Written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson
Art by Salvador Larroca
Published by Marvel Comics
My, my, does Salvatore Larocca draw a lovely Xenomorph.
Close your eyes, and I bet you can picture the beast perfectly. Sinewy, shiny, drooling, with the teeth and claws and barbed tail.
Larocca captures all of that.
Yet there’s still something a bit lacking when we finally see the monster.
It’s less about what we see, because the Xenomorph’s debut is Larocca’s best page in the issue.
It’s about what we don’t see.
This Xenomorph has just enacted a particularly vile piece of wreckage on a Space Marine, yet it appears without the gore I would expect. And one of those massive, alien hands is covering the main arena of bodily violence. It makes me speculate whether Marvel wanted to tone this down, even for a book that says PARENTAL ADVISORY on the cover.
It’s odd, when the previous issue gave us a close-up of someone’s head being blown off with a shotgun.
This briskly paced issue doesn’t mess around.
Just when retired soldier Gabriel Cruz thought he was out, Weyland-Yutani pulls him back in. Cruz’s old boss arrives on his doorstep with the news that his son Danny is in a party of anti-corporate terrorists who infiltrated Epsilon station and killed guards and research scientists on board.
Oh, and he doesn’t have to tell Cruz what else was aboard. Secure the specimen alive, Ted says.
Cruz heads to the station with a couple of young soldiers who, in classic fashion, have no idea what’s going on. My hopes for them were small when they didn’t even know who Cruz was as a big dog at Epsilon. At least one viewed the briefing, but it ain’t say nothin’ ‘bout no Xenomorphs!
It’s a cliché, but this is an Alien book. We also get a scared little girl singing a song to herself as her grampa gets facehugged or sliced into oblivion.
We get emergency lighting that bathes the station in red lights and black shadows, and soldiers shooting into the dark. Stay with Cruz, because he’s a seasoned Xenomorph expert and killer.
We get some more peeks at the nightmare mission Cruz survived 20 years before, too. I’m very intrigued to see how that side of the story unfolds. Also, because this story takes place 21 years after the events of Aliens, will that flashback tie to aftereffects of that movie, or even Alien 3?
Bring it on!
