Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens: a sequel to one of the greatest sequels of all time

In the summer of 1986, 20^th Century Fox released writer/director James Cameron’s follow up to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Aliens is the best kind of sequel: it benefits from association with the original, but at the same time it stands firmly on its own merits, requiring no familiarity with the previous film in order to be enjoyable. Indeed, when I first saw it as a young teenager, I had no idea it was a sequel, having been far to young to have seen Alien when it was released seven years earlier.

The film’s perfect blend of horror, action, and science fiction was wildly successful with audiences, but it spawned very little in the way of tie-in merchandise. According to author J. W. Rinzler in The Making of Aliens (Titan Books, 2020), “Fox had been burned by its over-enthusiasm for product tied to the previous R-rated Alien. On their second go-round they played it safe…” Nevertheless, there remained a great deal of enthusiasm for the film, no doubt sustained by its 7 Academy Award nominations (including a best actress nod for Sigourney Weaver) and two wins, as well as a 1987 home video release.

In 1988, fledgling publisher Dark Horse Comics decided to try their hand at licensed publishing, beginning with Godzilla and Aliens in May of that year. Unusually for a media tie-in, the first six issues of Aliens (plus an 8-page supporting story in their flagship title Dark Horse Presents) were published in black and white, but this was to the series’ advantage. Artist Mark A. Nelson’s highly detailed, atmospheric drawings made for some intriguing house ads, and gave the series an atmosphere that color reproduction of the time might have struggled to match.

Writer Mark Verheiden weaves an intriguing tale that takes place 10 years after the events of the film. The survivors of LV-426 have not done well since returning to Earth. Newt is now in a mental institution, suffering from crippling PTSD and debilitating nightmares about her experiences. Corporal Hicks has been scarred both physically and mentally by his encounter with the Aliens and the loss of his entire marine squad — he has fallen into alcoholism and frequently finds himself locked up for disorderly behavior.

Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is conspicuously absent, apparently due to Dark Horse’s inability to secure permission to use the actress’ likeness. The story cleverly gets around this seemingly insurmountable problem by making a few oblique and mysterious references to the character’s ultimate fate, and she would finally begin to appear in the comics a few years later.

Having established the current situation for the two returning characters, the story goes on to introduce two seemingly separate subplots. In one, a chance encounter with an Alien-infested derelict enables the Marine Corps to determine the location of what they believe to be the Aliens’ home planet. Unfortunately, Bionational, a competitor of the films’ faceless Weyland-Yutani Corporation, is right behind them, and what’s more, Bionational has recovered a surviving salvage pilot who is carrying a soon-to-be-born Alien Queen.

Meanwhile, we meet Salvaje, an obscure televangelist who has an unhealthy fascination with pregnancy, and is using an image of the Alien as the centerpiece of his religious movement. If you are at all familiar with the Alien’s life cycle, you can probably see where this is headed…

The story does a lot with dreams and nightmare imagery. Newt and Hicks are both understandably plagued by nightmares about their previous experience with the Aliens – in Newt’s case, the dreams are so bad that she’s been institutionalized over them. Their dreams are used to present a few short recaps of the events of the film, but this is kept to a minimum, just enough to remind the reader of the connection between the film and the comic book.

Dreams remain a major part of the story and its imagery. It is implied that the members of Salvaje’s Alien worshiping cult are being telepathically manipulated via their dreams, perhaps by the Alien Queen herself.

Later on, there is a terrifying sequence where the salvage pilot who is infected with an Alien Queen embryo escapes from the secure lab where he’s being held and actually makes it home to his wife, flying off with here into the sunset until he realizes that the whole thing was a dream and he’s about to give “birth” to the Alien Queen.

Perhaps inevitably, Hicks and Newt find themselves part of the expedition to the Aliens’ homeworld, accompanying a squad of newly trained marines and pursued by a ruthless corporate fixer. This is actually the least interesting part of the story – the corporate villain is a little too two-dimensionally villainous, lacking the terrifying anonymity of Weyland-Yutani’s faceless corporate mandates in the first film, or Carter J. Burke’s oily opportunism in the second.

Of much greater interest is the situation brewing on Earth. Bionational has bred an Alien Queen, but they have failed to learn the basic lesson of the Alien series, which is that you cannot control nature. In this case, Salvaje’s cultists converge on the company’s (oddly insecure) facility, willingly offering themselves as host bodies for the Aliens and allowing them to quickly spread out of control.

The story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but it would soon be picked up in a second four-issue series, this time with full color airbrushed artwork by Denis Beauvais.

The approach taken with this first Aliens comic book series is interesting, especially when viewed in a historical context. It’s worth noting that this was (if I’m not mistaken) the very first original Alien story to be told outside of the films, at a time when no one was using terms like “franchise” or “cinematic universe,” and “canon” was something that only biblical scholars were concerned with. Rather than stick to the status quo like most media tie-in comics did, Dark Horse swung for the fences, electing to move the story forward without much concern for what might happen later. And the film people were happy to let them, if for no other reason than a perception that the comic book audience was too small to matter.

The events of these comics were of course completely contradicted by the next film in the series, the imaginatively titled Alien³. But who cares? The comics arguably tell a better story, and who says there can’t be more than one version of “what happens next?”