Aliens: Resistance #1 - Dark Horse Comics

ALIENS: RESISTANCE No. 1, January 2019

Following “the events of the popular video game Alien: Isolation, which starred Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda, fifteen years after the events of the original film”, this first in a four-issue limited series published by “Dark Horse Comics” must have proved a somewhat baffling experience for those readers unfamiliar with its electronic survival horror roots despite Brian Wood providing some semblance of a summary as to his narrative’s background at the comic’s beginning. Indeed, the American author’s over-reliance upon his audience just soldiering on oblivious as to just how the female engineer became “the only survivor of the Sevastopol incident”, coupled with a poor pen-picture concerning this book’s other main protagonist, Zula Hendricks, makes it frustratingly hard to even understand just how the central cast so quickly become fast friends, or how “three years later” the rogue United States Colonial Marine Corps First Class Private manages to track down Ellen’s offspring when she is depicted simply wandering the vast wasteland of Earth..?

Admittedly, the “graphic designer who wrote the comic Aliens: Defiance” does manage to imbue this twenty-page periodical’s screenplay with some all-too brief moments of excitement, when he depicts Ripley attempting to infiltrate a Weyland-Yutani Corporation facility and being fired upon with alien acid blood-laced bullets by its suspicious super-enhanced synthetics. But just how the heroine managed to place herself in such perilous jeopardy in the first place is sadly never satisfactorily explained, nor why Hendricks’ partner on the Europa, Davis, needs “a minimum proximity of three meters from a node to pull data” on the location of a black site’s weapons test facility..? Disappointingly, all this action seems to have been contrivingly created for was to pad out the publication’s page count long enough for Zula to prepare her convenient missile-carrying flyer for nine days of hibernation sleep before it reaches the women’s target destination. 

Just as disappointing as the Eisner Award-nominee’s sedentary storyline though are Robert Cavey’s lifelessly lack-lustre illustrations, which although perfectly well-drawn debatably lack any dynamic vivacity even when he’s pencilling Amanda breathlessly racing down a partially-destroyed corridor for her very life. The creative team’s poor decision not to populate this comic with any sound effects, or even an exhausted grunt or wincing groan here and there, additionally makes the publication seem all the more a depressingly flat reading experience, dispiritingly devoid of any noticeable noise or energy.

The regular cover art of "ALIENS: RESISTANCE" No. 1 by Tristan Jones