Alien Verses Captain America #1 - Marvel Comics

ALIEN VERSES CAPTAIN AMERICA No. 1, January 2026

Announced at San Diego Comic-Con's Retailer Panel in July 2025, this four-part mini-series’ opening issue perhaps a little surprisingly focuses far more upon Baron Wolfgang von Strucker’s desperate search for a new weapon which will turn the tide of World War Two in the Red Skull’s favour than anything America’s Sentinel of Liberty is concerned with during 1944. But in doing so, Frank Tieri pens a thoroughly absorbing expedition to find “the fabled city of Attilan”, and a genuinely terrifying introduction to Twentieth Century Studios’ deadly race of killer xenomorphs.

Indeed, buried beneath the Himalayas and assaulted from every side by a small army of lightning-fast Facehuggers, it actually appears that the High Commander of Hydra himself may well succumb to the merciless aliens – just as the hapless Inhuman royal family apparently did some centuries before him. Fortuitously however, at least for the goose-stepping fascist super-villain, the human mutate’s Satan Claw provides the war criminal with just enough of an edge to escape such a horrible demise with a single, captive specimen, and subsequently plunge an already exhausted France into utter darkness; “Les monstres. We were…used as test subjects, oui? To breed… whatever those things are.”

Of course, the titular Captain America does eventually make a rather memorable appearance at this comic’s very end, when he thwarts an infant alien’s attempt to successfully escape Sergeant Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. However, rather than be warmly welcomed by his fellow veteran, Steve Rogers (and Bucky Barnes) are quite shockingly met with angry resentment and hostility – something which bodes ill for the Silver Age of Comics characters working well together throughout the rest of this adventure.

Equally as on-form as this twenty-five-page periodical’s Brooklyn-born writer is artist Stefano Raffaele, whose layouts do a first-rate job in capturing all of Strucker’s uncompromising haughtiness and the Xenomorphs’ sheer deadliness in either a claustrophobically confined tomb or the initially idyllic, open space of a French village. Of particular note though has to be the Italian illustrator’s ability to harness all the chilling cold a reader would expect of anyone foolish enough to hike the snowy mountaintops of the Earth's highest peaks whilst doggedly looking for a potentially mythical, long-lost civilisation.

Writer: Frank Tieri, Artist: Stefano Raffaele, and Color Artist: Neeraj Menon