This issue itself is almost as unexpected as its announcement. It was only a few years ago that Marvel got the rights to Alien and Predator comics from Dark Horse as part of Disney owning both Marvel and 20th Century Fox, but it took surprisingly long for this unholy behemoth of corporate acquisitions to yield a real crossover between the heroes of the House of Ideas and cinema’s most iconic sci-fi monsters. Sure, there were plenty of variant covers with this sort of thing, but we didn’t start to get actual miniseries in the vein of Batman versus Predator until last year’s Predator versus Wolverine opened the door for all kinds of action figure smash-em-up stories. I don’t think anyone expected Jonathan Hickman to join in on that sort of thing, which made the reveal that he was doing Aliens vs. Avengers all the more of a pleasant surprise.
Hickman goes all out with this story taking place outside of both the main Marvel and Alien continuities, setting it in an apocalyptic future where everywhere from Attilan to Atlantis has been overrun by xenomorphs. Humanity is holed up in a single remaining city on Earth watched over by Peter Weyland from Prometheus and aged-up versions of Bruce Banner, Carol Danvers, and Miles Morales. There’s a genuinely grim atmosphere to the whole thing, even if “What If…?” stories where most of the world’s heroes are dead are probably the most common type. There’s a real emphasis on how it’s too late for our heroes to save the world– the best that they can do is avenge it.
There’s a lot of familiar Hickman imagery going on here. There’s a version of Valeria Richards who has a final plan after all else fails. Apocalypse hacks and slashes a swarm of extraterrestrials. There’s a kind of poetic rhyme to all the Marvel elements of this that make the Alien elements all the more… “alien”. Hickman experiments with the different ways that he can fuse the two mythologies together, and there are some fascinating implications made here. A skrull/xenomorph hybrid is mentioned in passing, and that seed of an idea is planted in the narrative like an alien parasite in its host’s chest, promising to burst out when you least expect it.
Artist Esad Ribić has always been one of the best artists to translate the scope of Hickman’s ideas to the visual medium of comics, and his work in Aliens vs. Avengers (complemented by Ive Svorcina’s colors) is no exception. In a few pages, he efficiently conveys the aliens as a galactic threat. This isn’t just the end of our world: it’s the end of many worlds. Ribić brings a great somberness to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and their age and weariness isn’t just communicated by the wrinkles on their faces, but the defeated look in their eyes. He also does pretty good at capturing the xenomorphs in motion. I’ve read enough Alien comics to know that it’s easy for them to come across as static and posed (like action figures), but Ribić avoids that by making his aliens dynamic and lifelike.
Aliens vs. Avengers #1 effortlessly mixes action, drama, and unfiltered lore into an engaging first issue that will grab you tighter than a facehugger. I’m really excited to see where this leads.
