3 out of 5

It was fun.  …I was surprised?  Look: I don’t give a fig and a half about the Predator universe, or the Alien universe, are the AVPs wherein they coexist.  I’ve enjoyed the movies, sure, but I’ve no outward need to further add to what I’ve seen.  But, of course, occasionally writers I dig have flitted through the Dark Horse comics featuring those properties, and occasionally I will check those out.  And occasionally those are good.  But they’re not often fun.

Dan Abnett is an old hat at fun sci-fi.  His romps through 2000 AD are almost always inventive and exciting, and when he steps to creator-owned stuff like Wild’s End, I get this momentary bristle of “I need to read everything this guy writes” excitement.  Only not so much, because Dan is subject to the same limitations as most writers when it comes to his (expansive) DC / Marvel output: you can’t route the story-telling as organically (due to, I always assume, editorial mandates as to where things need to end up) and so the tendency is to fall back on soap opera tropes moreso than usual.  Years of comic reading have me accepting that some people dig this style of writing; I’m bored by it.

The Aliens stuff exists on the fringes of those same limitations.  The difference is that there’re not many core characters, moreso ideas, so the Where Can This Possibly Go question hits walls when it comes to expanding upon those ideas.

Thankfully, Dan’s millions of years of training in 2000 AD have sharpened his ability to lay down multi-character, big picture, fast-paced tales with limited pages.  Life and Death syncs up with that really well, as a crew of space marines is tasked with an ‘investigate the planet’ mission by Weyland-Yutani, and discovers, but of course, some Predators investigatin’ the planet at the same time.  Mad deaths ensue, but also – praise our writer – intelligent battle ops.  The marines don’t come across as dunderheads at all, and even with tons of names and ranks dropped about, Abnett even fits in some light character sketches.

Rain Beredo’s pastel-y colors set a nice tone that balances the planet’s earthiness with the machinery of future weapons and ships; they also are a good complement to Brian Albert Thies’ sketchy artwork, which needs the bump.  His action sequences are a tad murky to decipher, and there are some splash pages wherein focus is completely lost between foreground and background; I literally have no idea what I’m looking at in some scenes.  Thankfully, though his work is loose, personality comes across well and so you do get a sense for the cast, and the up close work has a nice, fluid feel.

Back to the where I started, with Aliens / Predator stuff, I’m generally expecting, at the most, an acceptable diversion.  But Dan has given me a fun new starting point in the world, even if it just boils down to a generic action thriller, and I’m looking forward to the next chapter.