Batman/Aliens 2
Guess Who's Going to Fight Xenomorphs Again
I am quickly driven from optimism into madness by a comic.
If you like Aliens and Batman, you'll like the comic but it does have a few failings. Maybe I'm a little hard on it because I wanted the story to skew a little more Alien than it did. I enjoyed the first two parts. The third part was...problematic. Not objectively bad but bad when compared to the first two parts.
The events of the original Batman/Aliens comic, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake and Barbara Gordon as Oracle are all part of the continuity of the comic's universe. We also learn Superman is "dead" in the timeline of the comic book.
Comparison to the Batman/Aliens
I enjoyed the first slightly formulaic but ultimately satisfying Batman/Aliens. The sequel is set in Gotham and more of a Batman comic than an Aliens comic. Especially by the third part. I'm getting ahead of myself.
The comic has more real estate to tell the story than Batman/Aliens. The Gotham setting ups the stakes of the comic book because all we had in the previous was a few mercenaries.
The art is on par with Batman/Aliens. But the character design is superior. The settings are more diverse. The entire comic is more visually creative.
The comic has more real estate to tell the story than Batman/Aliens. The Gotham setting ups the stakes of the comic book because all we had in the previous was a few mercenaries.
Here There Be Spoilers
The comic opens with a historical setting where a hero is fighting an alien. He receives a head injury from a professor who reveres the Xenomorphs with religious fervor. The professor regards the hero as a murderer and we can gather the hero was killing the crew members who were impregnated by the Xenomorphs before the creatures could emerge. The last comic established that killing the host would kill the creature even if it was about to burst.
The professor escapes the cave. The hero fights for survival but his fate is sealed. Her sets off dynamite to kill the Xenomorph. He's our suicide by grenade guy but dynamite this time. A solid action sequence to open.
The professor escapes the cave. The hero fights for survival but his fate is sealed. Her sets off dynamite to kill the Xenomorph. He's our suicide by grenade guy but dynamite this time. A solid action sequence to open.
Flash forward
Gotham's got issues. A work crew opens a Pandora's box with a Xenomorph. They all die. The Pandora's box of this comic is not a downed spaceship but a mysterious door underground. It's a door to a lab left there by the obsessed scientist guy from the opening. Considering it's Gotham, parasitic aliens are a standard discovery for a creepy laboratory.
The comic flashbacks to the last comic with Batman commenting "It was like the plot of a science-fiction film."
Bats joins Gordon at the site of the Xenomorph's dinner time. Batman leaves the crime scene without telling Gordon about the Xenomorph threat. Gordon calls him out on this later. Bats doesn't have a defense (he just batglares) because there was only one logical reason. Batman wanted to contain the threat before anyone else could discover the secret. He states this isn't his reason (meaning he didn't have a good reason to not warn Gordon).
Batman's a little slow to action dealing with the presence of the Xenomorph in the dense urban area. He takes time to read a journal. I appreciate the need for storytelling in the comic book but the pace is bogged down by this scene. Just get to work Bats!
A man with magic cellphone reception (for the time period) calls 911 to report a Xenomorph attack in the subway. Batman goes hunting.
He turns on yellow night vision and I love the uber serious lockjaw look he has when he turns on yellow eye. They turn into red eyes for reasons(?). The art switches between a yellow tone and blue tone. Consistency would have helped here. Perhaps switching between a night vision and a normal vision rather than cycling between different tones.
The artist breaks up the images to avoid repetition. He shows a silhouette with Bats, Gordon and a Swat Member including a white cut out of the bat, the white visor of the swat member's helmet. It's a small panel but very effective. On the other side, the aggravating strategically acid burned batsuit bearing his perfect abs is a little cliched and weird.
