Alien [2023] #3 - Marvel Comics

ALIEN No. 3, August 2023

Splitting its storyline between the surviving crew of the USCSS Boreas bravely battling a lone Xenomorph, and Batya Zahn attempting to escape the clutches of her Weyland-Yutani captors. Declan Shalvey’s script for Issue Three of “Alien” certainly seems to ‘juggle an awful lot of plates in the air’ so as to keep its audience entertained. Disappointingly however, despite all these high-octane action sequences featuring “a trail of gore and eviscerated bodies”, some within this comic’s audience probably still felt the book was lacking somewhat when it comes to the horror franchise’s famous claustrophobic feeling of terror and suspense.

True, the Irish writer certainly establishes a compellingly chilling set of scenes for any perusing bibliophile to navigate through, courtesy of a hapless security team being forced to slowly creep down a seemingly endless series of restrictive corridors looking for the chest-burster which killed their comrade-in-arms. But despite this ‘classic’ premise, and the fact that the outclassed company men eventually face a fully-grown killer alien, the furious firefight, grisly demises, and insane savagery on show arguably just doesn’t quite land with the impact this title’s creative line-up probably felt it would.

Much of this impotence is quite possibly due to the layouts of Andrea Broccardo, which whilst proficient enough, appear a little too Manga-like to genuinely give the comic’s pencilled proceedings the gruesome gravitas envisaged by H. R. Giger when he first began sketching the deadly extra-terrestrials and their suffocating environment for Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking film in 1979. Likewise, Triona Farrel’s colours are both too bright and flat-looking, making many a sequence appear rather one-dimensional, even when its clear there’s some sizeable distances between the figures in view.

Resultantly, it’s possibly not until towards this twenty-page periodical’s conclusion, that the comic actually catches its readers out with a seriously shocking gut-punch, by having Dayton heartbreakingly sucked beneath the planet’s icy waves when the spaceship he has commandeered catastrophically falls through a fast-appearing crevasse. This incident is wonderfully depicted, and despite Zahn’s character not being the most sympathetic in the cast, doubtless caused the odd bookworm to momentarily feel for the scientist and her husband’s tragic loss; “After everything you gave me… I let you down when you needed me the most. I couldn’t save you.”

Writer: Declan Shalvey, Artist: Andrea Broccardo, and Colorist: Triona Farrell