Trapped in a Bottled Nightmare

We’ve discussed comic book crossovers a couple of times in the past, with looks at both Star Trek/Green Lantern and Green Lantern Versus Aliens. The mechanics of it are pretty standard. One company, usually DC ComicsOne of the two biggest comic publishing companies in the world (and, depending on what big events are going on, the number one company), DC Comics is the home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and just about every big superhero introduced in the 1930s and 1940s., allows another to play with their characters, creating a story just close enough in continuity to line up for readers even though, quite obviously, nothing that happens in the story is ever going to have bearing on the main continuity. Sure, Kyle Rayner can fight xenomorphs on the abandoned surface of Mogo, but once the next big writer comes along (Geoff Johns, in this case), all of those ideas will be quietly shoved into a scrap bin as continuity reasserts itself.

And that’s fine. We’re not reading a book like Superman/Aliens to see how it ties into the greater continuity of both franchises. It doesn’t, and we know that. These are silly, fun larks written by authors that are given solid creative control to wander off the reservation and have a good time with the characters and settings. Could SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s. battle creatures that looked like xenomorphs? Sure. Hell, he’s probably done that at some point in his long history. Does him battling actual xenomorphs alter his character at all? Not in the slightest. He’s still Big Blue, and we know exactly what we’re getting when we tune in for one of his tales.

I’m sure this would probably annoy some comic fans. I mean, I am pedantic enough about continuity that I struggle when stories I like are then later removed from the broader storyline of a series. If I were the kind of Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. fan that had gotten into the Expanded Universe and fallen in love with those stories then I probably would have been pissed off when Disney came along and rejected all of them for the sake of making their own continuity. At the same time, though, I read a lot of Star TrekOriginally conceived as "Wagon Train in Space", Star Trek was released during the height of the Hollywood Western film and TV boom. While the concept CBS originally asked for had a western vibe, it was the smart, intellectual stories set in a future utopia of science and exploration that proved vital to the series' long impact on popular culture. books back in the day and those things never had any sense of connective continuity, to themselves of Star Trek canon as a whole. Sometimes it's fun to simply shut your brain off and read something for the fun of it. That’s Superman/Aliens, through and through.

In the story, Superman swoops in and saves a falling space probe before the engineers at Lexcorp can get to it first. Agreeing to share the information with the new head of Lexcorp’s space division, Cheryl Kimble, Supes is shocked to realize that the transmissions from the probe were Kryptonian in origin. Does this mean there could be other Kryptonians still alive somewhere out in space? Superman gets Kimble to agree to send a solitary manned mission, one that only Superman is on, to go and investigate where the probe came from.

Superman lands at the abandoned, glass-domed city of Argo, floating on an asteroid, clearly ejected from a larger planet. There he finds a few injured survivors from the city, who he quickly loads onto his ship and sends back to Earth for treatment. He then investigates further into the city, even though he knows that this far out from Earth, and away from a yellow sun, his powers will slowly fade. On the asteroid he finds the city, in ruins, and but a few survivors, a girl named Kara included. He also finds an aggressive species of aliens, black skinned and with acid for blood, killing the few survivors. Superman promises that he’ll help Kara, and any other survivors, escape just as soon as Lexcorp sends his ship back… but the survivors Superman sent home were infected with xenomorphs, and as soon as the ship lands they start to break free. Superman and Kara are on their own, and they’ll have to find a way to escape despite the thousands upon thousands of aliens roaming the doomed city of Argo.

Published by Dark Horse comics and released in 1995 (then collected and republished in 1996), Superman/Aliens came at an interesting point in the greater DC Comics continuity. It was after the giant, universe realigning event of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which saw the death of the original SupergirlIntroduced in 1959 as a female counterpart for Superman, the Last Daughter of Krypton would go onto have a long career in the DC Universe, thriving, dying, coming back, all the eventually become an even more powerful superhero than even her famous cousin., but before her reboot in the New 52. This was during the time when a different Supergirl, one known as the Matrix, was starring in comics, but a proper version of Kara Zor-El still hadn’t been introduced back into DC continuity. That gave the creative team of Dan Jurgens and Kevin Nowlan some wiggle room with their tale. They could play with the concept of Kara without contradicting anything DC had done, much to the delight of Supergirl fans reading at the time.

