Thursday, June 14, 2012

Fellow travelers - pre-Prometheus

Dark Horse comics usually didn't have much for ads, which raises many interesting questions: was this a matter of artistic vision and editorial choice, or were they merely unable to land the advertisers that plagued Marvel and DC's offerings? And if the former, how were they able to fund their publications through cover price alone when Marvel and DC comics apparently couldn't? Anyhow, this comic came up during the scan spree and even though it had no real video game connection, I knew that Prometheus was coming up and here was something I could tie into it -- another, earlier interpretation of the Engineers. (If only I could manage to make the blog post while the movie was still fresh in people's minds!) Since I collected in a scattered, furtive fashion, I can't really speak to the plot events that led up to this calamitous state of events, but it sure is a hum-dinger! Canny use of the Aliens franchise really made Dark Horse. They cast wide nets, turning numerous film licenses into comics of varying interest, and getting extra mileage out of them by lumping in thesis and antithesis for a new, novel synthesis. This Hegelian dialectic process didn't yield much in their "RoboCop vs. the Terminator" miniseries, but they took the flimsiest easter egg in Predator 2 and ran far with it. Then a decade or so later, after video game makers had explored the Alien vs. Predator phenomenon and exhausted it a few times, filmmakers discovered the mash-up also. Sorry for the crappiness of the scan! And sorry for the general off-topicness of this post. I promise to be back to video game ads soon!

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