Alien #12 Review

Written by: Phillip Kennedy Johnson
Art by: Salvador Larocca
Colors by: GURU-eFX
Letters by: VC’s Clayton Cowles
Cover art by: Marc Aspinall
Cover price: $3.99
Release date: June 1, 2022

Alien #12 brings the current arc to an end when the Spinners desperately try to escape becoming hosts as part of Weyland-Yutani’s grand plan for the Euridice colony.

Was It Good?

Alien #12 is fine. It’s not great, and it’s not terrible. It just sorta sits there like a frog on a log, ribbitting away in the afternoon sun. Johnson takes the opportunity in this arc’s finale to answer a few questions, set things up for a potential next arc, and bring all the dangling threads together for a satisfying conclusion. Is it satisfying? Not really, but Kennedy deserves an A for effort.

When last we left the survivors of the Alpha Station, they were locked in a room by forces loyal to Weyland-Yutani; a room full of facehuggers and those tiny insect-like Xenomorphs that don’t make any sense. Through a combination of prayer and luck, they figure out the aliens bleed acid, so the colonists use whatever they can to smash the aliens to force their blood out and burn through the floor to the level below. It’s unclear how the colonists managed to escape without a rope or serious acid burns, but escape they do.

A research team, complete with military muscle, arrives in transport to collect what they believe are the remaining colonists already impregnated with embryos. Gregory, the synth who betrayed the colonists, escorts the research team to the holding room where they find the colonists have escaped and Xenomorphs have infiltrated the rest of Gamma Station. This is all standard alien stuff, and to be blunt, handled much better in Aliens (1986), so you get the sense you’ve seen all this before. The conclusion isn’t new and doesn’t bring anything new to the franchise.

The colonists manage to flank the research team and escape in their transport, leaving the research team behind as Xenomorph snacks.

We learn the aliens avoid a compromised host, but we already learned this in Alien 3(1992).

We learn the Spinner religion may have been fabricated by Weyland-Yutani as an excuse to tempt lost souls to Euridice. This point comes out of nowhere since we never got to see the origins of the religion or how people were called to follow it, and it’s unclear why Kennedy dropped this last-minute revelation.

Lastly, the last page sets up a potential future for Jane, but it’s unclear how that could be possible when she’s almost dead from the disease ravaging her body. What you see is Kennedy dropping little nuggets of “new” revelations that aren’t new, “new” plot points that don’t get explored and have no relevance to the main conflict, and the beginning of a “new” arc that may or may not happen. That’s a lot of “new” things that are superficial at best, deflating any wow factor from the ending.

Larocca’s art, in part, contributes to the lack of excitement in this issue. We get a few action scenes in this issue, and the Photoshop-like look hinders the energy of the scenes. The panels in this issue don’t look drawn. They look assembled. There’s one scene, in particular, where Dr. Palmer is swarmed by Xenomorphs, and it looks awful. For individual objects and characters, Larocca’s art looks better than good. When put together, the assembly looks plastic and static.

About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.

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Bits and Pieces

Alien #12 ends the arc on a mediocre note. The surprise revelations are neither new nor surprising, and the few bits that are truly new seem irrelevant to the main story. The art is serviceable in closeups and focused panels, but the splash panels look awful in a few places.