Comics You Should Own – ‘Alien: The Illustrated Story’

In comics, no one can hear you scream! (Because, you know, your scream is just letters on the page and people are reading them, but it still works, dang it!)

Alien: The Illustrated Story by Archie Goodwin (writer), Walter Simonson (artist/colorist), Louise Simonson (colorist), Deborah Pedlar (colorist), Polly Law (colorist), Bob LeRose (colorist), and John Workman (letterer).

Originally published by Heavy Metal in 1979, reprinted by Titan Comics, cover dated May 2012.

I mean, SPOILERS, I guess? You all know what happens! And remember to click on the images to see them better!

There’s an argument often had about which medium is best for conveying art. “The book was better” is, after all, a common complaint among movie-goers when something gets adapted for the screen. I imagine that nerds from time immemorial have had this argument (typical 12-century nerd conversation: “You’re all wrong, Æðelstan, stained glass is much better at telling a story than stupid ink on vellum!” “Well, Cadwallon, you’re just full of scite, aren’t you, with your arsed-up opinions,” at which point Cadwallon attempted to behead his friend, but being a nerd, he couldn’t muster the strength), and it probably won’t end anytime soon. I don’t really get involved in these debates (the book usually is better, I admit, but not always, as the movie Fight Club, which is much better than the book, proves), but it’s certainly true that there are different ways to create art. This becomes fun to examine when the art involved is something that is not only excellent in two different mediums, but is also quite popular. Such is the case with Ridley Scott’s Alien.

One thing movies and television have over other visual arts is, of course, sound. No matter how obsessed Alan Moore is with comic opera and vaudeville, you can’t hear a comic, and sound is a very effective way to convey mood, and movies and television can use it effectively. Soundtracks can guide audiences to where the director wants them to go, and it can set up the audience very well, too. It can also contradict what we’re seeing on screen so that the cognitive dissonance in our brains makes us work harder to reconcile what we’re seeing. A good soundtrack can do a lot of heavy lifting, and that’s something that comics and books cannot compete with. Similarly, voices themselves can help the audience. In the case of Alien, we get Yaphet Kotto’s languid-yet-hard-edged drawl, Ian Holm’s clipped, slightly haughty British speech, and Sigourney Weaver’s tough-as-nails tone. The voices really help with the tone of the movie. Similarly, movies and television get to use actors – actual human beings until the AI comes for us all – and that’s always been a huge advantage, especially if the script isn’t great (which is, I should stress, not the case with Alien). John Hurt just looks like someone who would get killed by an alien, which is due to Hurt’s twitchiness, as it doesn’t really come across in the comic. Veronica Cartwright is always perfectly cast when you need someone to freak out, because she always looks like she’s about to cry. Ian Holm is so calm as the movie goes along, and it’s nice foreshadowing about his true nature. Weaver and Tom Skerritt have crackling sexual energy that doesn’t get realized but fits in with the weird sexual nature of the xenomorphs in general (and it’s Weaver, too, as she has excellent sexual chemistry with Biehn in the sequel and even Dance in the third movie, so let’s just attribute it to her being awesome). Movie and television have big advantages in the case of sound and movement, obviously.

This is, of course, COMICS You Should Own, not movies you should own, and Goodwin and Simonson’s adaptation of Alien is tremendous because of how the creators use the comics medium to tell a story in a better way than movies sometimes do. Sound in movies can also be a detriment, as either the soundtrack can obscure the dialogue or the dialogue is simply muted too much. In recent years, the sound in movies have become worse – it’s not just that you’re old! – but even in 1979, some of the dialogue in Alien is difficult to parse. Some of it is the pseudo-science that writers love, although there’s not a lot of that in the movie. Other times it’s just that the sound mixing is poor or the actors are talking too far away from the microphones, and some of it just gets lost and they can’t get an actor back to redo the dialogue. That is, naturally, not a problem in comics, where you can read the words in the script and nothing is lost. Certainly, in a movie like Alien, which is basically a “monster in a remote location” story, it doesn’t matter quite as much what the actors are saying, but it’s still something that no words are lost. There is very little omniscient narration in Goodwin’s script, but when he drops a narrative box into the story, it generally adds a bit of context. As has been noticed, Goodwin does a bit more with the class differences on board, as Parker and Brett complain about their smaller shares a bit more than they do in the movie and Ripley is a bit more dismissive of it, and we get the foreshadowing exchange of Ripley and Lambert discussing Ash’s lack of sexual interest, which originally implies that he’s gay but takes on a new meaning when we discover what Ash is. Goodwin does good work with the story, but he can’t do too much with it, obviously.

