The unproduced Alien 3 screenplay comes to life!
Creative Staff:
Story: William Gibson
Art: Johnnie Christmas
Colors: Tamra Bonvillain
Letterer: Nate Piekos of Blambot
What They Say:
The official adaptation of the original screenplay for Alien 3 written by William Gibson, the award-winning science-fiction author of Neuromancer. You’ll see familiar characters and places, but not all is the same in this horrifying Cold War Thriller!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As much as I am a huge fan of the Alien franchise, I’ve never managed to get into Dark Horse’s adaptations or storylines. The only book I’ve ever owned is Alien: Salvation and the only reason why was because of the creative team of Dave Gibbons, Mike Mignola and Kevin Knowlan attached to that one-shot. I’ve always been this way until now. Now, the fact that both 20th Century Fox and Dark Horse Comics are committed to producing a mini-series based on the first screenplay produced by William Gibson in 1987, I am extremely excited to read some Alien comics. On the one hand, it’s almost like a Marvel What If? or DC Comics Elseworlds title, in that we get to see what would’ve happened in the Alien franchise. I’m also a fan of David Fincher’s version of Alien 3, but I’m also very aware of the troubled production history involved with during Pre-Production and Production. While adapting scrapped scripts isn’t anything new to comics, its also really invigorating to inject this kind of life into the Dark Horse property.
The first issue of William Gibson’s Alien 3 is primarily a means to get into the atmosphere and letting us know about the characters that have survived in James Cameron’s Aliens. We find that Ripley, Hicks, Newt and the remains of Bishop have been disturbed by a group of thieves. As they’re on their ship, they find that there’s Alien egg inside and it attaches itself to one of their crew. As they are leaving, the sensors on the ship send a signal over to Weyland-Yutani Corp. to the remains of the Sulaco. A group of reps from Weyland-Yutani and a few space marines manage to intercept the remains and realize that people have already been on the ship beforehand.
Gibson approaches the story as a nice mixture of both Ridley Scott’s first film and James Cameron’s sequel, retaining the atmosphere of Alien and the character arcs of Aliens. The pencils done by Johnnie Christmas are really solid, with his work being a mixture of Timothy Green II and Max Fiumara. While there are a lot of dark colors in the book, Tamra Bonvillain injects the book with an astounding amount of colors that coincide with Alien universe and feel vibrant enough to make the pages stand out. Deep blacks, blues and greens make up a majority of the look, but there are plenty of other moments, like in the medbay or a conference room that’s full of off-white and cream colors. The very last panel on the last page with Corporal Hicks left me wanting much more and I can’t wait for the next issue.
In Summary:
If you’re a fan of the Alien franchise or you’re a fan of the Alien comics, there’s enough here to get people excited. The team on it is doing a fantastic job and I’m pretty confident that the rest of this mini-series is going to be more than excellent.
Grade: A+
Age Rating: 14+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: November 14th 2018
MSRP: $3.99
