For Alien Day, we’re looking back at “Aliens: Salvation,” a prestige format comic originally published November 1993. Alien³ had just come out, Ripley was dead, and the comics were in a position to explore what this series could be in the wake of the trilogy finishing. Dave Gibbons, Mike Mignola, Kevin Nowlan, and Matt Hollingsworth are all on this book — it’s a hell of a team.
Written by Dave GibbonsCover by Mike Mignola
with Dave Stewart
Pencilled by Mike Mignola
Inked by Kevin Nowlan
Colored by Matt Hollingsworth
Lettered by Clem RobinsSelkirk, a God-fearing crewman aboard the space freighter Nova Maru, is forced at gunpoint to abandon ship with his captain. They crash-land on a small planet, but it is soon apparent that they have not entirely escaped the Nova Maru’s dreadful cargo. Dave Gibbons’ tale is fully realized by artists Mike Mignola and Kevin Nowlan.
Mark Tweedale: Happy Alien Day, all. Given the occasion, it seems like the perfect time to revisit “Aliens: Salvation,” first published nearly twenty-eight years ago. Holy crap, this thing even predates the first “Hellboy” miniseries!
Before we get into the review, I wanted to quickly calibrate, get a sense of our Alien foundations. So Chris, what’s your experience with the Alien franchise?
Christopher Chiu-Tabet: Well, I happened to write a We Want Comics column on the series (already dated now thanks to Marvel snapping up the rights), and a retrospective of my personal favorite comic from the line, “Aliens: Labyrinth.” I think Alien and Aliens are two of the best films ever made, and the Alien is simply the greatest monster ever created for film — heck, it might even be the greatest monster ever imagined by a human being. And you?
Mark: I got introduced to the first two films in university. Aliens was an incredible experience to watch in the university cinema (that third act!) but Alien was the one that really stuck with me, mainly because of the striking choices it made, like breaking the fourth wall to deliberately unsettle the audience. I’ve seen a friend play Alien: Isolation (which is free on the Epic Games store at the moment, so definitely pick that up), but I could never play something like that myself — my anxiety would go through the roof. I’ve also seen a bunch of the other sequels, but none of them really did much for me, so I stopped seeking out new Alien material. The exception here being “Aliens: Salvation,” which I picked up because I was excited to see that world paired with Mike Mignola’s art, especially drawing H.R. Giger’s fantastic Alien design.
Chris: So what do we think of the comic itself? ’Cos seeing Mignola tell an Alien story is a huge part of the appeal, and why we’re still talking about this comic over all the other countless ones Dark Horse published over the years, but does it live up to its potential? I think it’s an evocative little story that reminds us, as all good entries in the series do, that capitalism is the real villain, and the religious overtones are interesting in light of what Prometheus revealed about this universe, but other than that, I think Gibbons’s script largely comes across as a bog standard Robinson Crusoe story.
Before I finish, I would like to add it seems Gibbons was also heavily inspired by the section with the insane Curate (a priest) in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, who is eventually sacrificed by the Narrator because he threatens to give away their position to the Martians. (This time, the deranged, secular captain gets killed by the religious narrator.)
Mark: Part of the reason I’ve struggled with expansions to the Alien franchise is the way it seems to be stuck replicating the past. “Aliens: Salvation” came out the year after Alien³, and I can’t help but see similarities. The religious element was something present in the film and turned up to eleven here in the comic. It’s something that rubs me the wrong way, and it’s frustrating because Selkirk spends most of the story denying his own agency, and when he finally embraces his agency at last, the story ends.
Continued belowA major element of the attraction of Alien to me is that the title refers to more than just the literal Alien running around killing people. Everything on LV-426 is alien and implies a larger world. I don’t ever need to see that world necessarily, but having it there makes the human characters that much smaller in it, and more vulnerable. I liked the harder sci-fi bent of that first film too.
Part of the reason “Aliens: Salvation” caught my interest is because Mignola’s art revels in ambiguity, and I was hoping for a story that would push that ambiguity into every aspect of this world. Unfortunately, too much of it felt like filling out a checklist of the standard Alien franchise items for my taste. (Person that’s secretly an android, check.)
Chris: I find it funny that this planet is inhabited by pterosaurs and apes: an allusion to a prehistoric Eden, defiled by capitalism, or did Gibbons just let Mignola draw what he wanted? The man certainly loves his monkeys, though to be fair, who doesn’t? (They’re so cute.)
Thematically, the reveal that Dean is an android is very in-tune with the psychosexual overtones of the films; this is the only time to my knowledge, a human character becomes sexually attracted to an android. I think when the comic was released, it made a lot of sense that a man would feel betrayed to discover she’s an artificial lifeform, whereas now, I think it reads as a suggestion of religious intolerance — that only a devoutly religious man like Selkirk would, in the 2100s, feel profound discomfort at the notion of lusting after an android.
