Alien #8 - Marvel Comics

ALIEN No. 8, January 2022

If Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s plan for Issue Eight of “Alien” was to make the title’s audience actually hope that the comic’s cast get horribly eviscerated by the “dangerous alien species known as Xenomorphs”, then his script certainly seems to succeed. For whilst no particular character actually behaves quite so badly as to warrant such a truly grotesque demise as being literally torn asunder by one of Hans Ruedi Giger’s co-creations, many readers would arguably be hard pressed to recollect a more dislikeable ensemble of farmers, technicians and settlers within a single publication.

Indeed, straight from the start of this particular twenty-page periodical, the residents of the moon colony Euridice demonstrate an incredible unwillingness to believe the eye witness account of their previously infallible leader that their farmsteads have been ‘invaded’ by a deadly extra-terrestrial, and instead seem far more concerned with fuel lines poisoning the soil or the wreck of the Heraclides causing years’ worth of damage by selfishly ripping “right through our cornfields and the orchard.”

Even the basic interactions between the various community members smacks of the Spinners being solely invested in their own needs and personal ambitions, rather than acknowledging that a large number of people have died quite horrifically in a spaceship crash. The utterly obnoxious Gunnar is debatably the best example of such a disagreeable outlook upon life by supposedly taking some moral high ground over Jane when he feels her terminal illness is detrimentally affecting her decision-making, and then later repulsively trying to pressurise Becca into continuing an intimate relationship with him despite the man already having a partner; “Tabby don’t know nothin’ that I don’t tell her. Only thing she needs to know is -- Nng.”

Happily however, once the Aliens do decide to make their presence known mid-way through the book, then the action undeniably begins to pick up, with artist Salvador Larroca pencilling a superbly paced chase scene from the remnants of the U.A.S. Extrasolar vessel back to Ambrose’s innocent-looking residence. This entire gauntlet is as thrillingly to peruse as its terrifying for those traversing it, and arguably ends with an astonishingly good cliff-hanger of a conclusion when one of the Spinners is dramatically revealed to be a malevolently-minded synthetic.

The regular cover art to "ALIEN" #8 by Marc Aspinall