Written in 1988, Gibson’s script would’ve followed up James Cameron’s Aliens by having the USS Sulaco be intercepted by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s rival, the Union of Progresive Peoples. The ship is taken to Anchorpoint, effectively a giant space station/shopping mall, where Hicks learns the UPP are breeding an army of Xenomorphs to battle Weyland-Yutani, who are planning the same thing.
Gibson told CBR, “The last thing you ever expect is to see your [script] beautifully adapted and realized, decades later, in a different medium, by an artist of Johnnie Christmas’ caliber. It’s a wonderful experience, and I have no doubt that Johnnie’s version, which adheres almost entirely to the script, delivers more of my material to the audience than any feature film would have been likely to do.” This marks the author’s latest foray into the world of comics, following his 2016 IDW miniseries “Archangel,” co-created with Michael St. John Smith and artist Butch Guice.
Ripley is noticeably absent from the story, remaining in hypersleep following a fire on the ship: as Sigourney Weaver recalled in David Hughes’s book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, it was intended to save her return for the fourth film. Gibson explained, “I’d like to point out that I worked from a treatment provide by the film’s three producers, so it wasn’t my idea, at all, to jettison Ripley. Unhappy with that, as a fan of the previous two films, I went for a multiple helping of Bishop, my second favorite human [sic] character in the first [sic] film.”
“William Gibson’s Alien 3” #1 goes on sale on November 7. Head on over to CBR for a five-page preview of the comic, as well as variant covers by Daniel Warren Johnson (“Extremity”) and Paolo Rivera (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens Adaptation”).
