Alien Verses Captain America #3 - Marvel Comics

ALIEN VERSES CAPTAIN AMERICA No. 3, March 2026

Packed full of planetwide invasions, grisly infestations and some seriously scintillating close combat, those readers who enjoy witnessing Xenomorphs massacre both heavily-armed soldiers and hapless civilians with the same deadly precision will doubtless have enjoyed Issue Three of “Alien Verses Captain America”. Indeed, Frank Tieri’s plot for this twenty-page periodical races along at a truly breath-taking pace, and only occasionally pauses to allow the likes of Sergeant Nick Fury to momentarily mourn the deaths of his Howling Commandos before throwing its audience back into a writhing mass of all-devouring aliens.

However, such unrelenting storytelling does arguably result in the American author taking a few somewhat jarring short-cuts when it comes to explaining some pretty important events, like the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence being ruthlessly slaughtered by a heavily-mutated chestburster. Sure, this comic’s opening does a grand job in depicting the Empire’s initial fall before the razor sharp teeth and spiked tails of the extra-terrestrials on the planet Hala. But there’s no explanation as to how the ‘militaristic, blue-skinned humanoids’ subsequently manage to vanquish their merciless foes under the leadership of Supremor Mar-Vell.

In fact, apart from the Kree clearly assuming the mantle of galactic defenders against the Xenomorph hordes, this book doesn’t debatably provide all that much information about them at all – and seemingly supposes that any onlookers already know about their large, interstellar civilisation. Such an assumption can prove a little problematic at times, such as when Tieri suddenly introduces Yon-Rogg into the narrative from completely out of the blue, and due to the commander’s physical similarity to Mar-Vell, could easily be mistaken for the “decorated captain” himself – an oversight which isn’t clarified until Steve Rogers calls him by name several panels later.

Easily doing most of the publication’s heavy-lifting though has to be Stefano Raffaele and colour artist Neeraj Menon. Together the creative pair provide some gobsmackingly good layouts, and provide so many intriguing insights into the fall of Hala, that some perusing bibliophiles may well wish that this particular instalment of the mini-series went into much further detail as to the aforementioned fall of the Kree’s artificial intelligence; “The Gods of Pama were unkind to us that day. Many lives were lost.”

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

Alien Verses Captain America #2 - Marvel Comics

ALIEN VERSES CAPTAIN AMERICA No. 2, February 2026

For those Marvelites expecting to get knee-deep in Xenomorphs with Sergeant Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos, Frank Tieri’s script for Issue Two of “Alien Verses Captain America” probably landed somewhat flatly. True, the American author does pen the elite special unit entering an alien-infested Hydra Stronghold in Occupied France. But by the time this twenty-page periodical is just halfway finished, only the World War Two squad’s veteran leader is still alive; “Bullets have no effect, Sarge! And it’s whipping that tail around again --”

Instead, the Eisner Award-winner moves away from writing a gritty, down-to-earth battle between some of the Allies’ finest soldiers and “the destructive might” of the Red Skull’s latest acquisitions, and ramps up this mini-series’ science-fiction flavour with the sudden appearance of Captain Mar-Vell. So swift a move, courtesy of a Kree Sentry robot crashing feet-first amongst the deadly extra-terrestrials just in the nick of time, must genuinely have taken many within this comic’s audience by complete surprise, and certainly ends any notion some bibliophiles might have had that this “Twentieth Century Studios” tie-in was going to at least be somewhat grounded using contemporary weaponry.

Up until this moment however, this publication proves remarkably similar in plot to the events of James Cameron’s 1986 feature film “Aliens”, with Captain American and Bucky Barnes desperately searching an underground complex-turned-Xenomorph nest for a lost comrade-in-arms. Whether such parallels are a good thing or not is rather debatable, but the fact that the Sentinel of Liberty’s shield is the only item standing between the war heroes and an acid blood bath definitely makes for some exciting, adrenalin-fuelled action – especially once its established that even the likes of "Dum Dum" Dugan are not safe from suffering a truly, gratuitously graphic demise.

Also helping to add to this comic’s ‘old school’ feel is arguably the layouts of Stefano Raffaele, who provides some wonderfully claustrophobic for the Howling Commandos as they’re voraciously devoured by the aliens one-by-one. In addition, Color Artist Neeraj Menon provides the panels with some very atmospheric muted greys, blues and browns, which resultantly really helps make the combatants’ blood and guts genuinely pop off the printed page.

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

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