Zula’s mistakes come home to roost far too quickly.
Creative Staff:
Story: Brian Wood
Art: Tristan Jones
Colors: Dan Jackson
Lettering: Nate Piekos of Blambot
What They Say:
Zula Hendricks and Davis are about to take on the xenomorph threat as well as a squad of hardened Colonial Marines intent on capturing a specimen in a large midspace fueling station. How far is Zula willing to go to stop her fellow combatants?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Aliens: Defiance had a bit of a gap this summer that’s being closed up quickly here as we go into the fall and that’s definitely a big plus. This installment sees the return of Tristan Jones on the artwork and that just delights me very much as I love his particular take on this world and all the detail and design to it. With Dan Jackson providing some solid continuity across the artists with the color work there’s a good consistency, but I really love the way Jones works his layouts and the overall movement of the action and tension that brings these sequences to life. Wood continues to provide some solid scripts here that aren’t working things in an overly compressed well for the most part and that helps because you can see how this could have been done in half the issues but felt like it missed the tension that you get from the film medium.
This installment works us backward a bit as it goes on so we already know the end game, though not the end result, and it’s an intriguing expansion on this world. Hendricks and Davis have arrived at the Wright-Aberra fuel depot and there are several ships docked here but seemingly no signs of life. With this being one of the early contagion points for the xenomorphs, an exploration is a given. It’s a solid sequence as we see them making their way in and getting a handle on the situation but the real shift is the introduction of Dr. Hollis, a relatively recent arrival on the depot that’s seemingly the sole survivor. She found a place to lock herself into that the xenomorphs couldn’t get through since it was designed to deal with fuel and that means she can break down some of what happened. It’s a familiar enough storyline with infected/carriers ending up here along with fully grown xenomorphs and the quick end of the crew and transients on the depot, which Jones doesn’t go into grisly detail over but provide some cringeworthy sequences.
Where things go really wonky however is the arrival of a group of marines, which Hendricks has to believe came because of her contact with her doctor back on Earth. It’s hard to tell for sure because of the hard to grasp time scale of spaceflight and locations, but it certainly pisses off Davis in an amusing way and puts the trio in a real bind. Davis is quickly becoming quite the character as he makes it clear, and Hendricks regretfully agrees, that the only thing they can do to deal with the larger problem is to eliminate the marines. And with a lot of xenomorphs on board that’s not that hard. While there’s some dialogue about how the marines may be here to retrieve samples as well, it’s a pretty good series of events in watching how Hendricks and Davis look to secure their own survival and plans and just how big they have to go to stop an actual marine ship.
In Summary:
While I would have liked to have seen a bit more about Hendrick’s struggle over what it is she has to do, since Davis is still mostly working cold efficient lines of thought, I’m also glad that we see her realizing that it’s the right option given the scale of the problem and just sets about doing it. I’m not a fan of revealing the tease at the start and going backward but it is a tried and true method. The exploration of the depot is a great bit of material overall and Tristan Jones delivers on the art throughout in a way that really makes for a great experience on the first read through and multiple reads later because there’s so much detail. Very good stuff overall that continues to have me pretty excited for what’s still to come as we hit the halfway mark next issue.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: September 28th, 2016
MSRP: $3.99