Batman gets the impregnated people to the hospital. The doctors remove the baby Xenomorphs. The story takes a turn when Batman's worst fear comes true. The government comes to take control of the situation. The government wants the baby nightmares that the doctors just harvested from the surviving Xenomorph victims. We also learn our antagonist is a government agent named Fortune. She reveals her evil nature by questioning why the doctors are removing the Xenomorph spawn from the innocent victims.
Things go wrong in the hospital. The Xenomorph and baby alien (that can spit acid) escape.
Back in the Batcave, the caring Alfred is appropriately snarky. I cheered when Oracle made an appearance. What isn't better with the addition of a well written Oracle? Tim and Dick are established to exist in the world but Bats won't call them for Batsy reasons. Namely, he's convinced if he doesn't do this alone, they'll all die. This leads to a well done nightmare sequence.
The Xenomorphs make their way to Arkham Asylum and Batman follows. The Joker gets one of the best lines of the comic. "HEH. All of a sudden I can't think of anything funny to say." It's so apropos. After the power goes out and the cells open, Two-Face gets a gun and starts shooting the aliens.
Fortune, the crazy government black ops lady, reveals herself to be a legitimate psychopath. She's petting the Xenomorph. She's crazy, evil and superpowered enough to get a decent life expectancy in a Batman comic (at least to the end of the story). She abducts Batman to use him for an experiment.
Fortune successfully engineered Xenomorph hybrid soldiers.
As a stand alone comic, I might have enjoyed this. I'm really angry at this point in the reading. The revelation of the Xenomorph soldiers was the moment that Aliens/Batman 2 dropped to the bottom of my list. Not to say I wouldn't enjoy the twist in a different context. It's not set up or telegraphed and I'm angry because of the third chapter we didn't get. The moment the plot veered in this direction, it veered away from an interesting plot focusing on Batman's fixation on stopping these monsters alone when he can't. Instead, the story agrees with his decision to take on the fight alone.
The Xenomorph/Arkham hybrid soldiers look like Extreme Dinosaurs. The character design is silly. They're more Impopster Funko than creepy Xenomorph hybrids. Not bad but bad in the context. They're not scary. They're cute Xenomorph versions of Batman villains. Then the revelation Crazy Fortune is an alien hybrid. Guh.
I'm shocked they didn't have a line of toys they were pimping. I'll admit the Crane one is kind of cool looking in that creepy, why does he look like a literal scarecrow? The Ivy makes sense because she's not fully human but Scarecrow just wears a mask. Why would the Joker/Alien hybrid have bright red lips? Why does Two-Face/Alien hybrid have scars on one half of the face? There's a little handwavium to explain why they are intelligent and don't rip her throat out.
Batman starts the "fuse" on the oil rig. Then he goes to investigate while the oil rig is burning. He reaches the lab of horrors where the other hybrids are in supersized test tubes. This is shocking to Bats. A little disingenuous considering he's been wading his way through viscera and acid blood for the last two books. Also because Batman intuited the hybrids were production model hybrids.
We're subjected by Fortune to a speech explaining how it's justified because Superheroes, blah, blah, blah. I prefer the "they're my babies" angle for this particular villain. We don't need a rehash of her pitch to the government to get funding.
Then Fortune gets her head ripped off by Xenomorph/Killer Croc. Bats tried to save her because he's Bats. Her character's death clock started ticking the moment she petted the Xenomorph in the last book.
Batman escapes but no one else does. Black ops helicopters bomb the rest into nothing. Batman speculates this is because the government has realized the Xenomorphs are too dangerous. They probably just didn't want to pay out for all the death benefits and it was cheaper to disavow.
A man with magic cellphone reception (for the time period) calls 911 to report a Xenomorph attack in the subway. Batman goes hunting.
He turns on yellow night vision and I love the uber serious lockjaw look he has when he turns on yellow eye. They turn into red eyes for reasons(?). The art switches between a yellow tone and blue tone. Consistency would have helped here. Perhaps switching between a night vision and a normal vision rather than cycling between different tones.