That’s one of the big mysteries hanging over the series as you read it: is this Kara Zor-El, or just some random blond girl named Kara? She knows Kryptonian (even if she does speak it with an accent different from Clark’s, although that can easily be explained away), and she lives in a city named Argo. Clearly this is Kara Zor-El, right? Superman can finally have his cousin back, even if it is in a crossover that likely would just be ignored by DC whenever they decided to launch their own reinvented Supergirl years later.

Of course, the comic eventually reveals that this girl isn’t Clark’s cousin, more than likely. Her city was only named Argo in memory of the fallen city that once stood on Krypton’s surface, and they only know the language of Kryptonian because a space traveler came through once and taught these beings the history and culture of the doomed planet. They weren’t really the lost Kryptonians Clark was searching for, but that doesn’t stop him from bonding quickly with Kara anyway. She might not have been his cousin (who, bear in mind, he no longer remembered existed), but she was someone he could trust.

Of course, even if she had been Kara Zor-El for real, Kara would eventually have been rebooted. Her real version showed up in Superman / Batman a decade later, bringing the proper Supergirl back to the pages of DC Comics. At best the writers here could have simply been looking to do a spin-off or sequel with Kara fighting aliens after this book was published, but even then those ideas weren’t followed up on, weirdly. There is a sequel, Superman/Aliens 2: God War that has almost nothing to do with this title at all, so… go figure. That’s just comics.

As far as the meat of this story, well, it’s fine. It’s really not a great Aliens story, if I’m being honest. The issue with many of these crossovers (and Green Lantern Versus Aliens had the same problem) is that one of the two sides provides rich, detailed characters with decades of deep storytelling to play with, and the other are xenomorphs without a lot of plot to carry over. That’s especially true in a mashup like this where the aliens continuity has to be almost completely thrown aside since things like Weyland Yutani, Ellen Ripley, the Nostromo, and more simply wouldn’t fit into DC’s world in any way. All we get for this crossover are the xenomorphs themselves, and they aren’t even all that scary. There’s very little gore, not a lot of blood, and the comic struggles to build any kind of creepy atmosphere. It just doesn’t work for the Aliens side of the equation at all.

On the Superman side, it’s a fairly okay, largely generic superhero tale. To make the fight between Kryptonian and alien creature fair the book has to go out of its way to somehow strip Superman of his powers (this won’t be the first time we see this trick done, either). Otherwise, what horror could be had from Superman battling creatures he could bat away like flies. It’s a lot of effort to get Superman into this situation, with the comic bending over backwards to make it work, without much payoff in the process.

I do like the parts of the story focused on Clark and Kara. I think their dynamic is interesting. Is she his cousin? Will they ever figure it out? But the book barely has time to let them talk about who they are as people, constantly sending them running around, dodging aliens without really talking about anything else. I would have loved some quieter moments that could build suspense, but the authors here didn’t really seem to know how to do that. They had three issues to play with, and they had to tell the story in that limited number of pages, so they rushed through as best as they could.

But if you set all that aside, there’s fun to be had here. Superman battles xenomorphs! It’s stupid and silly and makes no sense. It has no bearing on anything, and the series can’t even justify following up on its own plotlines. But for three issues we got to have a really ridiculous tale of Superman battling aliens, and, in some ways, that’s enough. It’s not good, and in fact I’d argue it’s pretty terrible, but it’s also a crossover you’d never expect and the authors try to have fun with it. It’s the kind of book you read to shut your brain off so pretty images can show you a stupid story, and Superman/Aliens does that perfectly.