I’m a Christian myself and am not a bigot, so perhaps if I saw Selkirk as my surrogate, I could interpret the reveal instead as an indication of him finally realizing how horrible and materialistic the universe is (“what kind of God would create the Alien?” Yes, the Engineers, but y’know what I mean). We are, on a purely physical level, machines made of blood and bone, and would we find other people attractive if we didn’t have the skin hiding all those gross mechanisms?
Mark: Well, that’s exactly the language of the first film. It’s why the android design is the way it is, to blur the line between machine and biology. It’s why Ash’s innards look like entrails. Our discomfort with the mechanism beneath flesh is even in the Alien’s design, where portions look like exposed muscle, as though the skin has been flayed off. And there’s been so much written about how the film takes our discomfort with sexuality and weaponizes it with sexual imagery that elicits horror.
I didn’t really need an android reveal. If Selkirk had known Dean was an android from the beginning and still felt attracted to her, I think it would’ve served the story better. The moment Selkirk chooses not to help Dean and to let her die, he makes a moral judgement. Up to that point, he’d done terrible things, walking up to a line in the sand, but never quite crossing it. Then, as far as I’m concerned, he murders Dean and crosses a threshold, becoming a new character. This is when Selkirk’s story came to life. . . but then the story ends. I wish we had reached this moment sooner so we could spend time with a character aware of his own agency.
As for the alien life on PCW9512, as fun as pterosaurs and apes are, populating an alien planet with Earthling analogues diminished the world. I know these things and can make pretty accurate story assumptions about them the second I see them. The universe feels small and explicable, not, y’know, alien. For the world established in Alien, I want the kind of sci-fi where even if a planet’s air is breathable, the microscopic life is incompatible with human biology. Even a puncture in a character’s suit is a major problem. The world of “Aliens: Salvation” has less in common with what we saw in Alien and more with something you’d expect to read in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. It’s pulpier, less grounded.
Continued belowChris: I understand what you mean — it could’ve been like Pandora in Avatar, still a lush world but poisonous to humans.
Mark: If Pandora had more adventurous art design without the obvious analogues to creatures and vegetation from Earth, yes. (That’s not a dig at the design work for Pandora, it’s just that Avatar was deliberately trying to draw analogues to things from Earth, so it served a very different purpose.)
Chris: It reminds me, there is a moment when Selkirk falls into the Queen’s nest, and it feels like the encounter with Satan in the lowest part of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, and perhaps if Mignola had written this, the overall vibe of the imagery would’ve been closer to someone like Gustave Dore or William Blake than a pulp adventure.
Mark: See, that sequence was where the visuals came alive for me. I wanted more of that.
It’s just a shame that the first Alien film came up with this great Alien design, and they’ve coasted on it ever since. There were elements that worked for me, like the pterosaurs being inedible and Selkirk being forced to resort to cannibalism, but this was more about the “sinful” act than it was to flesh out the planet itself as a source of conflict. Unfortunately, if the Aliens are the only problem the characters have to deal with, the conflict structure gets stale real fast.
I think this was my biggest problem with the story, actually. You have Mignola, an artist that could’ve drawn the hell out of Aliens that blend into the background, disappearing or emerging from shadows, and yet every time an Alien appeared it was immediately played for action rather than tension. There was a lot of hand-wringing from me while reading this at the many missed opportunities.
Chris: Aside from the few moments like the encounter with the Queen, there are surprisingly few depictions of the Aliens that I would consider iconic from Mignola — they’re always seen in claustrophobic panels, like a homogenous hive of giant insects. I know Aliens depicts them like bugs, but never to the point a single Alien doesn’t seem like a threat.
That said, I do love the sight of them stalking their prey in trees; I can’t say that’s very common.
Mark: That was one of those hand-wringing moments for me. It was such an interesting visual, and with more alien plant life, it could’ve been pushed into a place where you can’t be sure where the Alien begins and ends. . . or even if an Alien is there at all. I wanted the tension of ambiguity.
Chris: Like those impossibly ancient, incredibly gnarled trees that resemble bony fingers.
Mark: YES! Damn, that’d be awesome.
Where the story did work for me, was the recurring eye motif. Selkirk feels seen by his god, naked and raw; the dead Foss, with his uneaten head atop a bare skeleton, with that one gleaming, judgemental eye; Dean’s android eye, torn from its socket. It taps into several layers of discomfort. And Selkirk himself, throughout the story has these big, wide eyes. Then after he murders Dean, those eyes are lost in shadow for the rest of the book until his final prayer, in hopes of salvation. So it doesn’t just have the discomfort, it functions as a strong visual that taps into the book’s core themes too.
