“Yesterday’s” Comic> ALF #30

Quick, stop him before he starts pushing internet stock trading!

ALF #30

Marvel Comics (June, 1990)

For those of you who missed my reviews of the other few ALF comics I own, there are typically three stories per issue, one set on Melmac as ALF tells the Tanners about his homeplanet. (It was lost from my collection but I found it among a bunch of stuff. It should have stayed lost.) Meanwhile, at this point in the show baby Eric was added to the cast, which features into our first story.

“Speaker Of The House” breaks out yet another wacky Melmacian invention, the Vocabulariat, which temporarily allows someone wrapped in it to speak another language. I don’t know how that language is chosen, but Eric ends up with it and gets looped twice, allowing him to speak English and Klingon before his checkup. It’s at this point that I think they were running out of crazy Orbit Guard gear, and there isn’t much to this story. The only bad thing is having reschedule the baby’s checkup.

The “Melmac Memories” section is “Beau Jester”. When Brian’s girlfriend gives him the cold shoulder, ALF tells him about the time he though Rhonda gave him the brush-off (by sending him her brush–these are the jokes, people). So he joins a French Foreign Legion pun. But they run into trouble because with all the guys running off to forget nobody is buying Florence Nightingown’s dresses, so “Florence Of Arabia” gets the Legionnaires’ exes to go to the base and woo them back, including Rhonda (who just wanted Gordon to fix her brush). If this sounded lame to you, try reading it. I spared you the other puns that riddled this thing.

Our final story, “Kung Food For Thought!” has ALF teaching Brian the Melmacian Martial Art of Kung Food. It should surprise nobody who has heard of this series, TV or comic, to learn it’s weaponizing a food fight. It is also rather lame.

While some of the other later issues of this tie-in that barely tied in were also weak, they had something going for it, like the Melmacian version of Dungeons & Dragons. This has nothing going for it. At some point they lost the ability to make Melmac as ridiculous as they could, because there’s only so far you can take a gimmick like that. Just avoid this issue.