The day when comic book publishers (large and small) try to tempt you to try their wares - or hook existing readers in for the next "must read" story arc - with free sampler comics at your friendly local comic store.
Remember, the books may be free to you - but the store still pays for them, so don't be greedy!
As well as a taste of what's to come (see above), here's a clip from last week's Alien: Earth along with a "how did they do it" look behind the scenes.
Two episodes in (both dropped this morning on Disney Plus in the UK) and Alien: Earth is already looking like the best new show on the streamer since last year's Shōgun.
More a continuation (in a Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings way) than a sequel to the excellent [REC], [REC] 2 opens with the famous night-vision shot of Manuela Velasco being dragged off into the darkness and picks up the story moments later with the building being stormed by a SWAT team.
The armed police have been assigned to escort a sinister, scar-faced "government representative from the Ministry of Health", Dr Owen (Jonathan Mellor), into the quarantined housing block.
As with its predecessor, this Spanish-language horror is filmed in the shaky-cam style of hand-held cameras - whether carried by the SWAT team or a trio of juvenile delinquents who come into the story about half-way through.
Very quickly we are reminded that this is not your Uncle George's zombie film, but something a whole lot more supernatural, as it fills in some of the questions left hanging by [REC].
Imagine a tower block full of Regan MacNeils! This is the Aliens part of the story after the scene-setting Alien-ness of [REC].
The religious backstory makes for interesting meat, but the truly clever tricks come towards the end when the nature of the hand-held camera medium is used to brilliant effect.
[REC] 2 works on its own merits, although it may come across as a bit of a 'do-over' of [REC] when looked at like that.
However it's when you take the two halves as a single film you realise that this is an amazing, original horror movie that, in a market saturated with cookie-cutter zombie movies, has found a unique spin.
Despite having already named Go Fer Yer Gun! as my favourite roleplaying game set in the Old West, and having an ever-expanding collection of Deadlands material from across the ages, I still managed to purchase two more distinctly different games in the last seven days: Tales of The Old West and Shooting Iron.
While I admire Go Fer Yer Gun! for its elegant simplicity, Shooting Iron is another d20-based system (class, level, hit points et al), with a heap of background material (although nothing on Native Americans; they were supposed to be covered in a supplement, which has yet to see print seven years after the core rules were published).
I could see this nicely written and laid out, 200-plus page, tome being a source of "houserules" and additions to a possible GFTG! campaign, with little need for much tinkering with the stats and mechanics.
On the other end of the spectrum, Tales Of The Old West employs the Year Zero Engine, the award-winning d6 dice pool mechanics that power such Free League roleplaying games as ALIEN, Tales From The Loop, The Walking Dead etc
I'll admit the book is quite intimidating. Tales of The Old West may be too complicated for my little noggin, although one of our group mentioned to me in the past of her experience playing ALIEN, so that could help persuade me (always helps to have someone else at the table who knows the rules of the game you are playing).
Although a licenced product (it is produced by Effekt) the book has the high production and art standards consumers of Free League games have come to expect.
Of course, these "straight" West books are just the latest addition to my RPG library.
And so we come to the end of the Friday the 13th canon with the chapter I have seen the most times, Jason X.
A savage slice of solid pulp sci-fi served with a soupçon of satire.
In the early 21st Century, Jason (Kane Hodder) has been captured (presumably some time after his return in Freddy vs Jason) and is being held at a specially constructed Crystal Lake research centre, where project leader Rowan (Andromeda's Lexa Doig) has been investigating ways to permanently execute the mass-murdering zombie.
Eventually, she realises the only course of action is to cryofreeze him, but then interdepartmental shenanigans - and a misguided desire to monetise Jason's supernatural regnenerative abilities - leads to the monster's escape.
This ends up with both Jason and Rowan being accidentally frozen... and then forgotten about.
Jump ahead to the year 2455, and a student field trip to the wastelands of the dead Earth comes across the two frozen bodies.
Bringing them back to their ship, The Grendel, for study, the researchers use nanotechnology to bring Rowan back... unfortunately, at the same time, they also accidentally reawaken Jason.
