This is How it Ends

A Review of Prometheus: Omega

Part Sixteen of "James Versus Fire and Stone"

I was going to say that “Fire and Stone has been a real shit show,” but then I realized that calling it such terms doesn't do it justice. The real value of Fire and Stone is that it's been a learning experience for me. This comes on the heels of me realizing some things about my “career” (which is a term that needs some bold quotation marks). Fire and Stone hasn't pointed me towards this exactly, but one thing I've learned, or at least one thing that has really codified a philosophy I've been developing for some time. Basically, I realized that as bad as something might be, it's not my job to fix it. And it's certainly not my job to fix it for free. As flawed as Prometheus might be as a comic and as just plain incompetent as Alien Versus Predator is, it's not my job to sit there and think of ways that I could make this better.

Because that's a sucker's game.

And that bums me out. I should be the target of internet vitriol. I should be the one with snarky blog posts aimed at me. I should be the one losing sleep to meet a deadline on a book that nobody will remember in two years time. I'm not saying that a “creator” is inherently better than a “critic” (they aren't, just tell me that Roger Ebert hasn't contributed more to art and civilization than Uwe Boll). I've just been struck by this general sense that I need to do more. Whatever that means.

Maybe I should thank each and every book in the Fire and Stone line-up. It wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, but it has pushed me. In different ways, each one of these books has pushed me to be a better writer. Maybe.

Anyways, with all of that said, when I found out that Fire and Stone was seventeen parts and not sixteen, I know I groaned. I must have. There's no other sane response to finding out that I'm going to get suckered out of another four bucks on a self-imposed dare. All of that said, this last book came as something of a surprise. Because, Blimey. Prometheus: Omega is really, really good.

Omega is written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, she of Pretty Deadly and Bitch Planet (which shares the same pulpy/political DNA that made up the first three Alien movies). That should have told me that this was going to be an excellent book. Of course nobody told me this. It's nice to be pleasantly surprised, though. As much as Pretty Deadly is most certainly not my thing, she is a writer with a point of view and a set of skills that I like to see put to work. There's also this tinge of liberal guilt in the back of my head telling me that it's nice that women are writing more comics and that these comics are good (I'm currently reading a trade of the new Ms. Marvel run. It's so good, guys). There's no inherent value to that, I suppose, but it's nice. And it certainly can't be any worse than the men who worked on AvP.

Agustin Alessio deliver some solid work as the book's artist. Like the artist behind Prometheus, Alessio delivers a painterly quality that gives the work a level of class that you don't see in a lot of other books. Often when you see this style of work in a comic, it ends up being a series of good looking pictures that, when put together form a bad comic book (the companion to this phenomenon would be when a screenwriter or a novelist tries their hand at making a comic). Fortunately, that isn't the case.

Alessio's work isn't perfect, though. His work does lack some of the impact and the kinetics of Mooneyham had on Predator (a very different book, but one with a steady hand behind the art). Yet, conversely, therein lies its strength. His work isn't fantastical. It isn't showy. It's grounded and it gives the story the kind of weight that a horror (or adventure) story like this should have. The world of Prometheus: Omega looks less like a comic version of an alien planet than it does an alien planet. Tonally, it shares the most similarities with Patric Reynolds's work, which couldn't look more different stylistically.

I like it a lot is what I'm saying. I'm sorry I lack the vocabulary for writing about art. I should work on that.

MUTANT OF THE WEEK: Dare I say. . . It's Elden.

That's right. Elden: My Most Hated of Characters. Elden the Abomination. Elden the Plot Device That Just Won't Die. Elden the Least. He's kind of great in this. As listless and silly as he's been in the hands of other writers, DeConnick actually manages to put him into the right place at the right time and turn out a corker of a story.

As I say this, keep this in mind: There is a mutant mountain full of alien juice that the team has to escape from. Elden, for his achievements in this book, is cooler than a living piece of the planet- Cooler than an actual xenomorph as defined in the dictionary.

Then again, Elden's final scene is him becoming a Giger tapestry. How can anything in the world compete with that?

Nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I'm just excited for this movie.

After a long spell in the cold, it's a relief that I can give Prometheus: Omega FIVE OUT OF FIVE CHESTBURSTERS. It's nice to see something this well put together cap it off the only miniseries event that I've ever partaken in. I'm glad it's over, but I'm also glad for the few highlights cut inbetween the crap. Omega is a rare beam of light.

As a stand alone comic it also works. It's well written. It's funny. It's weird. It's good looking. Like Predator, it's everything a comic book should be and, even better, it's everything this particular comic should be.

If you have any affection at all towards Prometheus, Aliens, Predator, or any combination there of, this is a comic you should pick up. Or you should just pick it up because Kelly Sue DeConnick is a talented lady who deserves your adoration and dollars. If Fire and Stone only provided her (and the team on Aliens and on Predator) a forum for more people to see them, then perhaps it was worth it.

