3 out of 5

Weird.  I haven’t read any of the DH Aliens stuff before (that’s a lie, I read a prestige by Milligan), so I don’t know if the “eventually everyone dies” vibe is the norm or not, by 1 of the 2 Aliens series Woodring worked on, ‘Kidnapped’ isn’t exactly unrelenting – there are some good characters, some self-serving ones – it just has no bones about showing a character, introducing some attributes, and then offing them without trying to plug it as overly tragic or anything.  I’m not even clear exactly why the series is subtitled ‘Kidnapped,’ ’cause no one does much against their will here.  That is the part that’s absolutely in line with the sci-fi ‘Aliens’ world of the movies, humanity’s belief in control over All.  And again, I dunno if this is from the DH world or Jim’s brain, but the nice addition to that formula in ‘Kidnapped’ is that the aliens are now a far and away piece of that mentality – our tale opens with some poachers tracking down Queen eggs for a scientist, but this is all mundane – trafficking in alien eggs is illegal, but the scientist and the poachers seems to be well aware of the risks of the species – so that ‘control’ mentality isn’t as 1-to-1 as it was was in, say, Aliens 4, where we think that we can control the beasts, just more that we’re not so blown away by the buggers anymore and can view them as dangerous animals.

The scientist turns down a pink egg, as he figures it to be infected with some kind of something he doesn’t want to take a chance on, and so our poachers take the typical “whoops” road and decide to go in search of another buyer instead of burning it up as instructed.  They find one in a man named Zither, who hosts a vaguely defined TV show about pitting humanities worst monsters against one another.  So let’s give him a facehugger – he then secrets the spawn of said hugger to a date to a pleasure planet run by super-whore (in terms of her selling everything) Ivy Derringer.  Cue the bugger bursting and killing many people.  The catch here is that the alien is, indeed ill, leaving a trail of pink dust behind it that takes to the air… and infects people, the graphic results of which we see at series end.  Woop.

The 3-issue mini is weird because it all follows a logical line from start to finish and drops several well-designed characters in the mix who are just left or right of being 1-dimensional.  The overall mentality is one of complete indifference to the alien’s destruction, except that it can’t be allowed to continue.  The art,  by Francisco Solano Lopez, is excellent, sharing the thick figured look of many UK artists from the 2000 AD vein but without the slightly sarcastic tinge a lot of characters are given… reminding me of Colin Wilson, actually.  And the gore is nicely dotted through to be properly effective, the bloody messes on the covers giving you a good cringe before flipping through 15 or 16 pages before seeing more chaos.

Meep