‘Aliens Epic Collection: The Original Years’ Vol. 1 is steeped in both studied cool and clumsy corporate oversight

An driven example of early licensed comics.

March 15, 2023

When Alien was released in 1979, it might not have appeared to be the most fertile film for sequential expansion. Dropped on the eve of what may have been the most pro-corporate, ethically, and economically slippery decade, it was a movie in part about the loss of human value in the face of corporate profit. Roughneck miners, giving up not just work hours but long periods in stasis, do a dirty job for their employers, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and in doing so are eliminated by the bottom line. Insular, introspective, and truly horrifying, the film didn’t exactly jibe with the post-Star Wars merchandising boom (there was, famously, a scrapped action figure). The film killed off all but its final girl and the ship’s cat, Jonesy. There was an end, a rich and terrifying mystique.

When James Cameron signed onto the film’s sequel, which was released in 1986, pop culture was deep in the golden age of corporate excess; everything had action figures. Feature films, no matter how graphic, had NES games, merchandise, animated series. Everything was franchisable, actionable, and profitable. In the 1980s, if a film studio couldn’t leverage a film property into a veritable tidal wave of plastic and spin-out media, it was likely that property wouldn’t get made.

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Cameron, canny to the failing points of anti-corporate nuance, swapped out any potential socio-political commentary for military glory shots—the film delivers more close-ups to ratcheting guns, action-figure-ready power suits, and marketable vehicles than it did its own principal characters.

Moreover, it broke the franchise open to expansion, readily supplying a galaxy worth of horrible xenomorphs (and their final boss-ready Queens) for future films and expansion. Toys weren’t just back on the table, they diversified the monster to ensure children’s continuing return to Kaybee Toys.

For all that glut of profit, there is something restrained about Dark Horse’s original Aliens miniseries, which kicks off new corporate owner Marvel’s first Epic Collection. It isn’t immediately aimed at children, for one, and feels somehow separate from the media machine built around the franchise. There are various forms of horror at play within it—psychological, philosophic, and telepathic. The book is filled with zealotism both corporate and religious. Like the original film, the series seems interested in the human more than the extraterrestrial; most of its pages concern the social mechanisms by which oncoming tragedy is moved ceaselessly forward. Government, military, and corporate converge on the potential profits to be found in the ultimate killing machine.

There could be room for something of self-awareness in the book, but it just misses it in its franchise-savvy direction. Understanding that Sigourney Weaver might be off the table for future films, the comic sticks to the other survivors of Cameron’s shoot-em-up, Hicks and Newt. Like so much of the media following the original film, it can’t help itself from trying to demystify any and all questions surrounding the xenomorph and its origins; like later films, this knee-jerk impulse fails to understand what’s most compelling about the core concepts of the first movie. We don’t need to know where the aliens come from. Don’t tell us how they got on that ship, and most certainly don’t explain to us the Space Jockey, whose unknowable form galvanizes the first act of the film.

Mark Verheiden, the primary writer of these three miniseries, seems more intent to mine his own mythology and build his own apocalypse than he does to stay beholden to any aesthetic or concern of the films, and the books feel more and more frustrated by creative oversight. The reintroduction of Ripley, at the end of the second series, seems to take the wind out of his sails, and the third series (this one subtitled Earth War) feels unfocused and lifeless compared to the density of his earlier commitment.

None of this takes away from the effectiveness of the comic itself. There was an aesthetic to classic Dark Horse Comics of the ’80s and ’90s that felt drenched in a sort of secret cool, the work of creators who listened to The Replacements. Seeing it as a kid hinted at something larger and deeper to the medium than Superman and Spider-Man, as if popular intellectual properties like Aliens and Predator could be a gateway to the underground. The three Aliens stories presented here ooze a cool unlike anything being released at the time. No less than Dungeons & Dragons alum Mark A Nelson and future creator-owning superstar Sam Keith lay pencils on this book, and all of it looks striking, singular.

It should be noted that, like a bulk of the Star Wars Epic Collections, the work in Aliens Vol 1 is no longer canon—these stories do not fit neatly into the larger, now contextualized universe. That makes this book for the archivist fan, someone interested in craft over franchise fidelity. The work is incredible, elevating its corporate bankability with smooth, artistic cool. All the same, it’s a book made unsteady by over-illumination of mysteries and loses its heart the further one reads.