'Alienated' #1 Review: Story of 3 teens and an alien is a collaborative masterpiece with an animated film feel
Spoiler alert for 'Alienated' #1
The element of surprise in comics is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to conjure, especially in #1 issues. Comic books are the home of bizarre concepts and their serialized format encourages a range of shocking cliffhangers on a monthly basis. Comic book readers are, essentially, just about ready for anything, meaning that in order to pull the rug from under a reader's feet, a comic first needs to establish firm grounding. It needs to set the mood.
'Alienated' #1? It's a mood.
Written by Si Spurrier with art by Chris Wildgoose, colors by Andre May and lettering by Jim Campbell, 'Alienated' is the story of three teenagers who find an alien in the woods and are given more power than any easily corruptible teenager ought to have.
The first issue does not dive into all that right away though. It spends just enough time establishing its characters before introducing its inciting incident, before using that incident to further establish its characters and their world in some inventive ways.
The promotion for this series suggests that the alien, Chip, is going to be a big part of the series, but he is not a big part of this issue. We are instead given a look into the minds of Samuel, Samantha and Samir — the "three kids called Sam".
As is the case with comics, it can be sometimes hard to tell when an idea is symbolic of something bigger or just a really silly joke, but the shared name does put across one thing rather interestingly — the feeling that the kids are bound by something they had no control over and would not choose to be bound by if it was up to them. A name is a personal thing and having to share it with someone else when you are a bit of a societal outcast is a strange kind of bond to have.
As is also the case with comics, the symbolic becomes literal when the three Sams find the alien's cocoon and are compelled to reach out and touch it — which immediately binds the three of them together with a psychic connection. They can read each other's heads and share each other's thoughts as easily as if they were sharing a single mind, whether they want to or not, and it's here that the strong establishing work of the preceding pages really comes into play.
Each of the kids has an emptiness in them, in their own way. Samuel, an anonymous anti-establishment YouTube vlogger, yearns to be seen. He also desperately wants to stay out of the spotlight until he can be seen in the exact way he wants to be seen.
Samantha has her walls up high, holding some unrevealed past trauma deep inside her and waiting out her senior years of high school so she can move on to her new life. In her head, she's already gone.
Samir, outwardly the most social of the bunch, is so desperate to be liked that his outer personality is something of an empty canvas, a badly drawn reflection of whatever he thinks people want to see.
None of them are the kinds of people who really want anyone else to see the insides of their heads — but protagonists who get just what they want rarely make for good stories, yes?
May's colors play a big role in establishing the moods of the characters. They color the characters, color the backgrounds of their panels and color their captions — a handy storytelling trick that lets you know who is talking once the characters share conversations, despite not being in the same room together. A tired blue for Samuel, lonely and sad. A more vivid green marks the intensity of Samantha's feelings and her need to just hold on for six more months until she can leave. Red for Samir, despite the seemingly open, welcoming smile on his face, for all the inner rage he keeps surprisingly well hidden, even in his own head.
The mind is such an ephemeral place and representing it is an artistic challenge that the Wildgood-May-Spurrier team apparently relishes. Half-formed images, some metaphorical and some literal, awash with the representative colors of the mind they come from. Feelings expressed in fragmented phrases, clipped away from dramatic structure for maximum impact. The art of Wildgoose and May creates an animated, vivid world with rich backgrounds that bring it to life.
Reading through the comic can feel a little bit like watching a well-animated movie. The characters, the pacing of the panels combined with title cards placed just so control the flow of the comic reading experience in a very effective way. You can almost hear the soundtrack.
Just when you feel the comic's about lonely teenagers sharing thought space together, though, that shocking moment I was talking about earlier comes into play. The art violently imparts the urgency of the moment and changes the scope of the comic entirely.
'Alienated' #1 waits until the very end to play its hook card, taking its time to illustrate what's going to make the series good before letting you know what makes it thrilling. It's a must-read comic book about being just far enough outside of society to resent your lonely place within it and then suddenly having the power to change everything.
'Alienated' #1 is out now, wherever comic books are sold.