Comic review: UFOlogy #1- Do you remember when people used to talk about UFO’s?

Writer: James Tynion IV & Noah J. Yuenkel
Artist: Matthew Fox
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Released: April 1st 2015



Ufology #1 is one of those new comic books that already feels a bit old and dated.

There are a lot of them around these days. Sometimes a nostalgia factor kicks in and I can enjoy them, pretending to myself that the world is not the way it is today I go back in time to my old comic book reading days when things were fun and I didn’t really think about things too much. The problem with Ufology #1 is that it’s not fun enough to allow me to do that.

The book is about teenagers and UFO’s and it has an old radio Art Bell narration thing going on as well, so it already feels of a certain age. The young people are generic, lost, and rebellious in a way that they always are in comic books, but my own experiences of real life never seems to match that cliché. Get ready for another trademark Rorshach Rant. Okay, here we go:

Rebellion is not going to come from the younger generations in 2015.

Children of the post 9/11 generation have been ‘schooled’ by government indoctrination camps masquerading as centres of education. They don’t question, they look to conform, and their only desire is to join a system that wants to use and abuse them. Be a celebrity, be famous, be rich, be a slave to materialism. This is the young, programmed to obey, programmed to conform. All sense of wildness, of rebellion, of questioning authority and establishment lies has been wiped from the choice options of a compliant generation of overly protected and monitored car passengers.

It’s a generation of lazy order followers where God is dead and government has taken his place, but when I read comic books I don’t see anything that resembles children/teenagers in a contemporary context. What I do see is a facsimile of 1980’s rebellious kids, but with mobile phones in their hands just to make the reader think that these kids could actually exist today.

Ufology #1 is centred on a rebellious, confident, intelligent young girl. Her Dad is a cop. He is friendly and cool and lets her do pretty much whatever she likes, driving her around to have a date with a boy who he has never even met. It’s pretty ridiculous.

A cop, the most scared, paranoid, distrustful, government enslaved, power tripping, morality free, order following people alive today and he acts like a liberal parent from 1967. It’s terrible, and it takes me completely out of the story. I can’t believe this is real. This is fake, and thus the magic trick that is story telling is broken. I can’t read these people, as they are not people, they don’t exist.

The subject matter of this book, being about UFO’s, is not very ‘cool’ really, is it? UFO’s are something that old people used to talk about when they were younger, and the people still hanging on, still looking at the sky are starting to thin out now. Kids don’t look at the sky anymore, they look at their phones, so any book about flying saucers is only really going to an attract an older audience. UFOs might have been cool, but not now.

The comic book felt too long, and it lost my attention well before the end. It concluded with some panels featuring something to do with aliens that were designed to pique my interest; to make me want to keep on reading, to buy issue #2, but all they did was confuse me. I didn’t quite understand what was going on, and that is okay in a book that interests me, but when a book is starting to bore me it becomes a chore to go back, re-read and make sure I understand what is happening.

I did go back though. I re-read the story, and it still bored me. I’m writing this review feeling a bit fed up with it now, hence my pessimism about the whole thing.

So why did it bore me? I’m a guy in his forties, so I should like a book about UFO’s right? Yeah, I might have enjoyed the book when I was twenty something and UFO’s were cool and interesting, before the Internet and before everything else that has happened in the world in the past twenty years, but not now.

Plus, I don’t really want to read about teenagers AGAIN in my comic books.

Why has it always got to be about bloody teenagers when the writers must be aware that it’s only old people like myself who are actually buying the books? And if you insist on writing about teenagers then at least make them interesting and believable teenagers.

The rebellious young girl protagonist in this book doesn’t even come across as a real person to me. She’s a comic book character created by some old writer. She’s somebody for a pedestal, somebody to admire, but you know she isn’t real. She’s a ghost, a comic book cliché that comes with the requisite feminist liberal credentials, but she’s been done so many times before and there’s nothing there for me to grab hold of, to orientate myself with reality or to care about. I can’t care about a statue. I can’t care about a con. I can’t care about something that is evidently not real.

Ufology #1 isn’t a terrible book; it’s something worse than that. It’s a blah book that washes over you and metaphorically disintegrates into dust the moment you attempt to interact with it. It’s UFO’s and old paranormal radio shows, and it’s the young teen female rebel from 1986 who doesn’t exist today. It’s vapour, dust, old, a memory, something that has been done, something that used to be something, something that is fading as fast as a dream of a ghost that was never really there.



Rating: 4/10 (Boring)