Review- John Carpenter's Tales Of Science Fiction: Vault #1-3

John Carpenter's Tales Of Science Fiction: Vault #1-3 (Storm King, cover dates July- September, 2017)

Writer: James Ninness (series created by John Carpenter and Sandy King)

Artist: Andres Esparza

Colorist: Sergio Martinez

John Carpenter's latest comic book creation is an ongoing science fiction series, albeit with a Horror bent a la The Thing. While it is easy to pass this series off as an Alien meets The Thing riff, one would be missing the point and the punchline of this series if they did that. While the aforementioned movies are certainly reference points here they are not what this series is all about.

I try not to spoil books when I review them or give blow by blow book report style reviews. I'll try to touch on a few points and let you decide if it's something you might like. The crew of the Gaia are your standard rag tag bunch seen in these types of movies, with the dynamics of distrust and politics that you would find in any group of people. The Gaia encounters an unknown ship and decides to board it. We've all seen this before and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that something is wrong from the word go.

With the recent discovery of a new black hole so close to our solar system, this series was better timed than even the creators could have hoped for. Black holes are a huge mystery that we are only scratching the surface of understanding. It's here that we have the springboard for the Vault series. I'm not giving away anything else other than we are not alone and it's only a matter of time before unforeseen circumstances lead to unintended consequences for mankind.

I've read these three issues as they came out and again once the series was completed, and it works better as a whole story than as individual parts. Some comics series are like that. While I primarily read collected editions I do buy all Storm King stuff in singles first. At three issues I can't imagine this being collected as a stand alone book. It will likely be compiled with one of the other Tales Of Science Fiction series down the road. The next one is Vortex and issue 1 is out now.

Junk Food For Thought rating: 4 out of 5.