Written by Philip Kennedy Johnson
Art by Salvador Larroca
Published by Marvel Comics
Hey, didn’t you want another story set in the Alien franchise?
The travails of the iconic Xenomorph creature, and the spaceways corporation hell-bent on acquiring this horrorshow being, make their Marvel Comics debut.
What?
Marvel’s making Alien comics now?
Yes. Back in 2019, Disney bought out 21st Century Fox, which owns the rights to the franchise. The writing was on the wall for Dark Horse Comics’ long, venerable run with Alien and Star Wars, held by also-acquired Lucasfilm. Why would Disney, with its own comic book company in Marvel, sell off its rights to these – or any – franchise ever again?
And so here we are.
For a stone of a franchise that Fox keeps wringing a diminishing amount of blood from, Alien is still here. Ridley Scott – old and blown – still keeps wanting to tell more stories, uncover new mysteries.
The franchise has been with me my entire life. The original Alien premiered June 22, 1979, about a year and a half before I was born. The Xenomorph – that sleek, sexual and nightmarish H.R. Giger design – was in the public consciousness to the extent that I knew of it without having seen it.
I saw the sequel, James Cameron’s action-horror Aliens, at age 8 when my father bought a VHS copy. (Kids of the ’80s saw so many R-rated movies, and so many PG and PG-13 movies with casual boobs in them.)
I got off the ride in 1997 along with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley clone in Alien: Resurrection. Prometheus lured me back in 2012, only to send me running away again. Who really cares to learn more about Weyland-Yutani Corp., whoever created the Xenomorphs, or anything else? The more details got filled in, the least interesting it all got, in my opinion. The mystery was better.
The aliens appear, people get killed, somebody fights them, explosion-explosion-explosion, and the cycle begins again. The Dark Horse comics were fine with this, too.
What more could be told? Marvel’s new series tries to answer that question, and so far, so good.
The new series, taking place 21 years after the events of Aliens, introduces us to Gabriel Cruz, a recently retired soldier who barely survived an alien attack while working for Weyland-Yutani. (I still prefer when folks just call it “the Company.”) Cruz now is trying to patch things up with his abandoned son, but his re-entry into civilian life is rough as expected.
When we first meet Cruz, he’s describing a dream in which he’s trapped in an apparent cryogenic tube. The panels depict his point of view from inside the pod; the words “alien inside” are painted on the glass. He looks out upon a swarming brood of Xenomorphs, and among them is a humanoid figure who looks like a cross between the creatures and a woman. She’s new, different.
We then find out that Cruz is narrating his dream to a Bishop android. Salvador Larroca draws a reasonable Lance Henriksen, by the way. Cruz is leaving his post on the Epsilon Orbital Research and Development Station and returning to Earth.
If there’s anything that’s unexplored in my Alien franchise familiarity, it’s always been Earth and whatever this imagined 22nd-century future is. It’s definitely not Star Trek, we know that much.
(The Expanse novels and TV show basically threw social commentary of humanity’s future into an Alien story with the protomolecule as their version of the xenomorph. Go read and watch those, why don’t you?)
Philip Kennedy Johnson does a decent job hitting the Alien stuff you want to see already in the first issue, trying to put the hook of the song out first before digging into the verses.
Larocca’s art appears to be going for that ripped-from-the-movies feel to the point that everything feels like he traced the characters and their faces them from TV show screenshots on his iPad. Between that and the nearly all-widescreen panels layouts, I’m not that impressed. I want my comic books to be comic books. The splash pages, therefore, show up even stronger than they are.
We quickly find out that Cruz’s son, Danny, is part of a militant anti-corporate group seeking to expose Weyland-Yutani’s misdeeds and shut them down. Hints at his backstory drop during an argument with his father, who’s desperate to reconnect. Danny uses the moment at his father’s house to steal an access key to Epsilon.
With all that laid out, when and how does it go wrong? When will a facehugger get sprung loose? And then the killing and the death and the explosion-explosion-explosion?
Worry not, friends. This issue’s got you. The turn happens quickly and shockingly, in a comic book with PARENTAL ADVISORY printed in small type next to the bar code.
We’re definitely in an Alien story.