The biggest difference in the stories is in Simonson’s glorious artwork. The movie is very dark, for whatever reason (perhaps the budget wasn’t quite as big as Scott could have used – it was only his second feature, and 20th Century Fox didn’t seem to have a ton of confidence in it – and therefore he didn’t want to light it as much to keep sets a bit hidden?), and while it works for the horror vibe that Scott wanted (rather than a science fiction vibe like Star Wars, the success of which certainly helped get this green-lit), occasionally it is difficult to see what’s going on. That’s certainly not the case with the comic, which is brightly colored throughout. When I write “brightly,” I don’t mean that it’s all pastels and neon, just that the colors are not murky or swampy and they don’t obscure Simonson’s lines. When the scene is dark, the colorists use muted browns instead of Simonson simply spotting blacks (which he certainly does, just not to overwhelming effect), and it makes the art much clearer. The interiors of the Nostromo, while still dull-colored, are easy to see and distinguish from simple shadows. And despite the fact that the colors are muted, they’re still generally brighter than the colors in the movie. It makes the book stand out, because we can see Simonson’s lines very well. (It certainly doesn’t hurt that Workman’s lettering is phenomenal as usual. It’s big and bold yet fits perfectly in the artwork.)

There are several examples of this, so I thought I’d highlight a few. One of the more famous scenes in the movie that doesn’t involve Sigourney Weaver is when Tom Skerritt’s character, Dallas, dies. It’s famous maybe because of the “Xenomorph Jazz Hands” thing going on, but it’s still famous. Here’s the scene in the movie:

I mean, yes, it’s a cool scene in the movie, but … dang, you can barely see anything! Simonson and the colorist take care of that for us in the comic:

On the page prior to this, Simonson has Dallas drop down into the tunnel and turn toward the xenomorph. He gives us an almost completely black panel, with the circle of light from Dallas’s lantern pinned to the right side of the panel, leading us to the page turn. In the background, he draws just the tiniest hint of the alien about the strike, and then we turn the page and get this magnificent drawing, which takes up about half the page. It’s still dark, but because it’s not pitch black, we can see the entire creature. Simonson makes it larger than it appears in the movie, so it dominates the scene and dwarfs its victim. The composition of the panel is excellent, as well – the alien is shoved to the top corner, and its entire body is angled downward, so that we get a sense of the motion that is coming as it attacks Dallas. The captain is just on the outside of the circle of light, and the way the panel is composed, it’s almost as if Simonson is saying he’d be safe if he could remain inside that circle (although we know this isn’t true, of course), as just outside it, the monsters are lurking but inside it they can’t reach. The alien penetrating the circle with its claws puts paid to that belief, as we realize it’s indomitable, but the way Simonson creates the panel gives us that tiny bit of hope. Anyone reading this after its initial publication in June 1979 (it was published less than a month after the movie came out) probably knows what happens to Dallas, so this isn’t a shocking event, but Simonson still imbues the panel with a great deal of symbolism.

Simonson also makes the Nostromo and the alien ship far creepier than they are in the movie. I imagine the model for the ore refinery is the same as what it is in the comic, but again, possibly due to budget constraints, we don’t see it too much. Simonson is under no such constraints, so we get to see the exterior of the industrial monstrosity in all its glory a few times. In the movie, the interior is a bit nicer than we might expect for a gloried tugboat, but Simonson’s harder edges and the fact that he drops a lot of holding lines in places makes the Nostromo a bit seedier in the comic, which seems to fit the tone of the story a bit better. They don’t spend much time inside the alien ship, but again, because Simonson doesn’t need to be so dark, we see a bit more of it and can appreciate its vastness.

Where Simonson is brilliant is with the alien, which is a terrifying creature under his pen. Even before the panel I show above, Simonson is able to give the xenomorph a presence that we don’t always get in the movie. When the egg-layer leaps out of its pod and attaches itself to Kane’s face, Simonson gives us a wonderfully violent panel in which the creature leaps sideways across the panel, smashing him out of the panel as it goes for his head, and Simonson gives us just enough black blood to be horrifying:

