Blue Book #1 // Review
The evening of September 19th, 1961, husband and wife Betty and Barney Hill reported having been abducted by extraterrestrials. Their story was explored at length in the best-selling 1966 book The Interrupted Journey and inspired a number of TV adaptations, including 1975’s The UFO Incident and countless others since. Now the Hills’ story serves as the central story to the first issue of writer James Tynion IV’s new mini-series Blue Book. The author of The Department of Truth and Something Is Killing the Children explores straight-ahead popular legends in an issue captured in page and panel by Michael Avon Oeming.
It’s a late night. A road trip. Betty and Barney Hill are returning to New Hampshire from a vacation to Niagara Falls. They aren’t going to make it back until 2:30 in the morning on September 20th. Along the drive, they see something in the sky that seems to be following them. Looking through a pair of binoculars, Betty sees an 0dd-shaped craft with flashing multicolored lights. Things get weird from there as Barney sees things that don’t appear to be human. Then in a back-up story, Tynion explores legends of Coney Island that include the giant metal Elephantine Colossus.
Tynion is simply presenting the story of Betty and Barney Hill. The script follows an abbreviated path of The Interrupted Journey. Theoretically, the weirdness of the event would be enough to sell itself without further adaptation and embellishment, but aside from deciding on the pacing, Tynion isn’t actually doing a whole lot for the story. It’s always fascinating to take another look at one of the first-ever UFO close encounter stories, but Tynion isn’t doing much here that hasn’t already been done countless times in other formats. There’s little in the first issue of Blue Book that wouldn’t already be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with the Hills’ case.
Oeming casts the story in black, white, and light blue. So much attention has been paid to the remarkable events of September 19th, 1961. Relatively little focus has been paid to the relationship between the Hills. Oeming does a good job of placing Betty and Barney in a social setting as they return from Niagara Falls. The overwhelming darkness of the night is overcome with a deep light blue with white highlights. The simple visuals allow the story to present itself with stark intensity. That being said...it doesn’t provide a whole lot of additional style or insight to a story that has been haunting popular culture for decades.
Project Blue Book was a government study on UFOs that ran from 1952 to 1969. Tynion has set up an opportunity to explore a few different stories from that era that might gain something from a comic book format if he can find a novel way to approach them. There are so many stories that haven’t had the kind of exposure that The Interrupted Journey has had over the decades. Tynion’s back-up on Coney Island is fun, though. A few supporting pages of the weird could contribute to a relatively well-rounded mini-series.
