Alien: Resurrection Comic (1997): Plot & Changes
Alien: Resurrection is a two-issue Dark Horse Comics adaptation of the 1997 film, written by Jim Vance from Joss Whedon's screenplay and drawn by Eduardo Risso, with colors by Dave Stewart, lettering by Gary Fields, and painted covers by Dave McKean. Issue #1 reached shops on October 29, 1997, and issue #2 followed on November 12, 1997, just ahead of the film's theatrical opening. Military scientists aboard the USS Auriga cloned Ripley 8 to recover a Queen embryo, the smuggler ship Betty delivered living hosts, and the outbreak forced the survivors toward Earth with a hybrid Newborn in pursuit.
Plot Summary
Surgery On The Auriga
Beyond Pluto, surgeons aboard the USS Auriga opened the chest of their eighth Ripley clone and drew out a screaming Queen chestburster in a spray of fluid. Monitors tagged the host as Ripley 8 while Dr. Wren and his team sealed the creature into a clear container and checked the clone's readings. The ship held the recovered embryo as the prize of a United Systems Military program built from blood samples taken on Fiorina 161. The clone healed at a speed the doctors logged as extraordinary, and her strength already outpaced human limits. The Auriga program needed both host and Queen alive to breed more specimens.
When the team tried to close the incision, Ripley 8 woke, seized a surgeon's arm, and snapped it before the staff could restrain her. They moved her into a recessed cell under observation while Wren noted that she already carried adult capacity and fragmented memories of the original Ellen Ripley. He also credited the Aliens with passing traits down at a genetic level. The clone lay under guard as the Queen grew in separate containment, and the military officers above her argued over whether she was an asset or a threat. The Auriga's experiment had a living eighth attempt and a Queen ready to lay.
Number Eight Observed
General Perez watched the clone rest and told Wren he still favored termination if she caused trouble, calling her a meat by-product beside the Alien itself. Wren wore heavy round goggles as he briefed her recovery and pressed into her cell with notes about the blood work taken on Fiorina. When Ripley 8 lunged at him, a soldier shocked her into the floor, and Wren said Weyland-Yutani had been bought out by Walmart decades earlier. He framed the work as United Systems Military research into alloys and vaccines. Ripley 8 told him the species was a cancer that would breed until everyone on the ship died.
The Queen grew rapidly in her own bay while soldiers kept rifles trained on the clone's door. Ripley 8 asked whether the Queen would grow and got a short confirmation that it already had. Wren treated her as proof the program worked and dismissed her history as the original Ripley's failed attempt to wipe the species out. Perez kept the option of killing her on the table while the scientists moved on to the next delivery of hosts. The Auriga waited for a cargo ship that would fill the breeding cycle.
Betty Delivers The Cargo
The cargo vessel Betty locked into Docking Bay One under the Auriga's mechanical arms, and its crew stepped out under military escort. Elgyn led Johner, Christie, Call, Hillard, and Vriess through the bay while Wren checked their weapons and their motives. Elgyn took coin from Perez in a private office and confirmed that Call had signed on looking for maintenance work near the Handle. The crew's real cargo was living people stolen from cryosleep, and the military needed those hosts outside regulated space. Perez told Elgyn to mind his own business, and Elgyn agreed with a drink in hand.
In the hangar, soldiers opened the cryotubes and wheeled the unconscious victims toward a chamber of waiting eggs. and wheeled the unconscious victims toward a chamber of waiting eggs. Steam poured from the pods while eggs above them began to open under dripping slime from the Auriga ceiling. The deal was finished the moment the hosts moved into Alien reach, and the Betty crew settled in as temporary guests of the Auriga. Call watched the army around her with open distrust, and Johner treated the stop like another payday. The ship now held both a bred Queen and a fresh set of implanted hosts.
Mess Hall Green Blood
In the mess hall, Johner tried to force a one-on-one game on Ripley 8, and she threw him across the room before slamming a basketball hard enough to send Hillard diving. Christie shouted a warning as the fight spilled into a wider brawl, and United Systems soldiers poured in with rifles raised. Perez told everyone not to make a scene while his men covered the room. Ripley 8 lifted a finger to her lips, green acidic blood shining on her skin, and refused the order with a single word. A drop of that blood burned straight through the deck plating in front of the soldiers.
The green acid marked her as more Alien than human in front of both crews, and Call watched in front of both crews, and Call watched the hole smoke with open shock. Perez held his line without opening fire, and the Betty mercenaries filed the clone under a new kind of threat. Ripley 8 walked away from the standoff with her shackles still on and her warning delivered without a speech. The soldiers kept their rifles up long after she left the room. The Auriga's guests now knew the eighth clone bled like the creatures in the labs below.
