Aliens: Nightmare Asylum

Dark Horse launched the Aliens comic franchise in the late 80’s, followed closely by Predator and Aliens vs Predator; and by 1991 these titles were being reprinted in the UK, which is how they made it into my sweaty 12-year old hands. Slightly confusingly, the first series reprinted in the UK, was actually Book Two, and collected editions of this volume are now subtitled ‘Nightmare Asylum’. I’m glad to say that almost 30 years later, the series still stands up brilliantly.

The writer is Mark Verheiden, and although the plot carries on from the events in Book One, it’s fairly newcomer friendly. To clarify, at this point, the Alien 3 movie had not yet been produced, and so this arc carries on the adventures of a surviving Newt and Corporal Hicks from the end of Aliens. To be fair, Verheiden’s plot lifts a lot from George Romero’s Day of the Dead movie, but it is so tightly plotted, and packs a massive amount of incident, horror, action and poignancy into it’s 4-issues.

The painted art by Denis Beauvais is utterly stunning. To reiterate, this was produced before digital colouring became commonplace, and so each page will have been hand-painted. Although I can’t be sure, it looks like Beauvais was painting onto black paper instead of white, so each panel looks like it’s been chiselled out of the shadows. The black is printed to bleed all the way out to the edge of the paper, with the colours revealing just as much as is necessary to shred the readers’ nerves (I pinched the black bleed idea for my first comics in 2000-2002).

This mini is still available very cheaply, either in digital format, or as part of the recent Aliens Omnibus editions. If you are at all disappointed in the direction that film franchise ultimately went in, this series comes very highly recommended.