It maybe the future, but teens are still horny and that's motivation enough for Jason to start hacking away again.
You can guess what happens next.
Todd Farmer's script, directed by James Isaac, wears its Alien influences on its sleeve, with Jason substituting for that franchise's iconic xenomorphs.
The Grendel has its own cadre of marines, led by Spartacus's Peter Mensah, bargain basement clones of the beloved characters from Aliens, and their hunt for Jason through the bowels of the ship (while the civilians listen in, from relative safety) is an obvious homage (rip-off?) of the sequence in Aliens where the colonial marines first meet the xenomorphs in the tunnels under the colony on LV-426.
It's then left to the civilians - and their android (Andromeda's Lisa Ryder) to escape Jason's machete long enough for the ship to reach safety.
Unfortunately, just when they think they've got him beat, he gets a new lease of life - an upgrade - thanks to the same nanotechnology that brought Rowan back.
Also, the hull of the Grendel is deteriorating and is likely to collapse before the rescue ship Tiamat can reach them.
Silly, thrilling, and inventive, for me Jason X is a perfect example of how you keep a long-running franchise alive.
Through out-of-the-box thinking that takes the overarching narrative in a totally unexpected direction, yet remains true to its core principles, Farmer and Isaac have created a genuinely unique blend of old school slasher and pulp sci-fi.
Sure, it's obviously not the first blending of sci-fi and horror tropes, but as an extension of a franchise like Friday the 13th, it's inspired.
I would have loved to have seen a sequel to this where Jason vents his wrath on the horny teens of Earth Two, but sadly it was not to be.
Underrated cult sci-fi horror flick Event Horizon is finally getting some well-deserved comic book love this August - 28 years after it began terrifying audiences.
IDW will be publishing a five-issue prequel miniseries, Event Horizon: Dark Descent, revealing the horrors that unfolded in the lead-up to the start of the movie.
The comic is written by Batman: City of Madness's Christian Ward with Alien: Defiance's Tristan Jones on art duties.
According to IDW:
Embracing the hard-R rating of the shocking movie, Event Horizon: Dark Descent #1 (of 5 issues) will lightspeed jump into comic shops this August.
Taking place before the events of the film and completely accessible to new readers, this is the unbelievable story of the final fate of the original Event Horizon crew.
What really happened to Captain Kilpack and the first crew as their ship journeyed across a nightmarish realm of torments beyond imagining?
Abandon all hope as demonic forces - led by Paimon, the eyeless King of Hell - unleash agony and pure evil upon the crew in a gripping story.
I'm low-key obsessed with Event Horizon, so much so that several years ago - when contemplating an ALIEN RPG campaign - I wove it into my headcanon for the near-future Alien Universe.
Once again, it's also one of those Lovecraft-inspired horrors that isn't based upon any particular part of his mythos but feels like it is.
Christian Ward's variant cover artwork for issue one
Journey back to London in 1993 - when two friends with a love of the Alien movies, a lot of ambition and a little bit of madness - set out to create the world's scariest walkthrough attraction with a little help from Sigourney Weaver.
With its release marking this year's Alien Day, Beneath London - The Story of Alien War is a wonderful, nostalgic documentary that takes me back. I went through Alien War at least once, possibly twice (back in my late 20's when I used to train it up to London solo to buy comics).
Although my memory is shot to pieces these days, I don't recall Alien War being scary per se, rather it was an incredibly exciting experience.
My latest bargain Blu-Ray purchase, Apollo 18, posits a top secret mission in December 1973 to plant Cold War listening devices on The Moon, but something went wrong and that's why the Americans have never been back.
Then apparently in 2011, a whistleblower dumped 80 hours of video footage from the mission online, from which this 'found footage' style, faux documentary, was assembled.
Now, I thought I was over the 'found footage' craze shortly after the market was saturated with ill-conceived Blair Witch Project knock-offs, but recently I've stumbled upon a couple (this and the superb As Above, So Below) that have made me reconsider my prejudices.
One thing Apollo 18 gets right straight off the bat is that it doesn't hang around. Within minutes of introducing the three astronauts we're going to be following they're in space and then on The Moon.
