“Icarus”
Creative Staff:
Story: Phillip K. Johnson
Art: Julius Ohta
Colors: Yen Nitro
Letterer: VC’s Clayton Cowles
What They Say:
A small colony of synths have settled in secret on a backwater moon. When a company of United System soldiers come to them for help retrieving biotechnology on a hostile planet that could be the key to saving humanity, the synths must decide whether the prospect of peace between man and machine is worth the risk of betrayal.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having read the various Aliens comics over the years since Dark Horse first got the license, I can say that I was not happy but not surprised that the property ended up at Marvel after all the merger stuff. I don’t doubt that Marvel can do good work with it as I’m enjoying most of their Star Wars original works and expansions, but I also know that Alien is its own kettle of fish. I had read a bit of the series from about a year ago with Phillip K. Johnson writing but I never kept up on it, so I figured I’d try again with this one. It does set up some interesting things and takes place a bit further down the timeline which helps. Julius Ohta has long been a favorite of mine for some interesting properties and there’s definitely an interesting approach here since the story doesn’t, so far, lean into the dank and grim interiors but rather exterior and modern world sequences.
The flashback storyline takes place in 2205 where we see a Weyland-Yutani-claimed world, an investors’ paradise, where anything goes in creating new technology and human experimentation. It’s something that’s certainly how WY would operate and you can see the how and why of it. But things have gone bad, as they usually do, as we see that the Xenomorphs are there and have taken human hosts once again. While the corporate types are doing their best to get away at the expense of everyone else, the whole thing turns bleak and grim for the world of Tobler-9. We get to see a bit of it in the main storyline in 2217 and that the Xenomorphs have basically taken root and turned it into the usual kind of disturbing-looking place we’d expect right out of the Aliens film.
The 2217 storyline takes us to the world of Europa-5, a place that we learn is fairly toxic to humanity yet there are a group of people there living fairly good lives while trying to deal with culture and intelligence as well as physical attention. It turns out that the group of five here are synthetics that previously worked for the US government but left when things went bad in regards to how synths were treated. That makes the arrival of a general they know and his capture team problematic, though the reality is that he’s there to get their help to get something from Tobler-9. Set against the backdrop of a system of twenty-five worlds that the government operates and a nuclear disaster that is going to cause a ripple effect of food problems across all of them, he needs them to retrieve it and is dangling quite the prize in front of them to do it. You can see why they’re tempted even though they know it likely won’t go well.
In Summary:
This installment moves pretty briskly and that’s not a bad thing, though it comes in short in the number of pages as well. But it does tell the tale it needs to at this stage even if I wish for a few more pages to expand on the events of Tobler-9 more or to see more normalcy that the synthetics live by before going into action mode. I like that the story is taking place some forty or so years after the events of Aliens and showing some different elements of what’s going on in this time, and focusing on a synthetic group. The brief bit we get with the Xenomorphs is solid and it does leave you wanting more, and to know more of the “world design” of how humanity has spread out at this point.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: September 7th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
