4 out of 5

Just a simple tweak and a story becomes awesome.   Again, let’s hand it to DH for recognizing the gems from Dark Horse Presents (or properly responding to feedback) and letting Peter Hogan expand his sci-fi murder mystery to a full mini.  As I’m discovering for a lot of mini-series, some story elements get improperly shifted around due to a pre-planned issue limitation (seemingly 3 issues for these DHP), but Resident Alien is nonetheless a totally classy little tale with great characters and a great, simple idea, brought to surprisingly tasteful life by Steve Parkhouse.

So: one element stranger in a strange land, one element alien hiding among the masses.  Seems like an obvious enough mash-up, but our lead character – under the human name of Dr. Vanderspeigle – has no nefarious plans, no secret mission.  He’s just here, and thanks to his ability to trick the majority of the world into seeing him as human, as well as an ability to ‘interact’ with machines, the good doctor can blend in quietly pretty much anywhere.  As he’s chosen to do in the quiet town of Patience.  But when the resident town doctor is murdered, our lead alien is called upon to replace him.  And finds himself drawn to deciphering the clues to find the local doc’s killer.

There are some wonderful elements at play, here.  First off is the pitch of the lead character: he enjoys interacting with humans, and the more he does it the more he appreciates it, but he’s forcibly isolated himself due to the fear that 6% of the population will see through his ‘disguise.’  So it adds a smart element of self-acceptance and discovery into the mix, not something that normally comes with murder mysteries.  Second is the choice to always draw the alien as an alien.  Because he’s not ‘wearing’ a disguise, people just see him as human.  This is a wonderful tool for setting the tone of the story right away, something Hogan remarks on in a note at the end of the collected version of this mini.  Lastly is the ‘when’ of the story.  We get a few flashes to the alien’s crashing on the planet, and through it we get that he’s stuck here, but the who, what, where, and etc. of his past isn’t the focus.  Here and now is the focus.  Now admittedly, the balance of the inclusion of these flashes is one of the couple missteps to the story, because they’re honestly not even necessary, really, and seem to be included just to satisfy the inevitable want of readers to know SOMETHING about his past… but this also goes into the pre-planned limitations, because with one or two more issues, the flipping back and forth probably could’ve been smoothed out.  The mystery itself falls into this same bucket.  There’s some really great misdirection that I was thankful for, and a pretty funny narrative ‘shrug’ to explain some of the oddities, but like a lot of comic mysteries, it’s really just one of those things that you can’t solve until the bad guy pops out from the bushes and explains himself.  Oh well.  It’s still a lot of fun.

Lastly, my mention of being surprised by Parkhouse’s art is not a knock.  I love Parkhouse, but I’ve only seen him on more humorous books.  Everything he touches in this book is perfect.  The inks, the colors, the lettering, all match the tone, which is rather a stoic one.  And the locals, which he would normally draw with a bit of ‘duh’ in their facial features, are given personality and respect, even when their characters would lend themselves to some funny embellishments.

Supposedly there will be a volume 2.  I can’t wait.