I was a huge Alien/Aliens kid growing up. It was, without exaggeration, as crucial to me as Star Wars. And I was a child at a bizarre point in time where those two franchises weren’t actually that different. Both had three movies, both had video games, both had toys all over the shelves. Star Wars had more of those things, granted, but the Aliens stuff was never all that far down the aisle. More than that, both things had tons of tie-in novels and comics. I devoured them. Even though I picked up the Star Wars books at every yard sale or book sale I came across, the Aliens ones were the ones I read over and over. I couldn’t get enough of them, and started to collect them pretty feverishly. Whatever comics I could find with the Aliens logo on it, they were mine. Everything ranging from series like Aliens: Colonial Marines to issues of Chris Claremont’s Aliens/Predator: Deadliest of the Species. 

As an adult, I of course now understand that these comics are incredibly well known among fans. The climate now isn’t even that different from when I was growing up. Alien novels and comics are still churned out with astonishing regularity. Even if the comics now bear the Marvel logo, fans still look back on those years of Dark Horse books and reminisce about their favorite titles. But there are some, naturally, that just fall through the cracks. It’s only natural, when a company churns out comics consistently over such a long period of time. Some just kind of get forgotten. One of them just happens to have been my single favorite Aliens comic growing up, a little one-shot titled Aliens: Stalker. 

This comic was different for a lot of reasons. Even as a kid, it was unlike everything else I had read simply by being a one-shot, when most of the other Aliens comics I’d read were parts of long, sprawling miniseries. Both Colonial Marines and Aliens/Predator: Deadliest of the Species went on for around a year, whereas this was just a single, self-contained story, one of the only Aliens or Predator one-shots I had. Much more than that, though, Aliens: Stalker was one of only two comics out of the entire Dark Horse run to be set on Earth. By and large, the norm was for Aliens comics to be set in space, in the future, and Predator comics to be set on Earth, usually in the present, like their respective films. Sometimes the Predator comics would dip into the past, because that was baked into the concept, especially with the end of Predator 2 suggesting that the Predators had been up to their antics for a long, long time. 

Aliens comics didn’t do that, for the most part. They didn’t tackle Earth and they didn’t travel to the past, except for two one-shots. One of them was Aliens: Earth Angel, by John Byrne, which was originally a 13-part story serialized in Dark Horse Presents that depicted a Xenomorph invasion in a small town in the 1950s. Aliens: Stalker, however, goes back even further than that. Way further. This one-shot comic written and illustrated by David Wenzel is about a Xenomorph going up against a group of Vikings. It is one of the most different, unexpected and undeniably cool things that Dark Horse ever did with the Aliens license. Knowing now just how different it was from everything else Aliens-related at the time, I am all the more grateful for it. 

Aliens: Stalker begins by jumping us right into the middle of things, which is smart for a one-shot. It leaps right into the meat of the story. A band of fearful Vikings are being led by a mysterious man, covered in tattoos, known as Rainulf, the Wraith-Stalker. They are on the hunt for a beast that has laid waste to their lands and murdered their people, which they call the Crawler. You can probably guess what the Crawler actually is. What’s really interesting, though, is that the Crawler isn’t new to their lands. One of this group, the Lady Alwin, is descended from Drogo the Berserker, an Ancient King who first fought the creature and was believed to have killed it after going mad with berserker rage. He didn’t kill it, of course, and now the creature returns to prey upon the people of this land every fifty years. 

It is so cool to have an Aliens story set in the distant past that has its own backstory going back much further. From the sound of it, this Xenomorph that is somehow on Earth has already been there for a long time, possibly centuries. Rainulf has spent years training for this event that, supposedly, will only occur once in his lifetime. His path is to stop this creature, to succeed where so many others have failed, from King Drogo to all who attempted to fight the Crawler in his wake. Rainulf believes his sacred blade is the only thing capable of killing the creature. At first, it barely feels like you’re reading an Aliens comic, especially before the creature shows up. But when it does, it is exactly the Xenomorph we know and love.

For all of this story’s differences from a traditional Aliens comic, it still obeys the rules of that universe, through and through, it just doesn’t happen to tell us how the Xenomorph arrived on Earth. The creature is nearly impossible to kill without serious weaponry and has acid for blood, which winds up blinding one of the men. It’s fundamentally an Aliens story, just one that happens to have a very different setting than what we’re used to. There’s a futility to the hunt for the Crawler, because the legends say that the creature cannot be killed by mortal man. As the story progresses over 32 pages, certain characters shift into recognizable roles within the franchise. Rainulf kind of becomes the Hicks of the tale. He’s a soldier, he’s smart, he’s capable, reserved and level-headed. Even though he starts out as the clear leader, he shifts into a more supportive position by the end, as Lady Alwin truly becomes our Ripley.

At first, she’s in the background. She has a clear role to play, because she is descended from the first man to attempt to slay the creature. Her will and determination grow over the course of the issue, until she succumbs to her ancestor’s berserker rage. She lashes out against the alien, noting that the rule about the creature not being slayed by mortal man doesn’t apply to her, as she’s not a man. Together, she and Rainulf hack the Crawler to pieces. Rainulf breaks his precious blade, but at the end, it appears to forge itself back together, as we jump ahead into the future, with a new person narrating the tale.

The issue ends in a much more familiar setting, revealing that the entire story is being told by a military grunt to his comrades as they’re preparing to embark on a bug hunt. He looks nearly identical to Rainulf, even with similar tattoos all over his face; he’s even named Rainy, and he’s holding a dagger, which he claims to be the same dagger Rainulf used to battle the Crawler, which has been in his family for generations. His fellow soldiers don’t believe a word of the story until they’re up close and personal with the Xenos, and decide they better stick close to him just in case. I love this ending, because it leaves things completely open to interpretation.

It’s very possible that the story didn’t happen at all. Maybe Rainy made the whole thing up, maybe it’s just an old family legend. If you think there’s no way a Xenomorph could ever have made its way to Earth, then maybe it didn’t. But maybe the story is true. Maybe there’s destiny at work here, maybe this family’s legacy is tied to the Xenomorph, even after humans have taken to the stars. Maybe Rainy’s ancestor did fight some unknown kind of ancient serpent, and for a Colonial Marine recounting that legend, a Xenomorph is simply the most terrifying thing he could imagine it to have been. There are no real answers, and I think that’s one of the best things about it. You’re allowed to come to your own conclusion. 

This is my favorite Aliens comic. More than that, this is my favorite kind of tie-in. I think Aliens: Stalker should be used as the template for what more and more comics of this type can do, because, to me, this is why comics and novels and other tie-ins like this exist. Comics based on well known IP don’t just have to be lazy rehashing of greatest hits from the movies—although I do admit I like those, too. At their best, these are the stories where you really get to play in that sandbox. This is where you can explore forgotten corners of the mythology, expand that world until it bursts, play around with the concept and do stories you would never be able to get away with in a film. Most of my favorites do that. Friday the 13th: Bad Land tells a great story of parallel events in the past and present that suggest that Crystal Lake might just be an inherently evil place. Jason vs. Leatherface tells a story of an unlikely friendship born out of shared trauma. These are just a few examples. 

David Wenzel does exactly that with Aliens: Stalker, telling a story that is still so fundamentally that thing we love, but presented in a completely new and different way than we had ever seen it before. And who knows? With an Alien FX series set on Earth presumably—and hopefully—on the horizon, maybe this comic is worth re-evaluating as proof that these kinds of stories can work exceptionally well when you think outside the box.