Greetings all!
I've been an Aliens fan apparently since I was 3 years old. This first part is all what my parents tell me, since I was a little too young to remember. I was at a museum at the time that had a movie special effects exhibit, and in that exhibit they had a full sized Alien statue and a screen beside constantly looping the Powerloader Queen battle. My parents tell me they couldn't pry me away.
I so wanted to see the movie, but my parents being the good parents they were didn't want their 3 year old son watching Aliens, so every visit to the video rental store, they lied about the movie being taken out at the time. Finally one day I had apparently ran off into the store, plucked Aliens off the shelf, and showed them it was in. So of course they had to rent it for me, but they thoroughly explained that this was just a movie, nothing was real, and if I ever got scared they would have to turn it off. I'm told I was glued to the TV set and didn't wince away at all.
From there to about 5, I collected the Aliens Kenner toys, as many as I could get. I have memories of going to a long defunct toy store and ordering stuff from their catalogue that wasn't available in stores (oh Canada...). I remember getting together with friends, pooling all our Scorpion Aliens together to try and reenact the movie in toy form best we could, and then the Kenner comics as well. I was so disappointed seeing commercials for the Snake, Mantis and Boar Alien and being unable to get them in stores where I was.
Years passed, then at 9 years old, I was in a gas station and saw what I remember as Alien Alchemy on the comic stand. I picked it up, flipped through it, and remembered how much I missed Aliens. I was hooked once more. After soccer games on Saturdays my dad would take me to the local comic store, and allow me to pick out one comic. Instead of my usual Spiderman pick, I went and looked at the Aliens selection. Genocide #4 was my first Aliens comic ever. Weeks passed, and eventually I picked up AVP #1, and my initial opinions of thinking the idea sounded so stupid quickly disappeared and my love of the Predator franchise grew as well. So for the next few years I would pick up a random Aliens/Predator/AVP comic every Saturday. Being a kid, I never really completed sets, and of course just judged which ones to buy by the coolest (which usually meant most violent) covers. Also, in those few years, on trips to the US, I would pick up many of the Kenner figures not available in Canada.
My love of the AVP universe died off again, until I was about 14. I was in a grocery store which had a used book pile, $2 a book. I was sorting through them and came across Aliens vs. Predator: Prey. Thinking it had been a while since I had read anything AVP related, I picked it up. I instantly remembered the story from the comic, and my fond memories of it, and was hooked once more. I went all over to local bookstores big, small or used, trying to buy all the novels I could find. I had the stores order all those I couldn't find in stock, but being absolutely unable to find Aliens Rogue or Labyrinth. Desperate to find more Aliens reading material I made my first amazon purchase of those two books. That introduced me to online shopping.
Having finished off all the novels and eager to find more reading material, and now with a whole world of possible purchases now at my finger tips I went crazy, mainly ebay crazy. I bought all the comics/graphic novels I could, and finished off the collecting I had done much earlier in life. But not just comics, I bought Kenner/Hasbro/McFarlane/Hot Toys figures, shirts, cards, a chess set, costumes, video games, miniatures and all sorts of other Aliens/Predator/AVP stuff. This went on for about 5 years, resulting in two cupboards and a closet stuff with merchandise. After that, my interest was still there, but not nearly as strong, and I was no longer crazy with purchasing stuff. AVPR and Predators passed without me making a single purchase of merchandise from either of those movies (still regretting that).
Nowadays I still pick up a few things here and there, a lot of t-shirts mostly, and still wear some Alien themed costume every Halloween. So that's my history with Alien, and as you can see it has been a fairly steady thing in my life, a long time love who I've always come back to. I'm always in shock every time I hear someone hasn't seen Alien, and liked a crazed zealot, I do all I can to push the movies on them. I truly hope Prometheus brings out the same love for my beloved movie series in this generation of children.
