X Isle does not astound and get good this issue.
But, there were a few times I was actually impressed. The comic’s got terrible dialogue and middling plotting, but artist Greg Scott’s occasionally able to transcend the dialogue and make the action work. There’s a dinosaur versus human fight this issue, and some of it’s played for laughs.
It doesn’t end played for laughs; it ends played for cruelty because the ship crew—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the sidekick, maybe Michael Biehn as the captain (or whoever would’ve been a Biehn-type in 2006 when they tried selling this as a movie)–are assholes and the bad guys.
But it’s a good dinosaur fight scene. Scott does an excellent job breaking out the action. Unfortunately, he does a hilariously bad job just a few pages later. See, last issue, the good guys (who are looking for the annoying college coed daughter) found a spaceship, and this issue explains the spacecraft and the island and the monsters and so on. But the bad guys aren’t with the good guys, so the bad guys don’t know about the spaceship.
Sam Jackson, Tim Allen, and the coed’s love interest are exploring the spaceship, and they think they’ve got it figured. It’s like a zoo spaceship, and it crashed, freeing alien creatures from across the galaxy on one island on planet Earth. No sign of Christopher Pike and Vina yet.
There’s a terrible gory action sequence in the ship. Someone covered in blood, someone gasping a last noise. Even if it weren’t for the script, Scott’s art would still be accidentally hilarious. It’s a comedy beat with a gore death.
If the rest of the comic followed suit, great. Sadly, it doesn’t.
Then at the end, the coed returns to whine, and I’d forgotten how badly Michael A. Nelson writes her dialogue.
Frankly, not much hope for the next and final issue with her back. But, whatever, almost done.
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