Each of these books has to be sort of appreciated on its own merits, and within its own microcosm that it creates. The art of book one rather reflects the moody tone of Book One very well. The writing and the art are a match. Certainly the industrial design of the objects in the book can drive you batty if you analyze them too much. But overall, there was a consistency to the series that was very strong.
Book Two was orchestrated like clock-work to reflect the high level of action in that series. Den Beauvais' art was very realistic with exquisite attention paid to product design details. Everything here was consistent with the look of the Aliens film right down to the lighting. I don't know if anyone noticed this, but the behaviour of light off of objects in that book is extremely realistic. Beauvais spent time analyzing the direction of light casting and ensuring that its behaviour was spot on. Who does that? Again, the art matched the story.
And now we get to Aliens: Earth War. Dark Horse really jumped the shark with this book. If it were to be appreciated on its own terms and merits without any pre-existing Aliens material out there, who knows? It might be ok. I mean the writing went off on the strangest tangent. The Alien Queen Mother calling her Alien children back to her from across the universe? Are you kidding me? It became nonsensical and the art reflected this whimsy. So when you look at the Earth War series as a whole it is internally consistent.
However, when you take in the trilogy as a whole, you see that Earth War was completely out of character with the rest of the series and basically tanked what was a stellar performance up to that point by Mark Verheiden. Earth War, the third act in the Verheiden series was as far off the mark in terms of a proper continuation to the 2 previous books, as Alien 3 was in relation to the first 2 films.
I certainly hope we don't see Sam Kieth drawing Aliens comics anymore. He is a brilliant artist and there are a lot of his works out there that people love but as an Aliens artist he just does not match. He just doesn't understand that Aliens fans love the hardware of the Aliens universe as much as the characters and monsters, and he is not capable of drawing the hardward properly because he does not have that product design sensibility.
On the flip-side, it would be great to have Mark A. Nelson, the seminal Aliens artist (not counting Walt Simonson) and the brilliant Den Beauvais return for a couple more runs. They were some of the fan favorites. I just don't get why Dark Horse doesn't get those guys working on some series again...
