Resident Alien vol. 8

This is the kind of story I’d begin with a “spoiler warning” but that feels kind of unnecessary here.  Vol. 7 was called “The Book of Love” and with this volume being the “The Book of Life,” well… even if you hadn’t read to the end of the previous volume, you could probably guess what’s going on here.  Which is that alien-on-Earth Harry Vanderspiegel and his girlfriend Asta Twelvetrees are having a baby.  This means that the usual pre-parenthood jitters are amplified by fears about whether their kid will look more like their father than their mother, but they’re still present nonetheless.  Even if their kid does look normal, the question still remains as to whether they’ll be good parents on their own, or if they’ll need some extraterrestrial assistance.

Vol. 8 of this series is unusual compared to the previous ones as there’s no small-town crime angle being pursued here.  It’s all about Harry and Asta’s baby and writer Peter Hogan and artist Steve Parkhouse dive into all of the mundanity and low-grade human terror that entails.  The results, as presented by the creators, are pretty charming and move at a surprisingly brisk pace throughout the timeframe encapsulated by this volume.  There are some surprises along the way, but the majority of the storytelling here effectively focuses on the fears and concerns of the parents-to-be here.  It makes for charmingly mundane sci-fi storytelling, and things promise to become more complicated in vol. 9 with its ominous title “The Book of Changes.”