Comics You Should Own – ‘Aliens: Salvation’ and ‘Aliens: Dead Orbit’

Two? TWO?!?!?!? What madness is this?

Aliens: Salvation by Dave Gibbons (writer), Mike Mignola (penciler), Kevin Nowlan (inker), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), and Clem Robins (letterer).

Aliens: Dead Orbit by James Stokoe (writer/artist/letterer).

Published by Dark Horse, cover dated 1993 (Salvation) and 2017 (Dead Orbit).

Some SPOILERS, although you all know the drill when it comes to Alien stories!

The Alien franchise is such a good storytelling engine because a good writer can make it about almost anything and it still works. At its heart, of course, is the sexual metaphor of the xenomorphs themselves, while the corporate greed aspect that was present from the very beginning is also a vein that can be mined for a lot of stories. But a writer can create stories that feature the aliens and make it about so many different things, changing the tone to make it more science fiction, adventure, horror, or even psychological drama. A good writer, of course, can mix these genres and themes together to give us a fascinating blend, as we get in these two stories, produced decades apart. I don’t own too many Alien stories, because some of the ones I read were somewhat bland, in that they were just your standard fare of the aliens picking people off. In these two stories, people get picked off, of course, but Gibbons and Stokoe are interested in doing more with the xenomorphs, especially Gibbons, who’s a bit more thoughtful as a writer than Stokoe is. However, a big reason I got these comics is, of course, the art, which I’ll come back to.

Salvation was a one-shot while Dead Orbit was a mini-series, so Stokoe has a bit more room to work with, but Gibbons wastes no time in getting us into the story. After a quick introduction to the characters, on page 5 the captain of the cargo ship they’re on, Foss, comes in, shoots one of the crew members, and abandons ship with Selkirk, the narrator of the story. There’s a reason he takes Selkirk with him, but Selkirk believes it’s because God has plans for him. Selkirk is a good Christian, and he tells the story through the lens of his belief, as he thinks God has to be testing his faith. The good thing about Alien stories at this point is that writers don’t really need to introduce the xenomorphs — from the very beginning, we know exactly what the cargo vessel is carrying, even if Selkirk doesn’t, so Foss’s actions, while seemingly crazy to the characters, make a grim sense to us. Once they reach the surface of the planet to which the ship was heading, Gibbons turns this into almost a rousing jungle adventure, as Selkirk tries to survive as the aliens seemingly come out of the woodwork. Foss, who’s gone completely insane, dies fairly quickly, but Selkirk encounters another survivor, Dean, and the two of them plot to destroy the crashed spaceship and all the aliens inside it. It’s not an easy task, as you might expect.

Gibbons uses the familiar tropes of an Alien story — the weakened survivors, the desperate attempts to fight, the almost overwhelming odds — and views them through a religious frame, which works quite well. Selkirk might, in another circumstance, be an overbearing Christian who leaves no one alone in his attempts to convince them of the One True Way, but because Gibbons puts him in a high-stress environment immediately, we get a different view of him. He does not think he’s worthy of God’s love, but he carries on, viewing everything as a test. He kills a native of the world on which he has crash-landed, and prays for forgiveness for his rash act. He finds the crash site of the Nova Maru, and briefly believes that God has delivered him. When he is finally confronted with the xenomorphs, he sees them as demons, of course. As with all Alien stories, the corporation figures largely, and Selkirk eventually realizes that the corporate overlords are the true demons. As usual, none of this is unique to an Alien story or even stories in general, but Selkirk’s journey is interesting because Gibbons takes his faith seriously and puts it to the test. Selkirk might be a flawed human, but he turns out to be a good Christian. In somewhat of an ironic statement, his solution to the xenomorph problem might do more harm than good to those he’s trying to save, but, to him, it’s a good trade-off. Whether it is or not depends on your viewpoint.

Stokoe’s story is similar to Salvation and other Alien stories, as we get Wascylewski, the mechanic on an orbiting platform whose captain investigates a derelict ship and, like Tom Skerritt in the original movie, breaks protocol to bring aboard three people found in cryo-storage. Of course, two of them have aliens inside them, and when they break out, it’s good night for most of the crew. Stokoe places the action on a Weyland-Yutani fuel depot above a gas giant, which gets claustrophobic quickly when the aliens begin hunting the crew. He cuts back and forth between the present, when Wascylewski is the last person alive, and the past, which shows how he got to that point. Stokoe doesn’t do anything deeply metaphorical like Gibbons does; he tells a horror story, and a good one, and as Gibbons does, he shows that the true monsters just might be humans without making too big a deal about it. One crew member goes insane, like Foss does, and the one survivor from the derelict ship is not in the best of shape, and Stokoe keeps ratcheting up the tension to a tautness that threatens to snap. Like a lot of good Alien stories (but not, of course, Salvation), Wascylewski has no weapons and he has to use his wits to survive, and Stokoe does a good job using all the parts of the way station, including the outside of it. By switching back and forth between the present and the past, he gives us a better group dynamic than Gibbons does, as Gibbons kills off most of the crew so quickly. Stokoe does a nice job implying that the crew’s isolation was a reason they broke down so quickly — the captain’s refusal to follow safety protocols can be read as his desperation to do something to alleviate the boredom, and the crew’s in-fighting is definitely a by-product of the loneliness on board the station … which, of course, leads directly to their deaths.

