When you think of the Alien franchise, what iconic images come to mind? Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in a giant power loader suit or going face-to-face with a Xenomorph? The first facehugger? Hicks, Hudson and Vasquez realizing they were facing something hopeless? Queen of sci-fi Veronica Cartwright’s scream at the first terrifying chest burst? Ridley holding Jonesy finally sighing with relief that they survived the alien onslaught? Dozens of these and other iconic images are packed into a new adult coloring book, Alien: The Coloring Book, coming this May from Titan Books.
The adult coloring book business is gaining steam with publishers taking extra efforts to see that the artwork inside meets the standard of the franchise. Alien: The Coloring Book has pulled together artwork that resembles the actors and key scenes from the movie, but also does so in a visually interesting manner and conforms to the whole point of these books: to give fans a chance to color their favorite scenes (in or outside the lines).
Creating scenes from all of the Alien movies featuring heroine Ellen Ripley are artists Leandro Casco, Wellington Diaz, Vinz El Tabanas, Salvador Navarro, Guilherme Raffide, Rubine, Vincenzo Zerov Salvo, Adriano Vicente, and Daniel Wichinson. Eighty pages provide Xenomorphs, chestbursters, Xenomorph eggs, your favorite characters, spacesuits, ships, Ridley Scott’s futuristic sets and H.R. Giger-inspired designs. One of the fun illustrations features Lance Henriksen’s cyborg Bishop playing mumbletypeg with the hand of Private Hudson (played by the late Bill Paxton).
on Blu-Ray, 3D, and DVD. The trailer to the video release gets it just right–there are so many unanswered questions left in this summer’s big-budget blockbuster, sci-fi release that you may think you’re watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. What was this Dr. Manhattan-looking being in the distant past and in our distant future eating that dissolved him into the ocean? How does that being relate to the rather squiggly creature that emerged in one of the movie’s key scenes? Why didn’t Scott just come out and call this a prequel? Surprise, people! It’s a prequel! It’s actually really good at being a prequel, because unlike other prequel movies, it doesn’t re-hash every bit of the original film or films.
) and not so great (
) Vault compilations to hit the shelves is the new 
by Ian Nathan. I checked this out at the bookstore today and found it to be an impressive collection of photos and a typical sampling of reproduced ephemera from Ridley Scott’s science fiction and horror classic. Compared to other Vault offerings this one falls in the middle.
by Paul Scanlon and Michael Gross, 
by H.R. Giger, and in the additional materials included with the 
. If you haven’t seen those, this will be new to you. The book is slipcased, and smaller than prior Vaults, which are typically unwieldy in their weight and wide “landscape” style design, so small is good here. The illustrations are interesting for the Alien fan who has done no prior reading on the subject–behind the scenes views of the set design, particularly of the Nostromo rooms and corridors, could cause you to spend a good deal of time gawking at this book. It features director Ridley Scott’s annotated storyboards, Polaroids and script excerpts, costume designs, sketches and blueprints of the Nostromo, photos of cast and crew, and images of H.R. Giger’s concept artwork. The film itself not for the squeamish, expect to find several special effects images of chest bursts, the alien monster itself and plenty of alien goo.
, and with that comparison this must be a decent assemblage of behind the scenes data. With little in print currently available to Alien fans, this book is a long time coming. Although this book has vastly less material to assemble, it is arranged similarly to the 