The artist breaks up the images to avoid repetition. He shows a silhouette with Bats, Gordon and a Swat Member including a white cut out of the bat, the white visor of the swat member's helmet. It's a small panel but very effective. On the other side, the aggravating strategically acid burned batsuit bearing his perfect abs is a little cliched and weird.
Book 2
Batman gets the impregnated people to the hospital. The doctors remove the baby Xenomorphs. The story takes a turn when Batman's worst fear comes true. The government comes to take control of the situation. The government wants the baby nightmares that the doctors just harvested from the surviving Xenomorph victims. We also learn our antagonist is a government agent named Fortune. She reveals her evil nature by questioning why the doctors are removing the Xenomorph spawn from the innocent victims.
Things go wrong in the hospital. The Xenomorph and baby alien (that can spit acid) escape.
Back in the Batcave, the caring Alfred is appropriately snarky. I cheered when Oracle made an appearance. What isn't better with the addition of a well written Oracle? Tim and Dick are established to exist in the world but Bats won't call them for Batsy reasons. Namely, he's convinced if he doesn't do this alone, they'll all die. This leads to a well done nightmare sequence.
The Xenomorphs make their way to Arkham Asylum and Batman follows. The Joker gets one of the best lines of the comic. "HEH. All of a sudden I can't think of anything funny to say." It's so apropos. After the power goes out and the cells open, Two-Face gets a gun and starts shooting the aliens.
Fortune, the crazy government black ops lady, reveals herself to be a legitimate psychopath. She's petting the Xenomorph. She's crazy, evil and superpowered enough to get a decent life expectancy in a Batman comic (at least to the end of the story). She abducts Batman to use him for an experiment.
Book 3
Fortune successfully engineered Xenomorph hybrid soldiers.
As a stand alone comic, I might have enjoyed this. I'm really angry at this point in the reading. The revelation of the Xenomorph soldiers was the moment that Aliens/Batman 2 dropped to the bottom of my list. Not to say I wouldn't enjoy the twist in a different context. It's not set up or telegraphed and I'm angry because of the third chapter we didn't get. The moment the plot veered in this direction, it veered away from an interesting plot focusing on Batman's fixation on stopping these monsters alone when he can't. Instead, the story agrees with his decision to take on the fight alone.
The Xenomorph/Arkham hybrid soldiers look like Extreme Dinosaurs. The character design is silly. They're more Impopster Funko than creepy Xenomorph hybrids. Not bad but bad in the context. They're not scary. They're cute Xenomorph versions of Batman villains. Then the revelation Crazy Fortune is an alien hybrid. Guh.
I'm shocked they didn't have a line of toys they were pimping. I'll admit the Crane one is kind of cool looking in that creepy, why does he look like a literal scarecrow? The Ivy makes sense because she's not fully human but Scarecrow just wears a mask. Why would the Joker/Alien hybrid have bright red lips? Why does Two-Face/Alien hybrid have scars on one half of the face? There's a little handwavium to explain why they are intelligent and don't rip her throat out.
Batman starts the "fuse" on the oil rig. Then he goes to investigate while the oil rig is burning. He reaches the lab of horrors where the other hybrids are in supersized test tubes. This is shocking to Bats. A little disingenuous considering he's been wading his way through viscera and acid blood for the last two books. Also because Batman intuited the hybrids were production model hybrids.
We're subjected by Fortune to a speech explaining how it's justified because Superheroes, blah, blah, blah. I prefer the "they're my babies" angle for this particular villain. We don't need a rehash of her pitch to the government to get funding.
Then Fortune gets her head ripped off by Xenomorph/Killer Croc. Bats tried to save her because he's Bats. Her character's death clock started ticking the moment she petted the Xenomorph in the last book.
Batman escapes but no one else does. Black ops helicopters bomb the rest into nothing. Batman speculates this is because the government has realized the Xenomorphs are too dangerous. They probably just didn't want to pay out for all the death benefits and it was cheaper to disavow.
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