Hello all,
I really should post here a bit more but I am a bit burned out about Alien and Predator after the Alien prequels and those Predator movies.
My reception of this news is a bit mixed if I have to be honest. I have never been that big a fan of Dark Horse's Alien comics, a lot of the stories never really worked for me though the quality seemed to improve a bit in the last couple of years, at least regarding style as I disliked a lot of the designs of the earlier comics (spaceships and such).
I can't blame my disappointment about the Engineers on Dark Horse and its writers, that is more an issue with the Alien prequel movies.
My favorite Alien comic still remains "Aliens Apocalypse the Destroying Angels", and for Predator it is "Hell and Hot Water"
Sorry, going a little off topic here.
Seeing Marvel taken on the Alien and Predator universe might be interesting if I did not have a few personal criticisms and most of them are against Marvel and Disney.
I know Marvel can do "dark" though for me a good Alien or Predator story does not depend on how gory and bloody it is, more how well a story is told and how well characters are written (sorry but sometimes the characters in the DH comics were quite awful, ridiculous, or stereotypes).
Marvel writers' character writing these last ten year (perhaps fifteen) hasn't been exactly good. I am not throwing all of the writers onto one heap but the good ones tend to be more the exception than the standard.
Creative wise I think they will just follow up on what others have already been doing and I do not expect much "surprises" that could be exciting. Marvel/Disney is just going to milk these licenses for what remains to be milked.
As for crossovers, personally I do not think that the Aliens or the Predators work in a "supers" universe.
In the main Marvel universe there are various creatures already as dangerous as the aliens themselves, not to mention entities even deadlier than them, and the Predators are tech wise outdone by several of the major interstellar civilizations. The Predators would be just another random species Supers would run into.
They work much better in a universe which is much closer to our own reality, one that doesn't have incredible technologies other than FTL travel and communication and energy weapons (no teleporation or interdimensional travel), a universe that is cold and lonely because there are not dozens or even hundreds of technologically advanced species zipping between the star systems, life and especially intelligent life being quite rare and perhaps lasting barely a "second" in the universe's history.
Someone here suggested that it might be interesting to see the Predators hunt members of the various alien species of the Marvel universe and of course the Supers, Mutants, and other various other characters and human off shoots on Earth but to me it would just make it another crossover comic.
Marvel indeed had a tendency to incorporate other timelines into their main universe such as Conan which can work to a certain degree as most of it takes place long before the rise of the ancient world, but I feel that other licenses like Transformers, GIJoe never really worked and it was better to spin them off to their own universes. (Godzilla was kind of amusing and it was fun to watch SHIELD go against the creature, but I think it works better as a fun what if)
I am glad that Marvel never tried to make Indiana Jones and Robocop part of the Marvel universe back when they had those licenses. (well Indy could happen but I honestly hope it doesn't)
I don't have real expectations of this.
I never read Marvel's new Star Wars comics because they in general lack the space adventure/space opera vibe the older comics did back when the SW universe was still being established and was closer to Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon and other pulp sci-fi. There is nothing really exciting to discover any more.
