Alien vs. Captain America #1 // Review
It’s World War II. Captain America and Bucky have entered a facility that had been operated by Hydra--the advanced weapons division of the Nazi Party in Germany. Cap and Bucky have intel on something. Red Skull sent Baron Von Strucker out in search of some kind of weapon. Cap and Bucky need to find out why. They’re going to learn that it’s something quite a bit more dangerous than a weapon in Alien vs. Captain America #1. Writer Frank Tieri opens a cleverly-framed mini-series with artist Stafano Raffaele. Color comes to the page courtesy of Neeraj Menon.
Strucker went into the Himalayan mountains in search of the fabled lost city of Attilan--the Earth home of the Inhumans before they left for the Moon.They’re looking for some sort of an ancient weapon that might be able to turn the tide of the war in Europe and ensure a Nazi victory. What they find is a mausoleum inhabited by some leathery eggs and a tapestry that look like it might have been rendered by H.R. Geiger. Hydra has no idea what it’s about to unleash. They’re going to try to weaponize it, though. Captain America has his work cut out for him.
The first four films in the original Alien series all managed to find very clever ways of modifying the central premise of Xenomorph alien to a series of strikingly different sub genres of science fiction. Tieri manages to fuse the basic premise of the.Xenomorph with World War II based non Golden-Age superhero action. It's a very sharp and smartly-rendered fusion manages to be deeply entertaining, even though it's not necessarily doing anything too terribly new. And even watching Hydra encounter these things for the first time carries his own kind of well-executed satisfaction.
Raffaele’s approach to the artwork feels darkly cinematic. It's easy enough to bring the xenomotph aliens to the page in a way that feels strikingly dark. It’s another thing altogether to fuse the traditionally heroic vision of Captain America into that darkness. It's appealing to see a darker vision of the character that seems to fuse a little bit more with the horror genre. And Steely, determined Steve Rogers encounters world of science fiction, horror that hits the page in a way that feels very visually dynamic without compromising the central appeal of the character of Captain America.
In order to properly fuse the two properties together, Tieri and company work with a premise that deals somewhere between the second and fourth movies in the series. This makes perfect sense as Captain America is essentially an action hero and James Cameron's action based treatment of the premise is a good match. The legacy science fiction of the fourth film is mirrored in a clever execution of the light cycle of the xenomorph as it engages with the World War II era of the Titanic book. It's very potentially calculated. And now that the basic introduction is set, it should be interesting to see how the creative team manages to navigate through the rest of the series without making it feel painfully obvious. The joy of introducing the premise is a lot of fun. It will remain to be seen if it can maintain that appeal as the story works its way out to its inevitable resolution.