And the speeding train doesn't slow down. It's not long after they've landed that the weird shit starts happening and, given the speed with which events unfold, you find yourself wondering how director Gonzalo López-Gallego is going to keep Brian Miller's script running for the film's 75-minute duration (it's listed as 86-minutes, but the balance is just the closing credits).
But fear not. The pacing is superb throughout, and, barring a couple of lukewarm jump scares (one's played for laughs anyway), the story is somewhere between a modern Doctor Who and Event Horizon in its atmosphere.
In fact, I would make an argument for Apollo 18's possible inclusion in an unofficial headcanon of the Alien film franchise timeline.
After all, it manages to keep the incident (except for the 2011 'leak') under wraps, with only the Department of Defence being in the know, and takes a very measured approach to the possibility of an extraterrestrial lifeform.
Already plagued by communications interference, the astronauts of Apollo 18 discover evidence of a heretofore unknown Soviet mission to The Moon, but then begin to suspect that there's also something 'inhuman' up there with them as well.
The film's footage looks, for the most part, as though it's aged, period stock, encapsulating López-Gallego's eye for authenticity that - to an untrained, unscientific eye like my own - feels as though the 'found footage' could have been genuine.
Except for the unfortunate fact that - and this is no reflection at all on the actors, who are all wholly convincing - I recognised the men playing the three lead characters: Capt. Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, from Alphas, Batwoman etc), Lt Col John Grey (Ryan Robbins, from Riverdale, Arrow etc) and Commander Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, from The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones).
But, let's be honest, the story is ultimately so far into tinfoil hat conspiracy theory land that no one is really going to believe it's real.
Apollo 18 does a smashing job of maintaining its verisimilitude, right up to the denouement where we get the "official" explanation of what happened to the three men.
Within the context of the story, I bought the reason for NASA never returning to The Moon one hundred percent.
If you can accept the movie's premise, of being 'lost footage' from a classified American space mission, then you should love this.
Let's clear one thing up right from the start: writer/director Alexandre O. Philippe's Memory - The Origins Of Alien is not a "making of" documentary about Alien, and anyone picking this DVD up thinking that is going to be very disappointed.
The clue is in the title, if people could be bothered to think about it. This hour-and-a-half documentary is a a film studies course thesis on a reading of the influences that fed the original story and shaped - consciously or otherwise - the visual iconography of key moments, which have made the film so enduring in the collective psyche.
Rather than picking apart how the film was made (I'm sure there are plenty of DVD extras dealing with that topic on the many releases of Alien), it traces the development of the script by Dan O'Bannon, movies, authors (such as HP Lovecraft) and comic books that paved the way for the story, the impact of H.R. Giger's work, and then Ridley Scott's aesthetic, cultural and artistic themes that influenced the tone of the piece etc
Then, heightening the thesis approach, we have various readings of the picture, what it meant (beyond the straight horror/haunted house in space angle).
While its doesn't go quite full-on academia, Memory - The Origins Of Alien is not a documentary for the casual horror movie fan who wants to know how much blood they squirted out of John Hurt during the chestburster scene.
Rather it deconstructs subjective readings of what the film could be telling us on a deeper level and how this all ties back into archetypes found in Ancient Greek myths (The Furies), the art of Francis Bacon, and the real-world body horror of parasitic wasps.
Fascinating viewing for someone who likes that sort of thing (such as me, who would have loved to have had this while reading essays during the film studies elements of my university course), but bound to irritate those who mistakenly thought this was something else (just check some of the IMDB reviews).
However, film geeks and aspiring writers could do worse than absorbing this in-depth examination of the roots of the story that, eventually, became one of the most memorable horror/sci-fi films of all time.
If I have a criticism, it's that Memory - The Origins Of Alien is only 95-minutes long. I'm sure there's so much more to discuss on the mythological origins of Alien and what the film "means" (be it in the shot framing or the bio-mechanical design of the central creature).
It's also a shame that Scott's input is only through second-hand footage, but a lot of key people (in-front and behind) the camera of Alien have their say, even those who've passed (such as Giger and O'Bannon) are included via old interviews, complementing the many other commentators involved.
