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)

Comic book review: Prometheus Fire and Stone #1- A very bad start to a very long event

Writer: Paul Tobin
Art: Juan Ferreyra
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 10th September 2014

This introductory instalment of a seventeen issue, crossover event has to be good. Actually, it has to be very good.  It has to hook the readers into the story immediately and make them want to get every single issue of the run. It has to make the reader salivate in anticipation of what is going to happen next. It’s a teaser, a sample of the product that is yet to come.  If this issue fails to excite the reader then the entire crossover event is immediately in jeopardy. Issue #1 of Prometheus gets off to a very wobbly start. It then proceeds to trip, lose it’s balance, step on a banana skin and do a double somersault before landing flat on its face, arse in the air and pants around it’s ankles.

Why does it fall so spectacularly? There are a number of reasons. First off it fails to follow the last story (as seen in the big budget movie ‘Prometheus’) from its most interesting point. The movie ended on an unsatisfying note because it failed to answer the big question. If aliens created man, who created the aliens? You didn’t get that answer in the movie, and unless I’m very much mistaken it looks you are not going to get that answer here either.

Perhaps that question will be answered later on in the event, but there are no hints that this is where it’s going to go, and as that is the most interesting selling point of this entire arc why not hint about it here in the first issue? All I get from this first issue is the impression that we are going to get some Alien versus Predator fight scenes. That might be enough for some, but I want a bit more than that in my comics.

The dialogue in this issue felt a bit off to me as well. Sorry, that’s being a bit too nice. The dialogue felt very off. The characters were in witty banter mode and it felt completely unnatural. They were talking like characters in a cheap and cheesy action movie rather than as real people engaging in believable conversations with each other. The individual characters were impossible to identify with, as they were two dimensional, and drawn from the laziest of action movie cliches. The feminist liberal, sexually attractive, independently spirited young female leader. The overcompensating male chauvinistic macho show-off. The scientist with a secret. These people exist in bad movies, not in real life.

The art felt rushed, like it was half-done, like it was not quite ready for publication. Some of the backgrounds were lacking in colour and detail, the faces looked like rough sketches and the colouring was dull and lifeless.

The issue ends with a good cliffhanger, with the protagonists in danger from something lurking in the background. That’s good, but there’s a big problem. The problem is that the stilted characterisations and dialogue meant that I found it impossible to empathise with any of the characters, and I couldn’t care less about what happens to any of them.

It’s a horrible start to an event series, and a jumping off point already for this reader/reviewer. I’ll keep on checking out the other reviews, just to see if this event tackles the big question that the movie avoided, but at the moment I can’t find any reason to justify me spending my money on this long seventeen issue event. I really do hope it gets better, but this is no way to hook readers onto an event story that is going to play out over the next five months. The event needed a good start, but it doesn’t get it here.

Rating: 3/10