Travel Back to LV-426 in ‘Aliens: Aftermath #1’ (review)

Written by Benjamin Percy
Art by Dave Wachter
Published by Marvel Comics

I honestly didn’t think I wanted or needed any more stories from the Alien universe, but Marvel continues to knock it out the park with this latest entry.

Aliens: Aftermath delivers on that title, taking place 35 years after the events of Aliens, coinciding with the 35^th anniversary of the James Cameron-directed sequel.

You know the story: Ripley, having survived the events of Alien, wakes from a cryo-sleep pod 57 years later.

She then travels with a crew of hired marines to rescue a colony built on the same fated moon LV-426.

Did I think Alien stories could shift with the times?

Nope.

But it’s interesting to read about anti-corporate pirates and terrorists in 23rd-century Earth as Americans currently are going through the nation’s second Gilded Age amid worldwide paroxysms of late-stage capitalism on the brink of irreversible (in humanity’s lifetime, anyway) environmental ruin.

Our story opens with a livefeed broadcast of anti-corporate rebels Renegade XM blowing up a Weyland-Yutani fueling station. The kind of station that would have fueled Ripley’s ship Nostromo 92 years ago.

While the explosion was fun – at least for their burly, bravado-filled leader – the mission also was for extracting some W-Y corporate data on a site scrubbed from the maps. And they find it: evidence of LV-426, and of Hadley’s Hope, the colony overrun by Xenomoprhs that was destroyed in a nuclear blast when the colony’s power plant melted down.

As the crew travels to LV-426 and find the ruins of Hadley’s Hope, our loudmouthed leader does a confessional to camera where he reveals that not only were his parents killed in a Weyland-Yutani cryo-pod malfunction. He’s also Cutter Vasquez, nephew of Private Vasquez, the memorably buff and tough-as-nails female marine killed in Aliens.

(Also, they give Vasquez’s first name as Jennette, as homage to actress Jenette Goldstein from the movie. Though that’s a dubious honor to me because it was a white actress in apparent brownface. So.)

The story continues with thrills and chills both old and new. Including a new form of the Xenomorph that apparently happens when one is born into a nuclear winter.

Some other tight reversals are plotted out by Benjamin Percy, and Dave Wachter’s art evokes the Aliens movie plus the Moebius artwork that inspired the original film as well.