Guide to Aliens Comic Books - New for Patrons!

It’s the first Indie & Licensed comics guide of the year for Patrons of Crushing Krisis! This is a guide to the comics for one of my favorite film properties, which was published by Dark Horse Comics for over 30 years before joining the Marvel Comics umbrella after Disney acquired Fox. That’s right, both Ellen Ripley and the xenomorph queen are now a kick-ass Disney princesses, and I’ve got a Guide to Aliens Comic Books!

Guide to Aliens Comic Books

My first exposure to Aliens was watching either Alien or Aliens at way too early an age from the floor of my grandmother’s living room.

I’m pretty sure the family was showing it to me because I already knew Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters… and, Aliens isn’t that much scarier than Ghostbusters, right? Right?!

I think it’s a testament to the quality of the original Ridley Scott Alien and the bombast of James Cameron’s Aliens that my (somewhat older, not very nerdy) family had even rented it to watch on a random Saturday afternoon in the 1980s.

It wasn’t long after the release of Aliens that the fledging Dark Horse Comics acquired the license for Aliens Comics. It was one of their hugest earlier wins, and one of the reasons they were able to survive into the 90s (and acquire more valuable licenses).

Dark Horse began their comics line with a huge draw – an in-continuity sequel to Aliens! Told across a trio of mini-series from 1989-1990, the tale spanned galaxies and gave us a dreadful glimpse of what it would look like if the xenomorph’s reached Earth. It also told the first “Alien vs. Predator” story in 1990 – a franchise combination which itself became a massive blockbuster across many forms of media.

(In an ironic turn of events, Dark Horse had to later revise this blockbuster trilogy of comics to keep it in continuity, as elements of Aliens 3 meant that two of the starring characters of their initial trilogy of mini-series hadn’t survived to appear there. If you know your Aliens lore, you can guess who these two are!)

From there, Dark Horse Comics was the storytelling engine for all of the Aliens I.P. In fact, throughout the 90s there were novelizations of the comics that were marketed as the official continuing story of Aliens! To steer clear of further continuity tangles, Dark Horse stayed far away from Ripley and the events of the movies.

Instead, Aliens became synonymous with anthology storytelling – pulling in some of the biggest names in comics (including Mike Mignolia and Bernie Wrightson!) to write and illustrate its stories. That meant (for the most part) all of their comics could stay in continuity with each other and with the films, no matter how brutal or outlandish.

Dark Horse published nearly 40 Aliens mini-series and one-shots prior to the year 2000, plus stories in various Dark Horse anthology titles. It took Marvel three hefty omnibuses to cover all of that material!

Aliens comics died off in the 2000s, but revved back up for the 2010s with the release of the Prometheus and Covenant prequel films and a number of video games. This is the material covered by Marvel’s fourth omnibus. However, just as Dark Horses’s Aliens machine was spinning back up, the sale of Fox to Disney meant that the license for Aliens moved to Marvel Comics for the first time.

If anyone was disappointed about the license transfer, Marvel helped ease the pain with a massive boon right out of the gate – a series of four omnibuses printing every Dark Horse comic in publication order, including some that Dark Horse themselves had never printed. Mini-series, original graphic novels, black-and-white anthology stories, and even comics released with toys – every single one is in the quartet of omnibuses.

Then, in 2021, Marvel launched their own Alien ongoing comic, which they’ve now relaunched three times in as many years.

Those Marvel omnibuses provide a solid place to start with creating my Guide to Aliens Comic Books, but I took it much, much further. This guide includes every Dark Horse and Marvel Comic, including all of their original collections, ordered by release date. Just want the Marvel omnibuses? Great. Not sure which issues actually duplicate anthology stories? I explain it. Want to track down an original paperback collect of a random Dark Horse mid-90s mini-series? I’ve got the ISBN for that!

Want instant access to this Guide to Aliens? Become a Patron of CK for as little as $1 a month or $10.20 a year to gain access to this exclusive guide and over 70 other guides months before the general public gains access. I have launched 35 Guides to Patrons in the past 365 days – 15 Marvel, 2 DC, & 18 Indie! Plus, I’ve also updated 106 of my 200+ guides for both patrons and the general public.

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DC Guides (7): Batman – Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Birds of Prey, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, Omega Men