Aliens: Dust To Dust #4 - Dark Horse Comics

ALIENS: DUST TO DUST No. 4, January 2019

Wholly successful in his mission “to tell the story from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy… because that’s the age I was when first exposed to Aliens”, Gabriel Hardman’s conclusion to this four-issue “Dark Horse Comics” mini-series must have satisfied the vast majority of its eagerly awaiting audience when the book’s closing instalment was finally released in January 2019. Indeed, the Hugo Award-nominee’s decision not “to write about marines or anyone who seems like they could stand up to the Xenomorphs” genuinely seems to imbue his narrative with all the “extraordinarily scary and difficult circumstances” fans of the franchise would expect, yet make the publication even more pulse-pounding as a result of these blood-curdling challenges being faced by a “kid”.

Of course, that isn’t to say that the young orphan doesn’t need the help of others in order to successfully survive his ordeal on the planet LV-871, as one of the biggest shocks contained within Issue Four of “Aliens: Dust To Dust” is the revelation that Assistant Administrator Waugh is actually a Synthetic, whose limited functioning resultantly requires Maxon to “retrieve the sharpest piece of metal debris you can find in the shipwreck… [And] cut off my head.” But the boy still needs to climb “the whole way up” the nearby facility’s tower so as to reach the Evac Shuttle at the top and subsequently throw back the spacecraft’s throttle “twenty-seven percent” so as to “stay on the outlined orbital trajectory.”

Likewise, Hardman manages to produce another surprise in depicting Anne’s alien sacrificing itself in order to thwart the Queen Xenomorph from literally devouring this comic’s remaining protagonists towards the end of the twenty-page periodical. This demonstration of maternal instinct is all the more unanticipated due to the author’s one-armed creation previously seeming to attack the fair-haired lad when his party is lead into the colony’s storage chamber, and is only stopped by a hydraulically-powered mechanical arm slamming it aside just before it can impale the terrified boy; “You guys go! Get to the shuttle! It won’t hurt me!.. Ahhh!”

Also adding to this book’s claustrophobically-chilling atmosphere are Gabriel’s somewhat scratchily-drawn panels, with the penciller’s preference “to draw comic stories with… a lot of darkness” providing its action-sequences with plenty of terrifying appeal. Indeed, if the illustrator were telling “a bright, happy story” then he most certainly would “not be the guy for the job.” However, as “this is Aliens” the motion picture story-board artist is undeniably “a pretty good fit.”

Script and Art: Gabriel Hardman, Lettering: Michael Heisler, and Coloring: Rain Beredo