HOLLYWOOD CALLING

Yep, another silver screen fellow has stepped into the writer’s chair on a comic. However, this time it’s an actor. In fact, it’s an actor quite well known for playing a comic book character…

BAD PLANET #1
Written by Thomas Jane and Steve Niles
Drawn by Lewis Larosa and Tim Bradstreet
Published by Image Comics

Much like FEAR AGENT, BAD PLANET is an homage to the EC comics of the 50s drawn by folks like Wally Wood. An alien intelligence that spends its time eradicating entire planets from the face of the galaxy has targeted Earth next, and the unsuspecting populace is completely in the dark, only knowing that some sort of meteor is heading straight for the planet.

The early scenes are all riffs on the classic “discovery of threat from space” setup, but they do the job, introducing the characters and priming the reader for the arrival of a marauding army of (as the writers put it) “alien death spiders.” They sound charming, don’t they?

Along the way, we also meet alien truckers who are addicted to some very disturbing pornography, an arrogant astronomer named after comics’ greatest enemy, and another astronomer named after a famed sci-fi writer. The two astronomers are surely meant to be nice nods, but they have the odd effect of throwing you out of the story, and you immediately wish they’d taken less obvious routes to pay tribute.

On the flip side, the art is simply gorgeous. Lush, detailed, and full of life, every page has something to stop and make you look twice. The only blip is that the coloring printed way too dark, and obscures some of the finer details. It’s almost as if there was an expectation for a different paper stock that would hold the colors in different fashion, so I don’t think it was a deliberate bad choice.

For a long time, I was unable to warm up to Steve Niles’ work, but with GIANT MONSTER and now this book, I’m beginning to come around on him. BAD PLANET looks like it’s going to be a ton of fun, and the minor flaws that it has are imminently fixable. Bring on the alien death spiders!

/Mason