Recommended to me by my good mate Paul, Galaxy Of Terror is a slightly bonkers, early '80s Alien-wannabe, produced by the legendary Roger Corman and resplendent in that "they're making this up as they go along" feeling that he always brings to his movies.
In an alien galaxy, there is a world ruled by a glowing-headed dictator known as The Master (a very natty special effect, it must be said, and a character that has nothing to do with Doctor Who), who hand picks a miss-matched team of astronauts to embark on a rescue mission to the desolate planet Morganthus - where an earlier ship has crashed.
The rescue team boasts a host of well-known performers: Erin Moran (Joanie from Joanie Loves Chachi and Happy Days), Robert Englund (Nightmare On Elm Street, V etc,) David Lynch-stalwart Grace Zabriskie, horror-movie veteran Sid Haig and familiar TV faces Ray Walston and Bernard Behrens.
Throw in some rubbery monsters and an unpleasant assault by a giant rape-maggot that ranks with the original Evil Dead's animated tree as just plain wrong, and it's no wonder this has become a cult classic.
To be fair it quite quickly shakes off its Alien aspirations as it heads more into pseudo-psychological territory somewhere between Shakespeare and Space 1999.
For a low-budget schlockfest, Galaxy Of Terror has some very impressive visuals: as well as the storm-lashed surface of Morganthus we are treated to the sci-fi/Dungeons & Dragons delights of the massive, maze-like interior of a pyramidal structure the adventurers have to explore to turn off the energy beam that caused them to crash-land as well.
And if that isn't enough of an incentive to track this B-movie treasure down (as long as you can stomach the giant maggot scene and a squirm-worthy moment involving a shard of crystal sliding under someone's skin) there's the added bonus that the film is only 81 minutes long.
Locked into a seemingly inescapable Weyland-Yutani contract on a bleak mining colony in deep space, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her lovable "brother" Andy/ND-255 the android (David Jonsson), a font of dad jokes, team up with some friendly rapscallions to loot a derelict space ship that has just drifted into orbit.
However, upon docking with the craft, they discover it's not a ship, but a hastily abandoned space station. The group hopes to scavenge the cryo-pods so they can put themselves into suspended animation for the nine year flight to another colony.
However, the pods aren't fully fuelled up, so they have to venture further into the station... where they accidentally awaken a legion of facehuggers that were napping there.
Unsurprisingly, chaos ensues.
Matters aren't improved when the young pickers find the only surviving member of the station's crew is the remnants of a droid called Rook.
Rook is the same model synthetic as Ian Holm's Ash from the original Alien... and just as trustworthy.
Slightly wonky CGI has been used to replicate the late Ian Holm's face which makes Rook look more like a Gerry Anderson Thunderbird than anything else.
I get that this was supposed to be a shorthand and an Easter Egg, but ultimately it comes over as a rather uncomfortable design choice.
Written and directed by Fede Álvarez (who gave us the superb Evil Dead remake in 2013), Alien: Romulus makes no attempt to conceal what it is and this is one of its major strengths, for instance there is no need to explain xenomorphs to its audience or hide the fact that Andy is an android.
The film's biggest flaw, however, is its continual blurring of the line between respecting the franchise's lore and replaying its greatest hits (Andy's quoting of one of Ripley's best-known lines was particularly egregious).
While it builds nicely on what has gone before (managing to tie its story, surprisingly, into key elements from Prometheus), the constant need for the script (co-written by Álvarez with Rodo Sayagues) chokes on a surfeit of heavy-handed homages to earlier Alien movies.
And the thing is, it doesn't need them: there's clearly a cracking slasher in space horror film here, with its cast of teenage chum ready to feed the unstoppable, acid-blooded, monsters haunting the floating house.
It is potentially, as Joe Bob Briggs would call it, a perfect "spam in a cabin" movie.
Important elements are nicely foreshadowed and the central performances from the young cast are wholly believable (and appropriate for a sci-fi spin on the slasher genre), this could have been another classic in the well-loved franchise.
And it is a fun movie, but it's let down purely by film's teeth-grindingly awkward urge to scream: "you know that bit you liked in that other Alien film, well here it is in our film!"
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
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