis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cool to see a stage 2 alien wreck havoc. Too bad this was the dumbest fucking story with dumb characters. I couldn't take it serious for 3 issues of stupid Ness.

[Tyler Metcalfe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The one plus here is the concept of an infected alien egg. 99% of the characters are idiots and the art style is done well but a very odd choice for an aliens tale.

I do not care whether it is a short comic run, short story, novel, movie, or TV show. I like realistic characters. Sometimes you can truly have moronic characters.This is just full of terrible decisions. A guy has a face hugger on him and people just dump his body instead of destroying it? That just doesn’t make sense.

[Matthew McCormick-Rimmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings.

Not bad but I wasn't particularly keen on the artwork style, the story was better, not one of the best but worth a read for Aliens fans.

[Bogdan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The drawings and the whole art has the (interesting) Woodring style all over it.

The story was kind of a nonsense.

Only for the hardcore fans of the Alien franchise!

[Grantcorp · Rating 1 out of 5]

Run of the mill sci-fi/horror which apart from a single cameo by an alien queen only has one of the small critters crawling around generic environments and for some reason jumping into people's abdomens whereupon their bodies explode in gushes of red ink. It is just as stupid as it sounds. The artwork is alright but the environments are all brightly lit and sprawling with pastel colours which don't exactly fit with the gritty space-faring universe haunted by the xenomorph. Might have worked better as a standalone sci-fi story but in this form it is a colossal failure.