As everyone knows, the real star of Alien is not Ripley or the xenomorph, but Jonesy the ginger cat. Jonesy (who was actually played by four different, uncredited, moggies) is the only survivor of the Nostromo besides Ripley and his story needs to be told dammit.
After almost 40 years, Ridley Scott’s ship’s cat is finally getting his chance thanks to an 80-page illustrated book by Rory Lucey called Jonesy: Nine Lives On The Nostromo.
As you can see by the cover, Jonesy looks like he’s having a ball with a facehugger, but we all know it can’t have been easy for him running around that ship of nightmares, popping out of crates at all the wrong times.
“At the scary moments I tried to either diffuse the situation with cat hijinks, like Jonesy licking his butt in the escape pod during the final showdown, or play into the tension and have Jonesy be scared,” Lucey told io9. “Cats don’t exactly react to situations in human-appropriate ways, so just staying true to that helped bring the humour in naturally.”
So is it suitable for kids? Not exactly. “What I’ve said to my art students is that they should pay attention to the context clues of what is happening around Jonesy in the book,” says Lucey, who teaches art in a New Jersey high school. “And see if they, one, really want to see a movie like that and then two, have a conversation with their parents about if it is the right time.”
With any luck, Jonesy: Nine Lives On The Nostromo will kick-start a new sub-genre in illustrated fiction that the literary world has been crying out for, and we’ll see plenty more horror movies retold from the perspective of pets. We want to see Chips the dog’s take on Dawn Of The Dead, or find out what that German Shepherd really thought of The Hills Have Eyes. Then there’s Harry in Amityville Horror, Barney in Gremlins, Muffin in Friday the 13th Part 2…