Marvel and Alien fans shouldn’t sleep on the Aliens Vs. Avengers comic

There are few firm rules in comics reading, but Never trust an inter-brand tie-in comic could be one of them. The business interests are too involved to expect big creative swings, the licenses too fleeting to expect the books to be long-lived. 

And sometimes, even when a book is genuinely good, a panel of it will go viral out of context and you’ll sound like an absolute madwoman when you try to explain that, actually, when Batman took Rafael the Ninja Turtle to the alley where his parents died, it was a poignant moment, OK? OK?! There are all-time-great comics produced from brand crossovers, like Batman vs. Predator, but they’re one in a million. 

That’s my rationalization for why it’s taken me, a comics professional, half a year to get on the Aliens Vs. Avengers train. This is my mea culpa to writer Jonathan Hickman, artist Esad Ribić, and everybody else working on that comic: This crossover is a delight. 

“Delight” might not sound like the right word to describe a series in which human civilization is destroyed about 20 pages in. A series that takes place in a time when half the founding Avengers have liver spots and most of their friends died screaming. A series that’s a galactic-scale disaster-thriller about what might be the last days of humanity, because when the existential body horror genre meets the pulp sci-fi adventure genre, it turns out that the adventure guys get their shit rocked. 

But here’s the panel that convinced me to finally get off my butt and track the series down in Marvel Unlimited: 

You can tell that these things make the same sound as T-shirt cannons, and that’s sublime. Everything is terrible, but Hickman and Ribić are having a grand old time. In Aliens Vs. Avengers, the team that created maybe the best apocalyptic superhero crossover ever published show that they still know how to make an epic final sacrifice, a last-minute rescue, or surprise twists that take your breath away, even if you know from page one that half these people are gonna die. After all, this is an Alien comic. 

And between that stuff, Alien Vs. Avengers is still playing the crossover standard of unexpected but retrospectively obvious mashups: A Weyland-Yutani corporate takeover of Stark Industries, the Venom symbiote taking a facehugger as a host before it can kill a human, and evolution-obsessed X-Men villains like Apocalypse and Mister Sinister finding their own terrible meanings in the xenomorph species. 

If you’re a fan of Hickman’s work on Fantastic Four, Avengers, or X-Men, he’s playing his greatest hits here, giving big roles to the Krakoan-era X-Men status quo, Black Panther, and a nesting doll of massive multiversal apocalyptic threats. 

And if you’re an Alien fan looking for more of the machinations of David⁸ or the Engineers, Aliens Vs. Avengers isn’t just playing with the basic xenomorph layer of the setting, either. This shouldn’t dissuade anyone who hasn’t caught up on Prometheus or Alien: Covenant — I haven’t seen them, and found the comic gave me everything I needed to know — but will entice anyone who enjoyed Michael Fassbender’s memorable android. 

Three issues of Aliens Vs. Avengers have already been released — two are already available on Marvel Unlimited — with a final fourth installment due in May. I’ve been sleeping on this series, and I urge you to learn from my mistake. Just look at Mister Sinister. He’s got a gun that shoots facehuggers.