Happy "Alien" Day To All!
When Disney, Marvel Comics' parent company, acquired most of 20th Century Fox's assets back in 2019, it was only a matter of time before fans started seeing valuable properties like the "Alien" franchise seeping into its future content across all of the corporation's tentacular divisions.
We can just imagine dozens of creative executives concocting myriad mashups of intellectual properties before the contract ink dried — and what better medium to hatch a new crossover title than inside the pages of Marvel Comics.
Related: "Alien" movies, ranked worst to best
Those nasty xenomorphs — introduced in Ridley Scott's iconic 1979 sci-fi frightfest, "Alien" — are the perfect adversaries for some of the Idea Factory's most celebrated heroes, and now we're about to see the results of those ingenious integrations.
Presented under Marvel's 20th Century Studios imprint, a new "Aliens vs. Avengers" miniseries arrives starting July 24, and unprepared readers are going to be strapped in for a wild ride.
Written by the Eisner-nominated creator Jonathan Hickman ("The Avengers," "Fantastic Four") and paired with ravishing artwork by Esad Ribić ("Thor," "Conan the Barbarian"), this cataclysmic interspecies showdown represents the very first crossover of "Aliens" and the Marvel Universe.
Here's the official synopsis:
"The four-part epic is set in a new timeline many years in the future and features older, grittier versions of Marvel characters. It also will be the first-time readers will see certain parts of Alien lore in the Marvel Universe — like the home of the Engineers. In this unmissable series, Xenomorphs reach Earth, and the perfect organism meets a planet of superhumans. But who will be first to fall?"
"Probably one of the coolest things about the project is how we've found really fun ways to 'Avengerize' 'Aliens' and 'alien-up' Avengers,'" Hickman told Entertainment Weekly. "I think fans will be surprised at how elegantly some of those things fit together. It really turned out to be a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation."
Positioned to get audiences pumped for the August launch of director Fede Álvarez's 'Alien: Romulus," Marvel Comics' "Aliens vs. Avengers #1" hatches July 24, 2024.
"Hickman and Ribić are storytelling masters, and they bring a cinematic quality to this that seamlessly merges the high action and soap opera that Marvel fans expect with the deep terror and cosmic awe that the Alien universe so inspires," added Marvel editor Sarah Brunstad. "Watching them cut loose across the entire lexicon of these two great franchises is jaw-dropping. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN IN THIS BOOK — get ready."