Perhaps. . . 

You can read all of "James Versus Fire and Stone" here! There! It's all there! Read it!

Predator #4

Alien Versus Predator #4
Predator #3
Aliens #4
Prometheus #4
Alien Versus Predator #3
Aliens #3
Predator #2
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

James Kislingbury is basically over it.

“BEHOLD! GLORY!”

Predator #4 Review

Part Fifteen of James Versus Fire and Stone

I can't believe I've made it. I can't believe we made it. I can believe that I'm this late, though. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. In reality, this whole thing. . . Well, I guess I'll get a little more meditative when I review Prometheus: Omaga. . . Whenever it is that I get around to that one.

Back when iFanboy* had a website complete with writing one of the running gags, or complaints, really, was that it was hard to write things about good books week in and week out. There was Brubaker's run on Captain America. There's books like The Walking Dead (which they read in different formats, but still). Even now they still kind of go on about how it's hard to say new things about books that are continually good (Batman under the tutelage of Scott Snyder and Greg Capulo comes to mind)

I always saw that as a lack of creativity. Or will. Some kind of intellectual cowardice. Well, I'm here to say that I'm an asshole. It's hard to say more good things about Predator #4.It's just a solid book. It's fun. It's funny. It looks good. It feels good in a way that I cannot quite quantify. It's possible that it isn't the most intellectual stimulating book on the market, but I bet a lot of smarter books don't also have an alien big game hunter getting into a fist fight with a living god. If you like Predator, then go buy this book. Go read it at your local library. Just do something, will you?

It ends in a stronger way that any of the other books have. A solid portion of my good feelings towards the ending is down to this being an otherwise excellent book. So, if the ending is open-ended or incomplete in some way, oh well. The rest of it was fun as hell. In the end we get the journey and the destination. Good for Predator.

Also, shouldn't it be enough that something doesn't make people feel bad about things? That's an art, right?

If you want to imagine what this book is in my brain, it's Christopher Mooneyham and Joshua Williamson doing donuts in the school parking lot while everyone else from Fire and Stone looks on in frustration, trying to finish their assignments (not sure if Sebela and Olivietti can see it from the special education building down the way, but they can definitely hear those sweet, sweet donuts getting pulled). That's what it is. Imagine two bros pulling donuts in a parking lot forever. That's Predator: Fire and Stone.

Fuck it: I give Predator #4 FIVE OUT OF FIVE CHESTBURSTERS. I love it. It excites me. There's something about taking a thing as silly as a Predator/Prometheus/Alien crossover and taking it just serious enough to crank out a fun book. Go read it. Contrary to my whining about the BOOK WHICH SHALL NOT BE NAMED, this is the type of thing you should support. It's not high art, but it doesn't need to be. It's a genre piece that works and, since we're all friends here, I'm not afraid to say this: Sometimes that is as good as you need to be.

You can read the previous installments of "James Versus Fire and Stone" below:
Alien Versus Predator #4
Predator #3
Aliens #4
Prometheus #4
Alien Versus Predator #3
Aliens #3
Predator #2
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

*Gee, I sure mention iFanboy a lot. Probably because it's one of the few sources of comic opinions that I've listened to over the past eight years. And it's not like I'm going to link my friend Joe's opinion or a back issue of Wizard or something, appealing as that might be to everyone. . .

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and a survivor. You can follow his show here. You can donate to his endeavors here. Or you can just hire the poor bastard. Have you seen how skinny he is? He can't be eating well.

As an Expert in Lesbian Pulp Novels. . .

As an antidote to the unfortunate macho postering of Nick Pizzolotta's Galveston I picked up Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt.

I don't know what you've heard, but this Patricia Highsmith character can write the hell out of a book. And I don't care who knows it! Even though it isn't a book about murder or sociopaths (I think there's only one possible sociopath in the book), it still managed to keep my attention. But that doesn't need to be said. The book claims to be a "masterwork" right on the cover. It also claims that Nabokov ripped it off for Lolita in the same sentence so, like a lot of my criticism, I don't see the need in taking on The Price of Salt from the front.

What I'm impressed most by is the importance of correspondence in the novel.


To a person who has sent, maybe, three personal letters in his his entire life, to see this many people send this many letters over this many miles is utterly foreign to me. Reading about mercenaries in Africa or Nazi hunters makes more sense to me, is more familiar to me, than to send a letter to somebody on vacation not knowing where exactly they are. I mean, who forwards letters? Who has the time for that?

