Alien Nation: The Skin Trade

This is the third series, starting in March of 1991.

A Newcomer doctor announces that an operation he performed was successful and the patient died. The story contradicts, sort of, what the last series said. The previous series said the Newcomer ship landed because of a faulty auto-pilot, but this one goes back to the 'cause unknown' concept.

The story is partially narrated by Mason Jar, a private Newcomer detective. The story gets going like a very bad, very old stereotype detective story with the beautiful woman coming into the office and wanting help. (Couldn't they have come up with something more believable.) Anyhow, she says her husband is missing.

Her husband tended to get drunk on milk. Later we see some Newcomer rich thug have her husband's body disposed of. There is a neat two-page spread on the main characters of the story, with drawings. The detective saves a Newcomer bum from being beat up and finds out someone is running an operation where Newcomers can get something like skin grafts to make them look like humans so they can get better jobs. The gang boss' name is Dexter Methorophan.

The detective goes through the boss' office and ends up getting caught. The story is actually turning out to be fairly interesting.

We find out a human has been operated on to make him appear to be a Newcomer, and that Methorophan is behind it all. The detective, by the way, had escaped and now has Methorophan as an enemy. The detective goes to a morgue and finds the woman's husband's body and learns that six Newcomers have turned up dead, all of then basically scalped. Then we find out the wife has just killed a bunch of human street thugs.

Methorophan has the wife kidnapped and he and his thugs are going to cut off the spots on her head. The detective finds out that the wife is not as innocent as she seems, and the entire thing ends up being a matter of who has control of a particular narcotics trade.

Mason gets to the hospital but ends up being caught by Methorophan's thugs. Being a hospital, though, there are things like bottles of saline (salt-water) solutions lying around, and Mason is able to use that to his advantage. The police arrive and things are quickly settled, although Mason has to confront Anna, the guy's wife, about her part in the narcotics trade. Overall this has been a good series. A little old-fashioned, but it's done well.

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