Comic Info
Comic Name: It Came!
Publisher: Titan Books
Writer: Dan Boultwood
Artist: Dan Boultwood
# of Issues: 4
Release Date: 2014
It Came! #2
Reprints It Came! #1-4 (September 2013-November 2013). Something has landed in the English countryside and Doctor Boy Brett and Doris Night are about to discover that aliens have invaded! Now with killer robots and a threatening UFO headed toward London, Boy and Doris must find a way to save humanity from destruction!
Written and illustrated by Dan Boutwood, It Came! is a comic book parody of ’50s sci-fi films. Published by Titan Comics, the four issue story was relatively well received and released as a collection.
’50s sci-fi is one of my soft points. Though the plots, effects, and stock characters are often awful, it is still a fun genre and it has become quite fashionable to mock ’50s sci-fi as a result. Movies like Mars Attacks! and shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 were based around this…and It Came! is a comic book version in the same theme.
It Came! is almost there. It is a rather solid comic but it just doesn’t quite make it over the hump to a very good comic. The story for the comic is a bit conflicted. The comic is presented as a movie of an alien invasion and that Boy and Doris are really played by the actors Dick Claymore and Fanny Flanders. I don’t really see a need for this extra layer. If you hadn’t read the first couple pages or last few pages, you wouldn’t know that it was supposed to be a movie of an alien invasion. I was fine with it just being a goofy sci-fi themed story that felt like a movie.
It Came! #3
The characters are supposed to be stock characters. Boy is the stuffed shirt scientist who always has witty lines and Doris is the more self-aware fun assistant (almost more Doctor Who than ’50s sci-fi). Sometimes Boutwood takes the parody a bit too far, but other times he nails it. I particularly like the part where they dramatically dive through the UFO’s closing bay doors…only to find they are closing a lot slower than they anticipated in classic serial style.
Visually, the comic is quite strong. The story is presented in black-and-white and there are more aspects to make it “filmic” in quality. The story has previews (complete with a claymation dinosaur) and bios for the actors. It is a pretty slick package in that sense, but the story needed a tad more substance.
It Came! is good but not great. It is a fun comic and fans of ’50s sci-fi might want to check it out. I could see a “sequel” to It Came! and I think the comic would benefit from a sequel to expand on this actual movie theme. With only four issues, It Came! has a tough road to grab the viewers and explore the characters to a proper degree…maybe it will get another chance.