Chris: Yeah, there’s something really poignant about how the blue marble at the start becomes a milky yellow orb at the end, prematurely aged by Weyland-Yutani spreading the Alien infestation across the universe.
I’m glad you brought up Selkirk eating Foss’s remains; it read to me like a perverse spin on Holy Communion, which as Christians know, is Christ himself subverting the act of human sacrifice. (Jack Miles, a scholar of religion, once fabulously described “take, eat, this is my body” as the ultimate challenge to Satan, who could never top that perverse act of selflessness.)
And at the end, Selkirk (whose name means “church hall” in Scottish), sacrifices himself to stop Weyland-Yutani from trying to regain their assets, preventing them from wasting more lives in the process, yet also slaughtering all life on the planet. Do you think we’re supposed to take away any thoughts on Christianity from Gibbons or Mignola, or is it merely a tale designed for the nihilistic Alien universe? I thought it’s well worth considering Mignola’s greatest creation is a demon. Is it impossible for one person (human, god or demon) to save the world?
Continued belowMark: Personally, I find the Christianity angle as a bit too narrowly focused. Rather than this being a story about Christianity, I look at it as using Christianity as a lens through which to explore other ideas. You can swap out Christianity for many other religions or ideologies and the story works the same way, but the symbolism used to communicate its ideas would change. This being an American comic, it makes sense to tell this story with Christianity, because its audience is more likely to be literate in the symbolism at play.
The title ‘Salvation’ immediately frames everything that follows. Yes, Selkirk dies at the end, but he is saved. And look at the way he dies — as the aliens approach, he remains in prayer. His fate is already sealed and he remains committed to it right to the end.
As you pointed out before, this is a Robinson Crusoe story. There’s even a deliberate reference to the book where Crusoe kills an unknown bird, but finds its flesh inedible. So I can’t help but take some of the themes from Robinson Crusoe and apply them to “Aliens: Salvation,” particularly the idea of a personal journey with religion and divine providence. At the end, Selkirk’s salvation also leads in more general terms to the salvation of humankind. His sacrifice destroys the threat that was incubating on PCW9512, giving a purpose to his suffering, which suggests divine providence.
I think it’s noteworthy that on the final page it is a religious vessel that comes to PCW9512 to answer the distress call there. This could’ve been any vessel, but the creators very deliberately chose the missionary vessel St. Peter. This is the final bit of punctuation on “Aliens: Salvation,” as the vessel witnesses the aftermath of tragedy that occurred, while communicating to the reader the success of Selkirk’s sacrifice, even if the crew of the St. Peter are unaware of it themselves.
Chris: Yeah, the final panel of the ship bearing the Cross of Saint George is really striking, least of all because it’s a rather cool ship design from Mignola. It’s interesting how the book begins with Selkirk being mocked by the crew for his beliefs, but ends with the reveal that religion has become hardly obscure in the 2100s, and the bittersweet indication that the protagonist missed his calling elsewhere.
Mark: Also present throughout is the idea of every action being watched and judged, not just by god, but by Selkirk himself. His judgement of Dean is particularly vicious. There’s a nice bit in the art, where before he knows she’s an android, her face is rarely in shadow, and her short blond hair functions like a halo. After Selkirk starts seeing her more sexually, we start seeing shadows on Dean’s face and on her hair. Then after she is revealed as an android, the exposed synthetic part of her face remains hidden in shadow, and only the human part is seen. She is portrayed this way while Selkirk still remains sympathetic to her. When he judges her and decides to let her die, then we only see the synthetic face. This emphasis on framing the story subjectively was one of my favorite parts of this story.
Chris: Any more thoughts before we wrap this up? I have a couple: is it me or does Selkirk’s narration sound English, but American when screaming? Similarly, and I hope this isn’t just because of my brain seeing Mignola artwork, but is it me or does he look a bit like Rasputin at times? (Perhaps it’s the ascetic vibe.)
Mark: He does look a bit like Rasputin! As for the narration, I didn’t get the English/American sound, I just read it as more formal language, because he’s talking to his god.
I actually liked this story. In terms of being an Alien story, I felt like it fell short, but on its own terms it was still a good story. Mainly where it frustrated me was with ideas it presented, but didn’t explore as much as I would’ve liked and it was over all too soon. That said, look how much we’ve been talking about the comic — clearly for such a short comic, it’s got a lot there.
Continued belowChris: I feel it has an intriguing perspective, exploring how a religious person would feel encountering the Aliens, as well as Mignola’s distinctive art style with Hollingsworth’s lurid, nightmarish colors, but it’s very much for completists, whether of the Alien series, Mignola, or Gibbons — which is why we’re here I suppose.
Mark: It is indeed.
Final Verdict: 7 – May God have mercy on Selkirk’s soul.
