Writer: Victor Gischler

Artist: Tazio Bettin

Here’s the downside of decompressed storytelling: it becomes really hard to jump in at the endpoint of a story. Comics are sold in segments over five or six months with the intention of telling a whole story, but that assumes readers have the luxury of being there for the whole thing. Jumping in later is hard, and readers have to hope that their shops have the prior issues if they want to go back and get the whole thing.

So here I am jumping into Titan’s Independence Day adaption, and it’s tolerable but also the equivalent of walking into the last 20 percent of a movie. I’ve got a notion of what’s going on–one of those alien suit monsters from the movies is running loose on a submarine, while a human sub is battling an alien sub beneath the ocean–but beyond that I’ve got little context to the characters.  At best, I can tell that this appears to be an all-new cast unconnected to the original 1996 film, and that the story is set sometime before this summer’s sequel.

Not bad but just kind of there, Independence Day #5 follows the same basic pattern of “creepy monster in tight quarters” that’s already been done in Alien and similar franchises. What’s difficult to follow this late in the game is the fact that half the action takes place on the aliens’ own submarine, something which might be obvious do readers of the first four issues, but not so clear to late arrivals. Victor Gischler’s script at least has a clear finish (with an obvious nod to next month’s film), so the story’s not a total loss for readers wanting to dip into more Independence Day stories.

But that’s ultimately what this comic is–a basic “franchise comic” that exists as a merchandise expansion without really getting deep into its source material (though with only two movies, there’s not much to get into). As I explained in our Prometheus comic review, unexplored franchises have difficulty being relevant when there’s not much in the original work. So while the Independence Day story is competent, it’s also just sort of “there” and doesn’t give us much beyond what the original did so well back in 1996.

Rating: Two and a half Goldblums out of five.