Survival, Faith, and Xenomorphs - "Dead Orbit" and "Sacrifice"

In January 2026 I swerved a bit and read two short comics set in the Aliens universe, i.e. the universe kicked off by the 1979 Sigourney Weaver film Alien.

It was interesting to see how a film franchise could be used as a springboard for telling standalone stories in a different medium.  Comics are kind of the perfect medium for these kind of small scale stories, at least in a franchise like Aliens.

The Aliens franchise is immediately recognizable for its imagery, between H.R. Giger's absolutely iconic creature design and the parasitic body horror of the face-hugging and chest bursting alien life cycle.  Comics, as a visual medium, can retain the iconography and drawing a convincing sci-fi future doesn't cost the millions of dollars that filming one would.

Making a movie or a TV show is expensive and requires a lot of people.  But with a comic, a couple of creators can get together and tell a tight, compact story while still making it feel very much like the film franchise without having to worry about the broader marketability needed to recoup filming costs.

The two stories, Dead Orbit and Sacrifice are also very different from each other with the former being a tense and harrowing horror survival story and the latter a mournful and melancholic personal one.

Aliens: Dead Orbit is a 2017 comic written and drawn by James Stokoe.  Aliens: Sacrifice is a 1993 comic written by Peter Milligan and drawn by Paul Johnson.  Both are 4-issue miniseries published by Dark Horse that are now out of print as standalone books ever since Marvel acquired the Aliens franchise license in 2020, though Marvel has been releasing collections of the Dark Horse Aliens comics as Aliens: The Original Years.  Sacrifice and Dead Orbit are in Volumes 2 and 4, respectively.

I got both as second hand standalone books.  Neither is connected to any of the films.

Both stories are excellent and worth scaring up.  I'm not going to avoid spoilers.

Monsters in the Dark - Xenomorphs and Cosmic Horror

In "The Call of Cthulhu," H.P. Lovecraft's narrator says this:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

In the Alien universe, we have ventured too far into those "black seas of infinity."  And there are monsters in the darkness.

I find the Aliens franchise to be at its most compelling when it leans into this cosmic horror aspect.  The xenomophs frighten me not just because they are scary monsters that kill people but because they are creatures that are inscrutable in their pure destruction. Creatures whose hostility is so absolute, so relentless that it becomes malevolence.

They have no eyes.  They have acid for blood.  They seem to eat nothing.  They can survive the vacuum of space.  They are in all ways antithetical to life as we know it and almost beyond comprehension.  Even the body horror of their life cycle, where they don't just murder us but horribly violate us on the way in and on the way out reflects this.  They are a thing that should not be.

Once you've encountered the horror of the xenomorph you can't go back to who you were and no universe that could produce such a thing could be a good universe.   

And that vector, that sort of existential dread is really interesting to me.  Dead Orbit nibbles at the edge of this kind of cosmic horror and Sacrifice is explicitly about it.

Personally, I very much don't like stories in the franchise that try to explain the origin or

quantify the combat stats of the xenomorph.  This lessens the aspects of them that resonate with me.  As I always say, lore is not a story, and in the case of Aliens, I think filling out the stat sheet diminishes their power.  This is why I skipped the films Prometheus (2012) and Covenant (2017);  I don't care about their origins and finding out that it was genetically engineered black goo or a crazed android that created them (and not even all that long ago) does not interest me at all.  I also think the parts of Romulus (2024) that tried to tie the origin lore into the story were easily the worst parts of that movie.  (Overall, I liked that film and I think the first half was incredible but I do think the black goo triggered epilogue was a train wreck.)

A nice thing about a fairly anthological franchise like Aliens is that you can just ignore entries you don't like or that don't interest you and it's mostly fine.  It's like the Bond franchise that way.  (Moonraker is fucking terrible.)

Dead Orbit

Dead Orbit's plot is really simple.   A pair of aliens get loose on the Sphacteria space station.  The unarmed crew tries to survive.  It doesn't go well.

The story unfolds in two parallel timelines. In the present, the engineer Wascylewski has to leave the relative safety of the Sphacteria's observation deck because the deck is running out of oxygen.  As he creeps through the damaged, silent station the story intercuts with the past which shows a derelict ship arriving on autopilot and the Sphacteria's crew retrieving three badly burned but alive bodies from the derelict's cryo-sleep chambers.  Shock of shocks, two of the bodies have aliens inside which burst out and havoc ensues.  The crew is picked off one by one, with Wassy as the last survivor.   