Despite all this, both stories are classic Alien stories, so deep themes are a luxury, not a feature. Gibbons uses Christianity as a metaphor, of course, and there are some interesting tidbits that may or may not be intentional. “Selkirk” incorporates the Old English word for “church,” of course (“kirk”), and it basically means a church that was part of a hall or manor, probably a chapel that was built by a noble landowner. The ship is called the Nova Maru, which is interesting. “Nova,” of course, is “new,” while “maru” means circle in Japanese and is often appended to ship names in Japan (there are many theories why). Given that Selkirk and the rest work for the Weyland-Yutani, which is at least partially a Japanese company, this is not surprising, but what’s interesting (and perhaps accidental on Gibbons’s part, although I like to think not) is that in Spanish, it’s a diminutive form of, partly, Marie. So, if we squint a bit, “Nova Maru” can mean “New Mary,” implying that the aliens are unholy offspring of a different kind of virgin. Given what Selkirk sees in the wreckage of the ship, perhaps it’s not as far-fetched as it might be. Stokoe doesn’t do anything too unusual with the names, but his crew is a nice, diverse bunch (Arabic, Polish, Korean, Swedish, and others) — it doesn’t help them against the xenomorphs, but it’s still interesting to see.

Even with the interesting stories that Gibbons and Stokoe tell, the reason to get these two comics is the artwork. Stokoe was about 12 years into his career when he drew this, and while the only long-form series he had done was Orc Stain (all seven issues of it), he had done a lot of work all over the place, and he had reached a point of maturity with his artwork. Stokoe’s trademark is insane details, and we get that on Dead Orbit. Even his establishing shot of the fuel depot shows a staggering amount of detail, as Stokoe makes the orbiting platform a decrepit mess:

Once inside, we get more detail. Stokoe’s cartooning style feels loose despite the details, so all of his mechanical creations always look a bit baroque and decadent, even in the far future of the Alien Universe. This is only highlighted by the shabbiness of the characters, from the scruffy, chain-smoking Wascylewski to the heavily bearded Hassan. Even before everything goes to hell, the depot looks a bit worse for wear, despite the intricacy if its design. Stokoe makes sure the lighting in both the way station and the ship they find is poor, so that there are dark corners and shadowy corridors everywhere, adding to sense of dread, naturally, but also implying the cheapness of the construction due to the corporation’s penny-pinching. Stokoe has always been good at organic messiness, so when the crew finds indications of the aliens’ presence on the spaceship, Stokoe does a nice job making it look like scarring in the metal. The book becomes a horror story before the aliens show up, as the remaining crew of the spaceship is horribly burned in a cryo-storage malfunction, and he does a marvelous job with the terrible wounds they receive. Of course, they become metaphorical later, as they reveal the ugliness of humanity when it’s desperate to survive, and Stokoe contrasts it nicely with the horrors that burst out of the chests of two of the horrifically scarred crew members.

Stokoe has always been good with showing extreme emotions in his characters, and as the xenomorphs begin to hunt, he does an excellent job with the fear that the survivors feel. He uses hatching to devastating effect, shadowing their faces without using chunks of blacks so we can still see all the details on their faces as they descend. Torrenson goes crazy, and we get a superb evocation of that, as Stokoe just erases all traces of humanity from his face:

Of course, if you’re going to draw an Alien comic, you need to get the aliens right, and Stokoe does a terrific job with them. They’re lithe and sleek, with a kind of quirky personality that Stokoe seems to imbue with many of his characters. They’re toying with the humans, as they should, and they seem to be … enjoying themselves? The grimace that their mouths make always seem to hint at a smile, but Stokoe seems to lean into it a bit more, which is weird but clever. Wascylewski’s final battle with one of the xenomorphs (he has already managed to kill the other one) is a marvelous, wordless tour-de-force, in which the alien could easily be a super-villain, the way Stokoe draws it stalking its desperate prey. It’s a very cool scene.

