Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colorist: Yen Nitro
Cover Artist: Bjorn Barends
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Reviewer: StoryBabbler
Disaster strikes Steel Team as their “simple mission” has gone down the hole. They discovered some surviving humans, who ended up betraying them. They lost a member of the team to a Xenomorph queen. And now there’s a new horror that’s walking the surface of Tobler-9 and preparing to murder the rest of the human survivors. See how Steel Team survives the night against the Xenomorphs led by this new monster in Alien #5.
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Review:
So, Steel Team is in a bad place now, the human survivors are under attack by an Alien/Human hybrid, and now Steel Team needs to head right into this chaos to retrieve the beacon that will call a ship to get them off the planet. Things are not looking good for the human synthetics and they don’t get any better as the issue goes on.
The story picks up where it left off with the hybrid leading Xenomorphs right to the underground human settlement and massacring everyone. Julius Ohta and Yen Nitro really bring out the big guns when it comes to depicting this horror show as the Xenomorphs kill the humans left and right. But it doesn’t take long before Steel Team show up and the real action starts. Not every member gets their time to show off regarding the action, but they do get some shots in.
The real focus of this comic are the characters you see on the cover: Freyja and Eli. The comic doesn’t ham it up that much, but it continues to build on the frustration and friction between them. Eli’s aggressive stance against humans and not wanting to save the survivors over preserving the rest of Steel Team, while Freyja remains empathetic in trying to help them anyway regardless of them being human. Phillip Kennedy Johnson writes their opposition well without making them idiots about how they handle it on top of everything else going on, and he doesn’t have them do anything too predictable or cliche in this issue. At least not at first, but that’s a spoiler.
As stated before, the comic really pulls off the action-horror vibe that the second film in the series, Aliens, had. There’s no pretense at trying to make this a typical horror story even in the Alien franchise, and it goes all in with the action-oriented direction. But there’s still shocking surprises, horrific developments, and always more trouble and terror every time the Xenomorphs show up on the page. And if you go by the end of this comic, the rest of the characters are far from out of the woods.
Final Thoughts:
Alien #5 continues the horror show as Steel Team needs to head back to the scavengers’ base that’s under attack by alien xenomorphs and a new human/alien hybrid. The comic isn’t the greatest, but the story continues to develop in interesting ways, and the art keeps the action-horror element alive as Steel Team faces more of the aliens as things continue to go from bad to worse for them.