“Icarus”
Creative Staff:
Story: Phillip K. Johnson
Art: Julius Ohta
Colors: Yen Nitro
Letterer: VC’s Clayton Cowles
What They Say:
DEATH IS INEVITABLE! Steel Team is in fragments. Scores of innocent humans are dead after surviving years on an irradiated rock. A new kind of Xenomorph is emerging…hunting…killing. It’s all built to this. Is this the end – or beginning – of a new horror?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This series draws to a close with this installment and we get something that leaves it open for more should Phillip K. Johnson get a chance to come back to it but it also has a feeling like a closing of a chapter. Not a finale, but a chapter, and that works well enough as what this tale told has a classic kind of Alien story feeling to it. The series worked a decent setup and I liked the focus on the synthetics even if it does basically place them into a quasi-superhero mold to play with. Julius Ohta has long been a favorite of mine for some interesting properties and there’s definitely an interesting approach here since the story doesn’t, so far, lean into the dank and grim interiors but rather exterior and modern world sequences.
As you can expect from a series like this, it’s something that moves heavily through the action side to bring it to a close. We’re down to just two of the synthetics left with Freyja and Eli at this point along with the child that has survived from all the conflicts. Eli’s not exactly pleased with how all of this has gone down and is certainly taking it out on Frejya as they continue to fight. It’s a simple but chaotic situation with the xenomorphs and the queen as well as the way that we’ve got such a twisted evolution in the mix with the xenomorphs. And amid all of it, Frejya is just making it clear to Eli that she’s intent on saving the kid even though it seemingly goes against the hard line so many of them took over the years. He’s dealing with all of the losses they’ve taken – for a human – and it has an anger to everything.
But Frejya is insistent that they have to be better than what they were designed for and better than the people that created them. It’s a familiar angle but it works well as Frejya and the kid do connect well overall throughout it and there’s some good energy as they struggle to survive, though they don’t have the kid really get involved with something hands-on, which was a plus. It’s a fun finish to this aspect of it that has its own comically dark turn as well. When the military shows up for extraction, they’re ready to get what they need from the synthetics while quietly talking about how what was promised won’t actually happen in regard to citizenship. Which was a given, it’s just not going to be given to them. Of course, it has to go awry and while it doesn’t unfold as cleanly as it should with the pacing and layout, it’s kind of what you expected to happen. Of course, it leaves that whole radiation story that started this whole thing as a kind of giant loose end.
In Summary:
The series is one that overall was a lot of fun even if because of the nature of how the synthetics were portrayed here felt more like a superhero comic than a science fiction story. That’s not a bad thing to some degree but it just reminded me more of that than anything else. The general setup and concept is one that I liked and the nature of how badly things end isn’t a surprise either. Johnson’s story was pretty sharp and focused for a lot of it with some good dialogue, but I don’t know how connected it is to prior Alien works and bits I might have missed. Ohta has been a favorite of mine for some time with other publishers but they did a great job here in capturing the feel of all of this and engaging in a world that’s chaotic and violent without it being, well, cartoonish. It had the right edge to it and delivered.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: February 8th, 2023
MSRP: $3.99