Stokoe colors and letters this book, too, and those aspects of his art are probably a bit underrated, especially the lettering. His coloring is always quite good — he knows when to use blacks effectively, and he contrasts the cool blues and purples of the metallic space station well with the violent reds of the alien births and the burned survivors of the spaceship. Despite the feeling of decay even early in the book, that part is still fairly well-lit, and Stokoe slowly allows the black edges to creep in as the people die and the aliens begin to take over. Stokoe’s lettering doesn’t always fit the tone of the book he’s working on, but it does here. The balloons are often jagged sunbursts rather than smooth circles, while the letters are a bit ragged when the characters are stressed, and even the more “computerized” letters that we see when the ship’s AI “speaks” is a bit wonky, giving the impression of the computers slowly breaking down. The lettering is a big part of the art, and Stokoe does an excellent job making it fit the tone of the story.

While Stokoe’s art on Dead Orbit is great but similar to the work before and after it, Mignola’s art on Salvation is interesting because of what came right after it, which is Hellboy. In the early 1990s, Mignola began moving away from his early style and moving toward his apotheosis in Hellboy, and Salvation is an interesting step along the way. Early in his career, he was a bit more cartoony, but in the late 1980s, he began to use a more angular style and more spot blacks, which you can see in such works as Gotham by Gaslight. Around the time of Salvation, he also drew The Jungle Adventure (with Wolverine!), Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Dracula, all of which were refinements of that style, and Salvation is another one before he unleashed an even more abstract, angular style in Hellboy. The human characters in Salvation are still a bit in his “mid-career” style — the late 1980s/early 1990s — in that Mignola still uses hatching to add definition to their features and effective blacks to place them in shadows all the time. The figures, too, show a bit of the lingering cartoonish style from his early career, as the lines he uses for them are a bit more rounded than he’d later use (not by much, just a little). Selkirk’s face here is an excellent example of what we might call “mid-career Mignola”:

In later years, Mignola would forego the hatching on the face, and he’d even make the face and hands a bit more abstract. This is an interesting transitional period for his art, but it’s certainly not bad in any way.

Where we see the most hints of the new style he was about to employ is with the xenomorphs. Unlike Stokoe 20+ years later, Mignola keeps the aliens more abstract, eschewing details except for the geometric shapes revealed by the breaks in the vast chunks of black he uses to define them:

He can’t go completely angular with the aliens, because their form is dictated by outside forces, but he does use blacks liberally to create them, and as the book goes on, it seems like Mignola gets more confident in drawing both the aliens and other parts of the book in this style. Obviously, the tone of the book gets darker, so Mignola can show this in the art, but some of the pages at the end would not feel out of place in Hellboy, as he drops holding lines and just uses blacks to create negative space (assisted, I’m sure, by Nowlan’s inks, because Nowlan is a great inker). I assume that Mignola drew this essentially in order, and it’s interesting to track his development over the course of the book. Unlike a wonderful-looking book like, say, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (which looks great), this book looks like a transition. Mignola would “graduate” to much more atmospheric horror after this book, and while his movement work on Hellboy is fine, it’s interesting that he lost a bit of it with the new style, so he simply could not do an “action” book anymore after this. In Salvation, he could still pull it off. I’m not so sure he could have even a year later. The comics art world is better for him changing his style, of course, but it’s fun to think about him not changing it so much, too.

Both Salvation and Dead Orbit are examples of what good science fiction and horror can do. Gibbons is a bit obvious with the metaphors, but he doesn’t belabor his point too much. Selkirk talks of demons a lot, of course, and in the end, Gibbons switches Selkirk’s perspective effectively, but the religious metaphors fit well in the course of the story and they also don’t overwhelm the story, which is crucial. Stokoe, meanwhile, seems to be writing a simple horror story, but he too is able to get in shots at capitalism and the decadence that follows in its wake, and he’s more subtle about it than Gibbons is. In both cases, the stories are greatly helped by the art, but the stories are still very well done. As we know, science fiction and horror can be about a lot of things that our society struggles with, and both these stories do a good job trying to illuminate some of those things. And, of course, we get to see aliens tear apart a bunch of helpless humans, so that’s all right, too!

These comics are, unfortunately, hard to find. Salvation has been in and out of print for years, and it seems Marvel put it in a collection in 2022 … which seems to be out of print. Even Dead Orbit, which is much newer, seems to have fallen victim to the vagaries of licensing, as Dark Horse had no means to keep it in print and Marvel, I guess, hasn’t gotten around to it yet. It seems like the best thing to do is haunt comic book stores and conventions to see if any retailers have copies. We all like to do that, though, right?

Make sure you check out the archives! They’re always fun!