More questions than answers…
Creative Staff:
Story: James Stokoe
Art: James Stokoe
Colors: James Stokoe
Letterer: James Stokoe
What They Say:
Having narrowly escaped the deadly xenomorph, Wascylewski moves around the hold of the ship, wary of his terrifying pursuer. His reflexes are tested again—but this time, by a sudden, massive breach in the hull. Will he survive?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
How many times can you tell the same story? Quite a few is the truth of the matter, as seen by the core basic stories that exist and how many times they’re told. With the original Alien being a haunted house in space, there are plenty of ways to bring that to life each time, even with the familiarity of it within our culture, in the Aliens universe. James Stokoe set up an interesting location with the space station the last time around and gave us the perfunctory character pieces and made clear who the lead will be, whether he survives or not. This issue brings us more of the familiar, as it should be as the Xenomorph cycle has been firm for many years, but Stokoe gives it his own definition and imprint through the artwork, even in something as iconic as the chestburster sequence. You know it’s coming but there’s still a tension and some great detail to his approach in bringing it to life.
With the second installment in this miniseries we get to see the fallout from breaking quarantine as the captain now has to struggle with figuring out what that ship was up to. There’s a fair bit of chaos within the station in just what has happened already and a kind of on edge uncertainty that the crew is feeling, made more so by the way the three that they’ve brought on board are basically without skin and a mess. When the captain asks the doctor if they’ve said anything, well, the tension and his anxiety is so through the roof that he shoots back that they can’t because they don’t have any lips. The whole look of these apparent survivors is unsettling and that pushes everyone to react in strong ways, even if it is just Wassy looking to grab alcohol and hole up somewhere for a while.
Not that the captain will let him do that since he needs him to go through the logs of the ship to figure out where they had been. This leads to some exploration of what the state of humanity is in with talk of the outer colonies where even the company doesn’t go, cholera outbreaks, and commentary on the currency used. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t take long before the chestburster incidents begin to occur and it plays out very well for two reasons. The first is that we get some utterly creepy things here thanks to Stokoe’s artwork in how they come through and that there are two of them at once, resulting in a “best buds” kind of moment that’s almost comical. The second is that they’re bursting through far different bodies than we usually get as they’re so worked over at this point that it’s just utterly disturbing to watch the convulsions compared to the John Hurt moment, for example.
In Summary:
Aliens: Dead Orbit is delivering some great material here as it works within the realm of the familiar. That’s something that could be a problem with other works but the Aliens franchise opens itself up to a lot of interpretation and creativity in both writing and art so that each can stand alone without being judged truly against the rest. Stokoe has crafted a great environment for this to play out in that leaves me wanting more of it (and a live-action incarnation already, even if it would likely play out a little like Saturn 9) just to really connect with the location and characters. There’s a lot more to come with how this will unfold and the violence is only just now really getting ready to begin, and hopefully a twist or two along the way.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: May 31st, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
