Peter Hogan on Resident Alien: Comic Creator Interview From NYCC 2019

Peter Hogan interview: Resident Alien from comic to TV

New York Comic Con 2019 ran from Thursday, October 3 to Sunday, October 6, and Syfy used it to show off its upcoming adaptation of Resident Alien. On Friday, October 4, the series held a panel at the Hammerstein Ballroom that included a world-premiere screening of the first episode and a Q&A with Alan Tudyk, Sara Tomko, Corey Reynolds and executive producer Chris Sheridan. Away from the stage, at the Dark Horse booth, comics veteran Peter Hogan sat down for a one-on-one conversation about the book he wrote and the show built from it.

Hogan is a longtime comics veteran. He began as editor of the British comic magazine Revolver and is known for his work on 2000 A.D. and on The Sandman Presents: Love Street. Resident Alien is the work most people now connect him with, and it reached a far bigger audience once the TV series arrived. The comic's first chapter ran in Dark Horse Presents, volume 2, issues 4 to 6, between October and December 2011, and the first miniseries, Welcome to Earth!, followed in 2012. Hogan wrote it and Steve Parkhouse drew it.

The comic's premise is simple and unusual. An alien, Captain Hah Re, crashes on Earth and takes on the identity of a retired doctor named Harry Vanderspeigle in the small town of Patience, Washington. The Syfy series, adapted by Chris Sheridan, moved the setting to Colorado and made Tudyk its star. It premiered on January 27, 2021, after a delay caused by the pandemic, and ran for four seasons and 44 episodes before ending in August 2025. When the convention took place, Syfy had not yet announced a premiere date, so the panel and the booth conversation were the first real look at what the series would be.

Where Resident Alien came from

Asked what inspired the series, Hogan gave a practical answer. He and Steve Parkhouse had worked together before, he wanted to work with him again, and he asked what Parkhouse would like to draw. Parkhouse's answer involved aliens, and the idea grew from there. It was a collaboration first and a concept second, which may explain why the book feels more like a conversation between two craftspeople than a pitch.

He also said that Mike Richardson at Dark Horse fell in love with the book and gave him room to do what he wanted. Because of that freedom, he described the comic as its own thing, and he paid little attention to what other creators were doing. The readers who found it before the show seemed to like it, and Hogan hoped the adaptation would widen the audience.

Why a small town

The small-town setting follows from the character. Hogan's thinking was that an alien who has crash-landed would want to hide from the world and keep a low profile, so he would pick the middle of nowhere over downtown Manhattan. In the comic, he has been doing exactly that for a few years when the local doctor dies and the police pull him in to examine the body. That opening carries over to the TV version.

From there, Hogan said, the character is slowly pulled back into the world he was avoiding. The community around him is therefore not decoration. It is the pressure that forces a withdrawn visitor to engage.

What the show changes

Hogan was relaxed about the differences between the book and the series. In his view the producers did their own thing: parts of the comic made it in, and in other places they invented alternatives. He called the result not entirely faithful but very enjoyable, and he said some fans might prefer one version while others like both. It was a generous assessment from an author with every right to be protective.

The biggest change he discussed was the motivation of the main character. In the comic, readers connected with an alien who was not on Earth to abduct or kill anyone. He was a nice guy who was stuck here, and that avoided the usual alien tropes. Television, Hogan noted, is more used to a character on a journey, with an arc that plays out across a season, so the show gave the character a clearer purpose. He said he understood the choice and did not object, and that any adaptation falls short of being fully faithful.

He also said the comedy differs in degree. There is humor in the comic, he explained, but it is gentler. On TV there is more of it, though the drama has not gone away and several layers are at work.

Alan Tudyk and the problem of the alien's face

On Alan Tudyk, Hogan was brief and warm: he called the performance wonderful and the casting perfect. His comments on how to show the alien were more detailed. Chris Sheridan, he said, had considered showing the character as an alien throughout, but that would have meant hours of makeup every day, and he thought it might also confuse a television audience. An audience finds it easier to identify with a human actor.

The comic faces the opposite choice and makes it differently. Hogan had considered switching between forms on the page and decided it would be confusing in print, though he thought it could work on TV. Keeping Harry as an alien in every panel had two advantages. It was intriguing to him that everyone in the story treats Harry as an ordinary person, and even a quiet, domestic, dull scene still has an alien on the page. The same scene in a live-action series would have to find its tension somewhere else.

Spiritual elements and what comes next

The comic explores spiritual themes and a Native American backstory. Hogan said he believed the show would reach that material in later episodes. He had discussed it with Chris Sheridan the night before the interview, and he expected some of it to appear. For readers of the comic, that was one of the more notable pieces of news from the conversation.

Resident Alien comic and TV series compared

What Peter Hogan's answers say about the adaptation

The most striking thing about the conversation is how comfortable Peter Hogan was with change. Many writers are guarded when their work goes to screen. Hogan treated the show as a separate work that shared a starting point with his, and he drew a clear line between what a comic can do and what a series needs. The alien in every panel works because the reader never loses sight of him. A television audience needs a face it can connect with.

His comments on motive were the sharpest. The thing readers loved in the comic, an alien with no plan to harm anyone, is exactly what TV storytelling usually cannot sustain over a season, and Hogan named that tension without complaint. The show that followed carried that trade-off through four seasons on Syfy, which began airing it in January 2021.

Taken together, the answers sketch a clear division of labor. The comic is the place where a quiet alien can sit through a dull domestic scene and still hold a page, and where the reader supplies the sense of secrecy. The series is the place where that secret has to be dramatized, with a face, a voice and an engine for the plot. Hogan neither defends the first nor resists the second.

His advice for anyone trying to break into comics was to read widely and to go beyond comics. Creators, he said, tend to draw on the same movies and the same books, so work ends up recycling the same material. Reading other things or watching more adventurous films gives a writer something different to offer, and that difference is what sets a person apart over the long term.

Readers who want to follow the story further can find the collected comic series at Dark Horse, and the Resident Alien guide collects the show's coverage in one place.

Sources

• Resident Alien (comics), Wikipedia — creators, publisher and publication history