Alien and Predator comics without the creatures

[Bishop90]

I think It would be cool if dark horse brought out an anthology series with each story arc being based on a character from the films set before the movie eg: one arc could be Ripley growing up on Olympia colony on Luna, another arc could be ash's previous mission for Weyland-Yutani before the Nostromo mission or how about Hicks going through basic training and his first mission with the colonial marines or Vasquez running with a street gang in some earth slum, maybe an arc where Harrigan as a young homicide detective has to hunt down a serial killer or Blain on leave from the military dealing with corruption on the reservation, the possibilities are endless. feel free to comment especially if you chose depends I would love to hear your feedback.

[Xenomrph]

Ehh, it'd be a bit of hard sell, since the main draw for a lot of people is the creatures.

Like I'm not saying I wouldn't read it, just that I don't know that enough people would read it to justify it monetarily.

[Corporal Hicks]

I'd be interested in it assuming it was good. I think there's far more to the Alien series than just the Aliens themselves. I don't think it'd sell as something big but some stories like this spaced out in actual Alien related stories (something like what I'm hoping they do in Aliens: Bug Hunt) could work. Or maybe just slap something like this onto the end of an existing Alien series (like Defiance) as a second bonus story.

[HuDaFuK]

Aliens: Renegade didn't have any Aliens in it.

[Corporal Hicks]

Was that published before or after DotS?

[HuDaFuK]

Before. Quite along way before, actually; August-September '92 (DotS didn't start until July the following year). Originally it was just called Renegade but it was titled Aliens: Renegade for its Aliens magazine reprint (even though it still didn't have any Aliens in it, nor was it published as a part of DotS, which was never in the magazine).

I actually wonder if maybe the short was originally meant to be a random unrelated story that Claremont later decided to reference with he did the DotS series.

[Corporal Hicks]

Did it have an Alien aesthetic?

[HuDaFuK]

No clue, I'm not sure I've ever read it. At least, I don't remember specifically reading through it in Aliens magazine. I do know it was done by a different artist to DotS, a guy called Vince Giarrano. I don't think he's ever done anything else in the franchise.

[Rambo]

For the film Predators they made motion comic back stories for the main characters. Must not have been a huge hit because like you pointed out not much human-only material has been produced. Would be a tough sell as a stand alone.

[HuDaFuK]

Pretty sure one of those contradicted the official comic adaptation too. D minus for the continuity people on that one

[Xenomrph]

For the film Predators they made motion comic back stories for the main characters. Must not have been a huge hit because like you pointed out not much human-only material has been produced. Would be a tough sell as a stand alone.

I'd say the Predators prequel was a bit of a special case because the backstories of the characters was kind of an important part of the story and the characterizations.

[Corporal Hicks]

The Predators comics weren't particularly great anyway. Nolan in the comics is completely unlike Nolan in the film.

[Xenomrph]

Weren't the comics based on an earlier script draft, where Nolan was less of a crazy person?

[Corporal Hicks]

I can't really remember unfortunately. It's been years since I read that leaked script.

[Xenomrph]

I want to say that that was the case (and it's not really uncommon with comic adaptations, because just like movie novelizations they're based on scripts which could change as the movie gets filmed, edited, etc).