There is no safety on the station both because of the stalking xenomorphs and the oxygen slowly running out in the Sphacteria's modular sections.  Every time Wassy manages to escape to a new module, his oxygen indicator shows he has about 4 hours before he has to move on.  And the aliens are....somewhere.  Wassy is just trying to stave off death for as long as he can and after each escape both ticking clocks just start again.  It's bleak and salvation isn't really on the table.

He's fighting inevitability, and he's going to lose no matter how hard he rages against the dying of the light.

The book ends with Wassy in the Life Support module that he has just blown free of the station.  The xenomorphs are gone but his oxygen indicator begins ticking down again as he exhaustedly lights a cigarette with nowhere else to go.

It's a story with lots of empty corridors and a lot of silence.  Wassy doesn't talk to himself as he creeps through the station, which occasionally creaks or hisses oxygen.  The general quiet isn't comforting, though, nor is it an indication of safety.  It's quite the opposite and it amplifies the tension.  The aliens are listening and he has no idea where they might be.  Any sound he makes puts him in danger.  Wassy also has a loud smoker's wheeze when he is frightened or exerts himself, the noise of which bursts into the silent corridors, potentially betraying his presence.

I appreciate there's no lore in this and no real answers for any of the Sphacteria's crew.  How did the aliens get on the derelict ship?  Who are the derelict's crew and why are they all horribly burned?  What the hell happened?  How did those things get inside the derelict's burned crew?

Wassy and company will never know.

Art

James Stokoe's art is really impressive, not the least because he did the pencilling, the coloring, and the lettering himself.

There is a lot of detail in every panel and this manages to give a kind of paranoia to the reading experience.  There's so much to look at and in the busy space station "set" I found myself meticulously scanning each panel trying to parse what I was looking at, which is exactly what Wassy is doing as he tries to figure out whether that mess of lines in the distance is broken wiring and pipes or the xenomorph.

This effect feels very purposeful and doesn't ever feel like busy detail for busy detail's sake.  It's a brilliant use of the comic medium's strengths to inject atmosphere and tension.  There's great panel flow with each one leading elegantly into the next and different frame sizes propel the eye between the panels with the perfect rhythm for the atmosphere, even taking my paranoid panel scanning into account.

The characters are well individualized, with slightly exaggerated faces which is a touch more cartoony than how the environment or the aliens are drawn but it both gives the characters a lot of expressiveness and makes them easy to tell apart.  This slight cartoonish style also dampens some of the grossness.  The burn victims getting chest burst in the med bay when the young aliens emerge would have been utterly, maybe distractingly, horrific if drawn hyper-realistically.

There's also some good, small environmental details like the module letters on the bulkheads that the characters occasionally pass that help orient where they actually are on the station.  They aren't distractingly prominent but let an even vaguely attentive reader keep up with the geography.

Dead Orbit also has, for lack of a better phrase, really good sound design and scenic editing.  The way speech bubbles from the other timeline creep in as Wassy sneaks though the station makes for a natural and almost cinematic transition to the flashbacks.  You've seen this in movies a thousand times where sounds or dialog start from the flashback start playing before the scene cuts to the past.

There's also some really good and creative fades between timelines where past Wassy kind of dissolves into shrapnel or maybe embers that then "flow" into the next panel and reconstitute into his present timeline location.  It captures what it feels like to come out of a memory and the transition also manages to feel sort of metaphorical.  It's an effect that would be really hard to pull in film; the kind of realism film naturally pulls towards would make this a really weird transition, but it works amazingly here.

Stokoe uses subtle color work to signal to the reader which timeline they're in, with the past sections having a slight reddish tint and the present sections being slightly blue.  This becomes a really neat effect near the end when the two timelines start to happen simultaneously in the same panels as the dire present starts to directly echo the dire past.

There's only about 3 splash pages in the whole book, all related to the sudden appearance of an alien.  The relative paucity means the dramatic effect doesn't wane with overuse.

My only real critique of the art is that there's some geographical confusion during the final confrontation with the last alien.  Wassy blows the Life Support bay free and I swear the alien is on the wrong side of him during the explosion, given where it appears in the next page.  Also it had its arm blown off but the last we see it when he ejects it into space it has both again, which for a bit made me think that it was the other alien.  I don't think it was and the sequence is pretty effective and fast paced enough that it isn't, like, galling or anything.

