Nowadays, it’s easy to find comic adventures of every franchise you can imagine. Want to read more about the kids from Hawkins, Illinois? There’s Stranger Things comics. Need more Rick and Morty? There’s comics with more of their adventures. Are you an older millennial or Gen Xer who wants to relive the glory days of toy commercial cartoons? The Energon Universe has you covered for G.I. Joe and the Transformers and there’s numerous Thundercats series to choose from. Right now, Marvel owns the Star Wars, Aliens, and Predator licenses, but it wasn’t always this way. While there were licensed comics back in the day of all kinds, they’d fade away over the ’80s and ’90s, or were kiddie franchises. If you wanted something dark and mature, you were out of luck. Well, until Dark Horse Comics‘ Aliens #1, that is.
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The Aliens franchise is one of the greatest sci-fi horror franchises around, if not the greatest. Alien and Aliens are legitimate classics of the medium and while the later entries aren’t as amazing they’re still plenty great. Aliens came out in 1986 (I watched it numerous times as a six-year old because my parents were more permissive than parent); it’s one of the best sci-fi sequels ever and fans loved it. They wanted more, but Alien 3 wouldn’t drop for six years. In 1988, though, they got a chance to revisit the universe they loved when Dark Horse successfully got the rights to the property, opening the floodgates for another licensed comics boom in the ’90s. Aliens #1 is an important part of comic history and just a cool book, too.
Aliens #1 Continued the Aliens‘ Amazing Story
Usually, when I write these, I don’t put the cover in the article, but I had to for this one. This image is everything that every fan has ever loved about the Aliens franchise, capturing the vibe of it perfectly. Aliens #1 came at a time when fans wanted more of this from the franchise; they even made a cartoon and action figures about his very violent rated-R movie. It was one of the biggest franchises of the ’80s and I remember the adults watching it constantly back then. The cliffhanger ending – Ripley, Hicks, and Newt launched into space in an escape pod after defeating the Alien Queen – is an all-timer and fans were rabid to know what happened next.
This comic gave them that, four years before Alien 3. This issue stars Hicks and Newt, years after they were rescued. Newt is an adult and Ripley is nowhere to be found. Newt has been in a psych ward for years, dealing with the aftermath of watching everyone she knew killed by the ravenous Xenomorphs. Hicks, meanwhile, is still a marine, with the story finding him in a cell for drunk and disorderly conduct. He learns that a ship has been taken over by Xenomorphs and is sent on a mission to retrieve a specimen, because rich people in the Aliens universe are just as dumb as ones in the real world (there’s even one who worships them, because of course there is) and Hicks decides to recruit Newt for the mission.
It’s a pretty standard Aliens story. It’s all about the cost of corporate greed, as people are forced to risk their lives so the people with everything can have more. That makes it a pretty prescient story in 2026, where we live in a world run by that kind of attitude, but none of this is what makes the book so important. No, it’s important because of what it did for Dark Horse Comics. See, at this point in its existence, Dark Horse was a smaller indie. They had only been around for two years and Aliens would be the first of the licensed comics that would help make them into a power in the industry.
Marvel and DC had been doing licensed comics for years, but they shied away from the more mature ones. Dark Horse didn’t. The Alien comics led to the Godzilla and Predator comics, making the company even more money and allowing them to publish more amazing indie books. The company would get the Star Wars license in 1991, publishing some of the best Star Wars comics of all time. The success of Dark Horse’s licensed books led directly to what we have today; it wasn’t the first time that comics had been used to continue a beloved movie, but it was the beginning of the comic industry publishing every popular franchise. It showed that franchises that weren’t just for kids could sell well and opened the floodgates, which still haven’t closed 38 years later.
Aliens #1 Changed the Comic Industry
Aliens #1 was just the beginning; over the years more and more Dark Horse Xenomorph books would come out, keeping the franchise alive as the movies floundered. Nearly every major character at every major company had a crossover with the franchise in the ’90s (Wildstorm even used their as part of their normal continuity, the story changing the status quo of Stormwatch and leading to the birth of the Authority, one of the most important superteams ever) and while their books didn’t have the staying power of Dark Horse’s Star Wars books – people lost a lot of interest in the franchise after Alien 3 – they are of supreme importance to the history of the comic industry. There’s a good chance without them, we never would have gotten the amazing Dark Horse comics we have over the decades.
The comic industry looks very different without Dark Horse there and the only reason the company had the success it did was because this book gave them the cash in their early years to take chances, allowing books like Sin City, Concrete, Dark Horse Presents, and Hellboy to be born. The licensed comic boom of the ’90s helped create the pop cultural landscape that we have today, for better and for worse. It’s an important piece of comic history, a comic that changed the way we interact with our favorite franchises. The ComicBook marketplace and machine is full of important comics, but few of the others are as important as this one. You now have a chance to own a comic that has influenced pop culture in ways few others have.
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