Alien Nation: The Spartans

This was the first set of Alien Nation comics out. Unfortunately the comics were not allowed to use Matt and George as characters which, I think, was a mistake.

Art Deco is a missing Newcomer who is being looked for by Ruth Lawrence from the Newcomer Advocacy League. A group of humans named the Spartans are anti-Newcomer. He escapes from his cell but when he gets outside a guy with a water shooter filled with salt water shoots Art Deco. Since he is a Newcomer, this is enough to kill him.

A guy named Harvey Wallbanger has been arrested for hitting a convenience store worker. The store was being protested because it sold animals to Newcomers who use them as food. The Newcomers could only eat uncooked protein as their digestive system cannot processed cooked food.

Harvey wants to find his missing brother, who happens to be Art Deco.

Slagtown is the ghetto in which most Newcomers live and we get introduced to another character, Gloria Mundy. The two thugs who killed Art Deco tranquilize Gloria.

Harvey gets freed and gets back to his apartment but runs into another Newcomers, this one a Klee'Zahn'Zoon. He refers to Harvey as cargo and tells him Art is dead.

Herein is one problem with the comic; you must have been watching Alien Nation for any of this to make any sense at all. That's fine if you want to target to just that group of people, but for a comic to have any hope of surviving for long you should at least have a brief introduction, going over some terms, for the reader who make not know the series. The front of the comic has some helpful material, but the importance of something like the Klee'Zahn'Zoon would only be understood by someone familiar with the movie and/or the television series.

Harvey won't say anything more to Ruth other than that he knows for a fact that his brother is dead. She has no intention of stopping here investigation, though, since Gloria Mundy had worked for the same company that Art had worked for.

When Mundy wakes up she finds she's strapped down onto a huge metal table. She is tortured. Some one wants to find out the name of her overseer. Ruth meets with the head of the company and he later tells her he thinks drugs may be involved. Someone kills him and then tries to kill her, but the Klee'Zahn'Zoon from before kills that guy.

So far the story is staying quite interesting.

The Klee'Zahn'Zoon explains that he is actually an FBI agent and is investigating a group called The Spartans. We see them at the start of the issue. The next day they question a guy at the convenience store and find out the Spartans are looking for Newcomers who, on the ship, were involved with the technology, particularly that of the engines. Ruth and Justin, the FBI guy, are captured and Ruth finds out who is behind what is going on and what he wants to do. They manage to escape but get separated.

Ruth talks to the guy the Spartans are after, William Tell. She has a very hard time convincing him she's telling the truth, but things are put into motion that back up her story. There's a major shootout near the end of the story and the Spartans are at least slowed down if not stopped. The whole four-issue story makes sense and is quite good.

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