Sacrifice

"The devil bites into me and I wake up in Hell.  Screaming. On fire. In Hell."  These are the first words in Aliens: Sacrifice, spoken in the priest Ann McKay's narration as she dreams of her spaceship crashing.  She is the only survivor of the accident and lands on a planet near a strange fortified settlement that she saw from the window as the ship went down.  Stumbling through the woods towards it after getting out of the burning wreckage she finds a strange, stained ritual stone and then hears a noise behind her.  She glimpses the shadow of a xenomorph and then runs, making it to the settlement.

The sad, frightened, and suspicious colonists have been living in the shadow of the lone alien for 9 months and Ann discovers they have been keeping it at bay by leaving lab grown babies on the stone for it.  She offers herself up as the next sacrifice and arms herself, intending to kill it.  She fights it and the colonists, inspired by and ashamed by her courage join the fight.   They manage to trap it in a spiked pit trap and Ann delivers the coup de gras by descending into the pit and setting a grenade off in its face, which kills the alien but permanently blinds her.

That's the plot, but that's not really what Sacrifice is about.

Themes

Sacrifice is a mournful and quiet character story that uses the xenomorph to explore Ann's faith.  The alien bookends her faith journey and the creature looms in Ann's psyche as much as it looms over the settlement.

This is revealed slowly with some nice foreshadowing as Ann dreams of the xenomorph in more detail than she could have seen in the dark woods outside the settlement and she refers to the half glimpsed thing as an alien when she's talking to Masters right after she sees it.  I initially thought this was some narrative sloppiness but as the story unfolded it became clear that she had encountered a xenomorph before.

When she was a child, one killed her mother and Ann fled to a church where she dealt with the trauma by believing with "a ferocity that scared the older priests."  In her dreams of the beast she is obsessed with looking into its eyes; indeed the stylized creature in her subconscious does have eyes.  Jagged, angry, lightning bolt looking eyes.

She says explicitly that "I have to look into its eyes.  I have to see if they're the eyes of the devil."  The reason for this fixation becomes clear at the end when she descends into the pit trap with the wounded, struggling alien rather than just tossing the grenade in:

I will look into its face.  I will see its eyes. If he is the devil I'll know it.  And if there is a devil, then there must be a God.

But of course, when she does look into the xenomorphs face, there are no eyes.  As she recovers in the new eternal dark of blindness, she says:

What did I see?  Nothing.  It has no eyes.  Neither of us have now.  I saw nothing.  No devil.  No ultimate evil.  No ultimate anything.  Just bland, indifferent destruction. No more demonic than an earthquake or a plague.  There is no devil.  There is no God.

For Ann, the alien reveals that there is no plan.  There is no one looking out for us and no enemy trying to architect our downfall.  There's just "bland, indifferent, destruction."  There's no hostile metaphysical intelligence.   The universe itself is hostile, unreasoning.

The alien that triggered the stirrings of her faith and her desire for certainty is there at the end, stomping it out.  Her faith on some level was aspirational and it was a faith not just in religion but in an ordered, comprehensible universe.  The xenomorph destroyed all of that.

...

This shit is bleak.

Art

I think Paul Johnson's art in Sacrifice is wonderful.  It's painted, though it at times almost looks like colored pencil and is similar in realism to the art of Alex Ross, who did the iconic art for Kingdom Come and World's Greatest Superheroes.  (Johnson is older than Ross and Sacrifice predates the books I just listed by several years.)  Everyone is very individualized and easy to tell apart.

Johnson said in an interview with comicsbeat.com that he majored in fine arts and that:

My comic painting technique and style drew on a wide range of influences from fine artists such as Rembrandt, Degas and Francis Bacon to classic American illustrators such as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth.

The backgrounds in a lot of the panels are a very deep black and this darkness and the shadows everywhere impart isolation and fear.  The omnipresent darkness fills the pages with paranoia as there is no chance the characters will actually spot the jet black alien in it before it is on top of them.  They, and the reader, have absolutely no idea where it is.  The few direct encounters with the xenomorph are frantic with a mix of framings and quick insert closeups that are disorienting in the best possible way.

