Customer Reviews

Aliens: Kidnapped

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Most of the Aliens comic books have been great so far. However, this particular story is not very interesting. It begins when a band of smugglers go in to obtain some eggs from a Queen's nest. When they arrive, they find that their comrades have all been killed, but also entirely stripped of their flesh and muscles, leaving nothing but bone behind. The smugglers intrude on the angry queen, and after a brief scuffle, take one single egg that had been left untouched. There is something odd about this egg however, as it is always secreting a strange substance.

When the egg is smuggled into a resort town on a distant planet, a playboy inadvertantly becomes the host for the facehugger in the infected egg. After he is invited by a super-model to join her on a trip to her own personal resort, all hell breaks loose. The alien egg had a flesh-eating virus. Shortly after the chestburster hatches, it begins to spread the disease all across the resort.

Definitely not the best Alien comic i've read. There is no real action, and the Alien doesnt live long enough to survive past the chestburster stage. The story itself is also not very good. It is a little convoluted and silly. All in all, an Aliens short that definitely doesnt deliver based on the high expectations set from previous Alien comics. This was a 2-part comic book and this book is the collaboration of the two. Of you are an Alien fan and feel that you must own all the Alien comics for collector's purposes, then by all means buy it. If you are looking for a new, interesting and action-packed story like all previous Aliens comics, then this is definitely not worth buying.

I would like to say that this is one of may favorites in the Aliens graphic novel series. I will not argue with the other reviewers: There is plenty of silliness and grossness, without much fear, action or suspense. What it does offer is a fresh, almost satirical approach to the series. Plus, I found the munching larva to be a distinctly creepy creature. Neither the movies nor the other books have ever dealt much with the first face of the Alien lifecycle.

David N. Brown
Mesa, Arizona

Aliens: Kidnapped Graphic Novel Review
Grade: C+
Aliens: Kidnapped could have been so much more. The idea was intriguing, and was the main reason I bought the Aliens Omnibus vol. 5. (That's were I read all of my Aliens comics and graphic novels, they're worth the price!) Kidnapped is a three part comic series collected in this graphic novel, and since it's only three issues it's pretty short, eighty pages.
The premise of Kidnapped is simple: Smugglers take an "infected" or "sick" Alien egg, and the face-hugger that comes out of it basically impregnates a television host with a "sick" or "diseased Alien. The guy is meanwhile on his way to a top-of-the-line resort paradise planet, but the chest-burster pops out before he reaches his destination. The chest-burster is still sick though, and is loose killing in "Paradise". Sounds cool right?
Wrong. Although I do like the fact that the story focuses on a "baby" Alien for the first time in the comics, the whole plotline becomes dumb and silly, and winds up plain out stupid. The art lingers on pointless scenes, the dialogue is dumb, and the plot becomes sort of confusing. Buy this to see the idea, but don't get it for just about anything else.

After a great start and several years of successful creativity in Alines comics, Dark Horse began putting out some real stinkers in the mid to late 90's, of which Kidnapped is the absolute worst. The art is fairly poor, and the story mostly unoriginal with the added fault of being less of an Aliens tale and more of a viral outbreak story. The idea of the Aliens themselves being a sort of terrible macro-virus already exists in the Aliens' universe of fiction, and therefore doesn't really need an additional contagious element to it. Also, the flesh-eating-virus in this story is portayed as pink goo, which is not only not-scary but pretty silly. The characters just follow the pink trail around as they try to get it through their thick heads that something may be wrong. There's lots of great material out there adding to the Aliens mythos, but this story should just be ignored lest it detracts from the whole.