I was excited to get back to Alien Worlds. It's been a really long time since I've read some science fiction I've enjoyed. I'm not sure why I went off it, but I did, so it's nice to be able to dip my toes back in.
The cool thing is that last weekend, at the Edmonton Comic Expo, I found a special, published about 3 years after the series ended, all written by Bruce Jones and his various original co-creators. I think this series is moving out of the Storage collection, and into Active rotation. I need to think about it further.
That said, I did not enjoy this issue nearly as much as I have the prior 3. The stories are still good, a nice range of comic to tragic, and the art is wonderful. The dialogue is as snappy and interesting as the previous issues. But there was just something missing. Maybe it's that in each of the previous issues, there's been one story that's really resonated, that's really stood above the rest. In this issue, there's no superlative story. Not that the stories are bad; they're good. But none of them are great. No worries, though. Not every single comic can be a good one, and I've been very lucky in the quality of comics I've read over the last little while.
One story does deserve mention, however. The short piece "One Day In Ohio" is a tragic little story of a servant robot that doesn't realize it's family has died in a holocaust of some sort. It eventually rescues a chimp from the local zoo, treating it as the family child, until it overheats one day and explodes. The chimp, touchingly, tries it's best to take care of the ruined machine. And that's it.
Maybe there was a great story in this issue.
We'll continue along tomorrow, I was unable to find some of the missing issues for this series at the con. I'll be poking about in local comic stores, but it's (not) surprising (at all) how few comic shops carry Pacific Comics back issues from the 1980s. We'll muddle through somehow.
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