And that's what most of the last third of the novel is about. As much as it's about bouncing around the USA in a car (something I am deeply familiar with), it's also about people's words bouncing back and forth to each other. Entire relationships are formed and dissolved based on what people write in letters. This also means that most of the "action" in the book is based around people stopping what they're doing, sitting down, and processing what other people are saying. It's an interesting way to tell a story and it speaks to Highsmith's skill that she manages to ring this much enjoyment out of an idea that sounds so tedious on paper.

I suppose that's the other thing I am impressed by. I am impressed by how much nothing happens in this book. And I mean nothing. Long stretches of it. Not that it's a bad thing. Highsmith has a wonderful grasp of the English language, and like my favorite authors, she has a beautiful handle on the inner workings of human beings. As much as I love procedural novels and books about people moving through the motions, I also love how this book seems to be about people going on about their day. Going to work. Going to a bar. Writing a letter. Then, POW, a gun and lesbians sleeping with each other are introduced within the span of ten pages. It's like it was making up for lost time.

I guess there's also a learning experience in the doomed relationship of Richard and Therese, but that's another entry for another day.


Also, what's that title actually supposed to mean? I haven't felt this confused about a book's title since The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. As a title Carol makes more sense and even then that title doesn't exactly tell me anything.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcast, and an aspiring set designer.

In Which I Finally Crack

Or “Well, that got out of hand quick”

A Review AvP #4

Part Fourteen of "James Versus Fire and Stone"

The nightmare is over. We have reached the end of the tunnel and there is light. Alien Versus Predator did not bury us, but sometimes I wish it had.

In many ways AvP #4 is worse than I could have imagined. The one-liners seem to have been written by a child. The art is lazy and muddy in new and stupid ways. The story. . . well, it actually makes sense, so there's that. Yet, despite all of this it's also the funniest released so far. AvP #4 is the issue in which is has passed through the vortex and emerged on the other side as “So Bad It's Good,” as opposed to “So Bad It Should Be Sealed Away in a Vault Forever and Ever.” Congrats, Sebela and Olivetti. You did it.

All that said, don't buy this run of Aliens Versus Predator. Don't read it. Don't even think about it. Speak not its name. Know not its horrors. With all of that said, I have this horrible feeling in the back of my head that tells me that my life is going to be ironically saved by this final issue somehow, and, honestly,, I don't know if death is better.

“Consumer” is an ugly word, isn't it? I'm no communist, but it is certainly revealing of what the people in charge of production think of us, doesn't it? What do you do? Do you enjoy? Do you ruminate? Do you meditate? Do you absorb? No. You consume. It's a reduction of a human being to a medium that moves money.

It's part of a trend, or at least a change in our perception of what art is. It's a devaluing of what it is. You see it all over and, unlike being a consumer, you actually see

I guess it's probably always been this way. I mean, how old is that "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" essay? Gotta be pushing a hundred, right? The modern twist is that we seem to have accepted just how crappy things can be. This is a crappiness not thrust upon us, but a crappiness we have taken into our hearts.

You see this with how we watch TV. We don't watch it any more, we "binge watch." It's depressing. Besides it taking its terminology from one of the more decadent mental dysfunctions we've drummed up as human beings-- is that it has helped eliminate the idea that we should pause and take any time to think about anything. Want to think about what this means for Walt and Skyler's relationship? Maybe? Fuck it, put the next one on. There's no breathing room. There is no time for (Japanese word for “breathing room”). There's just non-stop noise. A wall to wall assault on the senses

What'd you do with Breaking Bad? I consumed it. Great. I'm sure that's what Vince Gilligan and everybody wanted you to do with their art. Then again, maybe they did. I'm sure the paycheck doesn't look any different.

It is as though, at some point, we all watched They Live, smiled, nodded, and then put on another episode of Friends (now on Instant Watch!). Sometimes, some of us need a Trashcan of Reason to the head. I paw through AvP, desperately trying to make sense of it, and I think that Trashcan has finally arrived at my head.And if you're not a consumer, it's not like you get upgraded. Instead, what are you? You're a fan. Great!

“Fan” is an equally ugly little word. It comes from fanatic. I supposed being a fanatic of Transformers is a vertical move away from the type of cave dweller that flies planes into buildings, but the connotation is there. I mean, nobody likes fanatics, do they?

I look at Aliens Versus Predator, and the trend our media is stuck in in general and I think “God. Can't we do better than this?” We're science fiction nerds. We supported Star Trek and Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut. We watched Twilight Zone when it was more than just a marathon on Thanksgiving Day. We believe in ideas. We like weird shit. Now what do we foam at the mouth at? A Jurassic Park sequel? Another Disney movie based on a ride (based on a retro-future)? Is this the future we were building for ourselves? Do we somehow deserve this?

