One of the things I love about superhero comics is the ‘anything goes’ nature of the genre; you can have spacemen, cowboys and wizards on the same team, and no one bats an eye. The superhero book has evolved over time in a somewhat haphazard fashion, with writers and artists grabbing ideas from every possible source as they desperately search for a new gag to make their latest deadline. But we in the modern age have the luxury of looking back over all that has come before, able to pick and choose those elements that appeal to us when we steal for our own books.
I’ve loved science fiction in all its forms since I was little, though it was of course Star Wars that really blew my mind and made me want to find out how movies worked, a passion that eventually drove me to attend film school many years later. The late 70s and early 80s was a great time to be a kid; every week some amazing movie, TV show or book came out, and you got some really great birthday and Christmas gifts. I got two wonderful glossy softback books as a young nerd that would shape my concept of what science fiction could be: Di Fate’s Catalog of Science Fiction Hardware and Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. These two tomes were my constant companions during my junior high years, devoured and abused until their perfect-bound pages started to fall out. Di Fate’s book is a tour of some of the coolest weapons and technology ever featured in SF novels, with vivid paintings and crude but effective diagrams and blueprints, covering the works of Saberhagen, Wells, EE ‘Doc’ Smith, Heinlein and a host of other classic authors. But as cool as that book was, Barlowe’s Guide was even cooler.
Drawing on much of the same pool of brilliant writers and fantasists that Di Fate had, Wayne Douglas Barlowe produced a marvelous catalog of alien races that he illustrated with almost photorealistic detail. I hadn’t read a lot of classic SF at that time, but I would encounter several of these entities years later, and it would be Barlowe’s take on the character I would recall. What really made an impression on me was just how damned alien some of these creatures really were, with all kinds of crazy tentacles, pseudopods and crystalline structures in their bodies. But the aliens we encounter in pop SF like Star Wars and Star Trek tend to be of the ‘bumpy forehead’ school, for the obvious reason that they are meant to be played by humans, but even in the world of comic books, where anything’s possible, most aliens still look a lot like us. Kryptonians, Skrulls, the Shi’ar and many other races often have great concepts and designs, but still come off as just humans with cool powers.*
I decided to stick with a small number of races, three of them allied with humans and a fourth that is as sinister as it is mysterious; partly I did this to keep my job simple, but I also wanted to give the universe a sense of scale. The Milky Way galaxy is truly vast, and we live in only one small corner of it; there may be many more races out there, but will we ever live to see them?
Starting next post, I will introduce you to the other members of the ‘Alliance of the Great Wing’, the Orthi, the Lhan-Gar and the Nameless!
“Fight the Light!”
* Another source of wonderfully alien aliens is White Wolf’s late lamented roleplaying game Trinity, which I personally feel is the best science fiction game to date (sorry Traveller!)
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