Ironically, when the alien bursts out of Kane’s chest, the movie does a much better job. In the movie, we get some banter between the crew, as they think the danger is over. Hurt always has that kind of sad-eyed look, and when his chest starts to hurt (so to speak), we get a final, almost mournful look from him. Yaphet Kotto desperately trying to wedge something in his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue is superb, and the little burst of blood that freezes everyone is chilling. When the alien rips open his chest, the reactions are amazing (Cartwright apparently didn’t know there would be blood, so her reaction is genuine), and then, despite the slight goofiness of the alien, its appearance is terrifying and shocking. It’s a great scene and one of the best deaths in cinematic history. Unfortunately, Goodwin and Simonson don’t really match it. There’s less than a page of Kane at the table, and there’s no real build-up to the bursting. Kane yells that it hurts, and things escalate (too) quickly:

As excellent as the splash page is, it doesn’t have quite the same power, despite it being after a page turn. It’s probably because of the page count that Goodwin had to speed up the chest-bursting, and while Simonson’s alien is a bit big to come out of Kane’s chest cavity (yes, we see later that it can fold itself up into small spaces, but that’s a lot of alien to inside Kane’s chest, especially as it’s occupied by organs), it’s still very impressive. It’s just that the movie does a slightly better job leading up to it.

Other than that, Simonson’s art tends to do a better job showing what’s going on. It’s not surprising, given that he can draw everything while the movie had to work with puppets and models and dudes in alien suits. Brett’s death is very good in the movie, mostly because Scott doesn’t show too much, but Simonson can show it, and he does, wonderfully. When Parker bashes Ash, Simonson can draw the android so that it looks more like a machine, rather than drenching it in milk and other goopy stuff to make it look more gross (to be fair, it looks awesome in the movie, but Ash does look a bit more “android-y” in the comic). The final scene in the movie, when Ripley shoots the alien out of the airlock and turns on the engine, is well done, but Simonson, despite again having a space constraint, makes it look better because the xenomorph doesn’t look like a dude in a rigid suit. Scott and the people working on the movie make it look as good as it can, but they’re working with 1979 technology. Simonson is limited only by his imagination.

Despite the space restrictions, Goodwin and Simonson pace the comic well, and they cram a lot of information into 61 pages. Even at this early point in his career, Simonson was very good at laying a page out so that it moves things along swiftly without leaving out crucial stuff. Kane wakes up first, and Simonson shows one of his eyes opening in four small panels in a row, so there’s a sense of movement even though it’s just a man opening an eye. When they receive the transmission that lures them to the planet, Simonson interrupts the familiar surroundings of a conference room (yes, it’s on a spaceship, but it’s still a conference room) with a large panel of harsh letters and strange, red-on-blue color, jarring us something alien and creepy (see above). The Engineers’ spaceship is a baroque monstrosity, and, as I noted, the Nostromo and the rig it’s taking home look like things cobbled together by blind people, which Simonson just took from the movie, of course, but which he made into a quiet commentary on the degradation of society back on Earth, as a company can’t even keep its spaceships in tip-top shape. Simonson’s use of hatching on the faces make the characters look rougher than in the movie – Tom Skerritt grew a beard and Harry Dean Stanton was just old, so they looked weathered a bit, but Scott couldn’t mess up Weaver’s luminous face, so Ripley in the book looks a bit more worn that Weaver did. Obviously, both movie and comic have things to recommend them, but when it comes to actually seeing what’s going on and feeling like the crew is really going through something, it’s hard to beat Simonson.

Alien did very well at the box office, won an Oscar (for Best Visual Effects), spawned a cinematic universe, and has become a cultural icon. The comic, however, languished for a time, as Simonson went on to bigger things like the X-Men/Teen Titans crossover and The Mighty Thor, plus so much else for both Marvel and DC, while Goodwin continued to write but also continued to be more famous as an editor, working on Marvel’s Epic line and James Robinson’s Starman (one of his last jobs before his death). Alien: The Illustrated Story had the misfortune (if that’s the right word, which it probably isn’t) of being published by Heavy Metal, which meant it remained more of a curio for years, without getting reprinted. You can find the original if you want to pay a good chunk of money, but the Titan version is still in print and is pretty cheap. As good as the movie is, there are some things the comic just does better. We hadn’t quite reached Peak Simonson yet, but you can see that he’s well on his way, while Goodwin does an excellent job creating something that is just slightly different from the movie, so you never feel cheated. You can even splurge for the Original Art Edition (if you can find it), which retails at $75 and which is, well, frankly, huge and awesome (and panels of which I’ve cleverly hidden in this post, if you can find them!). My excellent assistant shows you the difference between the regular edition and this one!

No matter how you read it, it’s definitely a Comic You Should Own. You can find others at the archives, if you’re so inclined!