The art in Sacrifice really sells the melancholic tone of the story and I really like how the flashbacks to Ann's mother are in cool blues.  They way the flashbacks feel reminded me a lot of how the dreamlike flashbacks are used in Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys.

Gallimaufry

Dead Orbit

• James Stokoe also wrote and drew the 2012 comic Godzilla: The Half Century War which I read right before Dead Orbit.  Originally this piece was going to be about that book as well as Dead Orbit as they are both extensions of film franchises by the same creator, but while I enjoyed Half Century War a lot and thought it was really good, I didn't have that much to add about it.  It's worth checking out if you like Stokoe or Godzilla.

• I loved the moment near the end of Dead Orbit where Wassy blows the med bay free and the alien emerges from the shattered station, unfazed by the vacuum of space.  The expressiveness of Stokoe's faces was really well deployed here as you can almost feel Wassy think "My God...how?"

• Dead Orbit also had a cool moment for the reader when the aliens chest burst out of the bodies in the med bay.  I had distinct moment of "Oh no, there's two of them" during this scene as this was the first time a reader would realize there was more than one stalking the Sphacteria.  It immediately raised the peril of an already perilous situation for Wassy.  It's a nice reverse dramatic irony; Wassy knows in the present timeline that there's two, but the reader doesn't.

• After Wassy manages a narrow escape from the aliens I really liked how he just sits down and collects himself in the med bay while the blood drips from the chest burst bodies in a slow, persistent, "drip, drip."  Like I said above, this book has really good sound design.

• One of the best examples of how tense this story can be is when, after a hull breach, Wassy passes out in the middle of a corridor due to the oxygen jetting out of the damaged module.  Watching him gaspingly struggle and fail to stay conscious while the aliens might be near was actually rather stressful.   He wakes up in a different part of the Sphacteria in a very bad situation....

Sacrifice

• I've seen some people on reddit complain that the ecology of the alien in Sacrifice doesn't make sense with the canon.  Like the settlement shouldn't be able to placate it with the babies.  For me this critique is firmly in the "whatever, who cares" category for a story like this.  Lore nitpicks strike again.

• The tone of the story reminds me of the Alien 3 film with its elegaic atmosphere, hopelessness, and bleakness.  I need to rewatch that film, which I apparently hate much less than the average person.  (I remember liking it quite a bit.)

• I made a reference to Alex Ross's art style with regards to Paul Johnson's earlier.  Ross's Kingdom Come also has a clergy member point of view character named McCay.  (Though it's spelled "McKay" in Sacrifice.)  Coincidence?  Probably.

• There's a lot of dutch angles which in cinematic language implies a world that is off kilter.  The technique is well used here; Ann is dislocated, reeling from traumas in the past and present and her worldview is under strain.

• Paul Johnson had a relatively short comics career.  In that comicsbeat interview, when asked why he retired he said:

The mainstream companies had their own properties and that’s what they wanted to sell. This era also saw the advent of cross-marketing of comics with computer games, movies, toys, etc. I had come into mainstream comics sideways, but I was still a bit of an outsider — too mainstream for the experimental comics and too experimental for mainstream comics. I had a great time drawing and painting comics when I did them, but I sensed the writing was on the wall and it was time for a change. I didn’t want to spend my time chasing and executing comics that I really wasn’t that buzzed about.

Johnson doesn't do art anymore but seems fine with that.  I'm planning on checking out more of his work.

Conclusion

I really liked both of these stories and found them to be very compelling.  They are quite different in terms of plot and art but both are really, really assured and effective in what they were trying to do.  Dead Orbit was a stressful read in the best possible way, and Sacrifice stuck with me for a long time afterwards.

They told stories that leaned into the elements I like about the Alien franchise: tense overmatched survival horror in Dead Orbit and existential dread in Sacrifice.  And both were really fascinating looks at how creators can expand a film franchise into a new medium and really masterfully use the language and techniques of the new medium while still making the stories feel like they are in continuity with the films.

I have no idea what the overall quality is for the Dark Horse Aliens IP as a whole, so I can't weigh in on whether the collected editions featuring these stories are worth it overall or if it's better to get second hand standalone versions.

Aliens is great and I appreciate that people are using the franchise to tell lots of different kinds of stories, and tell them well.  I like when things are good.

Happy reading.

-m