AvP Booty Review

Aliens vs Predator: Booty is a 1-shot comic that has been created by a team of relative unknowns in the comic world, all who have stopped or for some other reason are not doing work for Dark Horse anymore. Steve Dutro is the most famous, and has been the letterer for many comics, including Star Wars. Den Beauvais is the cover artist and has done very little work, which is a shame as he seems to be skilled. Chris Chalenor is the colorist, and though he has done a wide variety of work, he has stopped as of 2002. The writer Barbara Kesel has done quite a lot of work, but has only contributed to one comic since 1994. Ron Randall worked on the two sequels to Predator: Concrete Jungle, but unfortunately only his Dark River work stands out, this comic being no exception.

This is quite a basic story, with three protagonists who are caught between Aliens vs Predators. The three characters are on board a ship carrying stolen aliens from Weyland-Yutani. Lo and behold, a Predator ship latches on to the human vessel to capture an Alien Queen. As you can guess it goes wrong when they try to capture the aliens by setting up a net mechanism around them (which looks ridiculous), and the usual AvP action occurs. Nothing much happens, except at the end the Predators survive and capture the alien, and one of the female characters exchange masks with a Predator. And that’s the whole story.

You can probably guess from my wording that I didn’t like this comic. I really, really didn’t. The two main elements that support comics; story and art are both of bad quality. The story is simple enough, which is acceptable for a 1-shot, but the dialogue is bad, and some of the concepts very weak. The art is the main problem for me, it just makes no impact whatsoever. It looks very basic and standard, as though no effort was made. I really disliked the Predator masks, they look like aqua masks more than anything, and the background is boringly simple. Due to this you want the characters to be well-done, but they look vague as well. Its annoying though, as I said before, Ron Randall did brilliantly in Predator: Dark River, with Predator: Cold War being less good but still enjoyable, though this is completely different. The only good thing is the cover art, which isn’t too bad.

All in all, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. The Aliens: Mondo Heat preview at the end of the comic is more enjoyable!