Alien #1, Or In Space No One Can Hear That Repressed Trauma

In space, no one can hear your repressed trauma in Alien #1. Written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, drawn by Salvador Larroca, colored by Guru-eFX, and lettered by Clayton Cowles, Marvel’s first turn into xenomorph country finds a world post Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens. One of Weyland-Yutani’s top men is retiring and yearning to reconnect with his son back on Earth. But his son has been radicalized, using the reunion as a chance to expose Weyland-Yutani and destroy one of their most prized installations. But the “perfect organism” still lurks inside the company’s innards and they’ve just been unleashed once more. Cue the creepy Jerry Goldsmith music.

The Alien franchise, at its core, is about regular old humans being faced with something beyond themselves. And then having to deal as such. From the crew of the Nostromo to the grunts that landed at Hadley’s Hope and found their game quickly over, the best Alien entries are about people who do a boring, largely mundane, and/or rote jobs faced with eldritch cosmic organisms (that they can never really hope to control or understand).

In this regard, Marvel’s Alien #1 is a success. But I fear it might overestimate just how much we really care about these particular humans, in this particular entry into the long and storied franchise and Marvel’s first “at bat” with the iconic IP. Especially in the absence of any real striking xenomorph action.   

Written by newly rising freelance workman Phillip Kennedy Johnson and provided an almost hysterically waxen look by artists Salvador Larroca and Guru-eFX, Alien #1 certainly has good intentions. Even a pretty novel set up! Lifetime “company man” Gabriel Cruz, custodian to Weyland-Yutani’s massive Epsilon Station, is leaving the service. Plagued by nightmares of a Marine mission gone wrong years ago, Cruz is aimed for a quieter life back on his homeworld with his son Daniel. But Earth is different in the year 2200. Daniel has become part of a growing movement on the planet, one with the goal of exposing and destroying W-Y elements. Elements like Epsilon Station which, you guessed it, have a bunch of secretly squirreled away xenomorphs hidden in it’s vast deck layout.

As a premise, especially as an Alien premise, it has creepy, multi-jointed legs. It is also nice to see Johnson, as a writer, both continuing the Aliens comics tradition of being slightly satirical/bleak as all hell (a tradition started with the truly wonderful and underread Dark Horse Comics era with the license) AND taking some choice potshots at how military “success” can alienate someone away from family due to the extreme disconnect and distance. He also even manages to thread in a super creepy “mystery box” into the proceedings, peppered with an super fun ongoing cameo that fans will be sure to enjoy. You see, Cruz has met the xenomorph before and the images of their viciousness never left him so this provides the issue a neat framing device that keeps it firmly ensconced in the “horror” elements of “science fiction horror” as we flashback throughout the opener to this “first contact”.

Unfortunately, these threads are never really fleshed out to more than just threads in this opening issue. Even more disappointingly, instead of xenomorph shocks and creeping dread, we are given in their places a lot of exposition centered around the Cruz family, the state of Epsilon Station as a whole, and the budding activist movements against Weyland-Yutani. On some degree, I get it. You have to set the table before you can actually sit at it. But that being said, I expected this opening issue to have at least a few chills in store and really it just has a lot narrative track laying, promising the shocks once that gets done properly. The dreaded “your first issue should really be your second” pitfall of opening series #1s.

Making matters worse is the state of the artwork in this opener. By now you will have probably seen at least two art elements from this issue that have gone semi-viral (but NOT in the way Marvel would have hoped) and I am sorry to say that the context of the whole issue doesn’t do them much better. Larroca isn’t also the person you would think of when you hear “exposition heavy script” and the work here supports that thought consistently. Page after page, especially in the issue’s back half, are filled with oddly blocked models and severely comical expressions, which in turn undermines the genuine emotion of Johnson’s script.

Larroca’s touch with the horror too doesn’t really hold much of a facehugger’s weight. Though there is a finely staged sequence in the issue’s therapy based framing device that echoes one of the better iconic visuals of The Walking Dead, none of the pages here will ever be accused of being “pulse-pounding”. Also in regard to the “viral” splash? The one that functions as a sort of “who’s who” of the xenomorph species, spanning across the whole franchise? While the script positions it as a big moment for the issue, it really just does look like a really poorly maintained toy shelf. One that doesn’t even really have the most firm handle on the designs overall, making it all look muddy and ill-formed just as a visual. Part of me wonders if Marvel might have been better suited getting an actual horror artist for these and not one known for his, let’s say, “screen accuracy” (read: copying and tracing), but that’s obviously above my pay grade.

As a diehard, acid-blooded Alien fan (I even like Prometheus!), Alien #1 ticks a few boxes for me. It’s meaner than it looks and has the potential for some real deal challenges of corporate and state institutions, supported by a pretty firm, fun understanding of what makes the franchise and its known elements work overall. However, I would find it difficult giving this to a casual reader as an example of the property. It’s frankly too ugly to really catch eyes and too wordy to hook someone in that doesn’t know Alien beyond “Ripley seems cool” and “The Alien is gross and scary”. The potential is there, but Alien #1 doesn’t capitalize on it just yet. 

Maybe in it’s next stage of evolution it will.