The depressing capper on all of this is a realization I had about Steven Spielberg. Twenty-some years ago he made Jurassic Park. If he was an up and coming film maker today, he would be relegated to a Jurassic Park reboot. Or a fucking monkey movie reboot sequel and you fucks think you're going to break me? And, yeah, most of those movies are fine, some better than fine, but, really, what would you rather have? Jurassic Park or another Jurassic Park sequel?

So Dark Horse pumps out bullshit like Aliens Versus Predator and it sells. And it has for decades. To quote a film executive in the early 90's, “I could piss on a wall for two hours and call it Alien 3 and it would make sixty million dollars.” Names sell. Divorced of even its source, we still lap it up and, why? Because we're consumers. We're fans. It's what they expect of us because it's the easy thing to do. And, fuck that. It's a marketing strategy that takes us for saps.

But there's hope. There are people doing right by us, people that aren't looking for another inch of flesh to fuck us in. In comics we have Jonathan Hickman, for one. Between East of West and Manhattan Projects, he's making some of the craziest, most interesting sci-fi out there (and that isn't to mention his work for Marvel, of which I have only read Agents of SHIELD, which was, well, a book of questionable quality and purpose). He's a man who is swings for the fences and connects most of the time. He's a writer who is worth spending some time with.

Then there's Matt Fraction, Fionna Staples, Grant Morrison, Ales Kot, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Brian K. Vaughn. John Arcudi, Guy Davis, and Mike Mignola are still doing their crazy apocalytic stuff with Hellboy and the BPRD with the same publisher that shoveled AvP out into the street. There's also Brandon Graham and his legion of artist and writer collaborators, who are playing DM with the Prophet license (proving that you can take a terrible license and make it into something wonderful). Hell, if we want to let Brian Wood back out of the cold, he's doing some solid work with The Massive. Then there's the legion of small publishers and indie artists doing their thing under the radar. It's not all gloom.

Now that I think about it, if you're into that sort of thing, even licensed comics seem to be pretty good nowadays. So, I don't know. There's hope. We just have to accept it. As consumers, as fans, as binge watchers, it's up to us to us to determine what the marketplace looks like. Or, god forbid, a gallery space. What's the Against Me lyric? "Be the bands you want to hear."

Overall, I look at the way we look at art and the way it's presented to us is done so in the most crass, disposable fashion. We aren't aficionados. We're consumers. Or we're fans. We don't appreciate thing. We binge on it. And we are expected to move on to the next thing. I don't think that's the way to look at good art and I don't think that it's the way we should be looking at art. Like I said, we're better than that.

Life is short and miserable enough without going out of your way to fill it with bad stuff. It's an exhausting way to live. That's the only lesson I think I can impart to you: Seek out the things you love and go love them. Try to make sure that the things you fill your life with and spend your money on aren't crass and disposable. You're better than that. Unless you just want to live in garbage, because the universe will always find a place for simple people with too much money in their hands.

What does AvP #4 get? ONE OUT OF FIVE CHESTBURSTERS. It's barely a book. It's barely a story. It's terrible. Read anything else, because the odds are good that even if it sucks, it'll be better than this piece of shit. The only pleasure I got from the book was when it was done. And even that was tinged with annoyance.

Ack. I need a musical break.




You can read the previous installments of "James Versus Fire and Stone" below:
Predator #3
Aliens #4
Prometheus #4
Alien Versus Predator #3
Aliens #3
Predator #2
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

James Kislingbury is a writer and a podcaster and a big game hunter. If you like what you read, you can support his podcasting endeavors by going to his Patreon. Or don't. Whatever. Be that way.

A Good Old Child Murder Picture

I want this movie. Dracula accents and all. I want this bad.

I've been meaning to read Child 44 for years. It looks like a movie adaptation is going to have to do for the time being.

This also reminds me of a movie I watched in a high school class called Citizen X. Why I watched it in class, I haven't the foggiest (I can't even remember what class it was. Senior religion?). It is notable for two reasons: A) It has Max Von Sydow and that's always a good reason to show up, and B) It's pretty good. I guess the third reason should be "It has echoes of Child 44."Oh, and the fourth reason is look how smart I am for connecting things with other things! Give me some money!

The thing I remember most distinctly is that the film ends with a positive note: The Soviet Union breaking up, and, presumably, without the Communist Party running the show good men will actually be able to get things done. It's projected that this is going to be a time of optimism and that the worst is behind us. While, the breaking up of the USSR is a fantastic thing, it's kind of funny to think that, at some point, we thought everything was going to be okay with Russia once we got rid of that pesky politburo. Oh, the 90's. Your hope almost seems cute.

What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Child 44. Let's do this. Any excuse to listen to more Gary Oldman chewing scenery with a Russian accent is a good excuse.

James Kislingbury is a podcaster, a writer, and a friend of workers everywhere.