Call Confronts Ripley
During the Auriga sleep cycle, scientists reported that the Queen's egg-laying stage was over and that a secondary stage was arriving right on schedule. Call bypassed locks and sensors, slipped into Ripley 8's cell, and put a knife to her, asking whether the thing inside her was already out. Ripley 8 said it was out but not all the way, then broke Call's grip hard enough to cut her own palm and spill green blood. Call called her a lab-grown thing and reminded her that Ellen Ripley had died two hundred years earlier to stop the beasts. Ripley 8 answered that she had come to terms with what she was.
Call begged anything human left in her to help stop the program before the Aliens got loose, and Ripley 8 told her they were already loose and that Call would never leave the ship alive. She warned Call that soldiers were coming for her and sent her out of the cell ahead of the sweep. Call ran for her crew while Wren's people closed in on the Betty berth. The clone stayed behind as the only person on the ship who already expected the cages to fail. The next breach would prove her right.
Xenomorphs Escape
Inside the containment bay, the cloned Xenomorphs turned on one of their own and used its acid blood to burn a hole straight through the floor. Scientists above them screamed for nitrogen freeze as the creatures climbed through the gap and tore into the observation crew. Father ordered a full evacuation to the lifeboat bays while Perez destroyed a contaminated boat rather than let a stowaway Alien reach open space. Bodies fell through shafts as the swarm spread, and Ripley 8 listened to the thuds against her cell while the ship emptied around her. The Auriga shifted from research platform to kill zone in minutes.
Ripley 8 melted her shackles' controls with her own blood, tore through the wall of her cell, and walked into corridors already littered with the dead. Perez kept ejecting boats and sealing sections while the remaining soldiers ran for whatever craft still answered. The Betty crew grabbed weapons and argued over whether Call had brought the disaster with her as a mole. Vriess found himself alone under a grate with a Xenomorph above him and armed the gun built into his chair. The survivors had one working exit left if they could reach the Betty before the swarm did.
Elgyn Dies On The Grate
Vriess shot the Alien above him as Christie closed in, and acid spray burned Christie's arm. Ripley 8 fell in with the Betty crew as Father announced the evacuation complete and the damaged Auriga turning for home. Call pointed them toward an elevator shaft that met a maintenance tunnel above their dock, and Elgyn took point across a grated deck. Claws punched up through the floor, dragged him under, and killed him in a burst of blood before Ripley 8 could reach him. She killed the Alien that took him and tossed Call its inner jaw as a grim keepsake.
Wren appeared on the run and confirmed what the autopilot already showed: damage had set the Auriga on a three-hour course for Earth. Johner asked Ripley 8 what she had done the last time she faced these animals, and she answered that she died. The remaining crew kept moving with Wren as an unwilling guide and with Purvis, one of the kidnapped hosts, still among them. Elgyn's death left Hillard and the others without their captain at the worst possible turn. Earth was now the clock on every choice they made.
Course For Earth
Father kept announcing damage reports and an estimated time to Earth even after the lifeboats were gone, and Ripley 8 asked why the computer still addressed a ship it thought empty. The survivors pushed through smoke-filled corridors with rifles up while Johner argued that they should ditch Vriess to make better time. Vriess took the insult without a fight, and Call refused to leave him behind after finding him alive. Ripley 8 told them the Aliens were breeding and that any scouts sent out would come for the meat still walking the decks. The Betty remained the only craft that could beat the Auriga's fall toward the planet.
Wren steered them toward a shortcut he claimed to know, and the group accepted the risk because the long route would burn the clock dry. Bodies already lined parts of the path, proof that the evacuation had been anything but clean. Call kept Ripley 8 close enough to watch and far enough to shoot if the clone turned. Johner treated every sealed door as another trap. The Auriga's remaining humans were a single armed party with one dock left to reach.
Bodies In The Corridors
Wren tried to block a restricted bay, but the Betty crew forced the shortcut and found a torn corpse on the deck. Johner stared at the remains and said he must be dreaming, then pushed the group onward before another Alien answered the smell. Deeper in, they dragged a panicked man named Purvis out of hiding, and he said he had woken from cryo into something horrible. Ripley 8 smelled the embryo in him at once and told the others to leave him because he already carried a chestburster. Call argued for freezing him on the Betty so a doctor could cut it out later.
Ripley 8 told Purvis the Betty crew had sold his tube to the military doctors and that the animal would kill him in hours, then called herself the monster's mother. Christie pulled Purvis along anyway, and the group accepted one more doomed hostage rather than shoot him in the corridor. Wren stayed useful only as long as he knew the next hatch code. The bodies around them made clear that the Aliens had already fed well during the evacuation. Every sealed room ahead could hide another nest or another dying host.
Failed Clones In The Lab
Against Johner's protests, Ripley 8 forced open the door marked 1-7 and walked into a lab of glowing tanks filled with failed Ripley clones. One specimen in the fluid wore an elongated Xenomorph-like head, and others hung as twisted human shapes in the glass. Deeper inside, a living clone strapped to a gurney begged her to kill it while monitors sketched its broken skeleton in red. Ripley 8 raised a flamethrower and burned the lab until the tanks shattered and the room went up in fire. She left the wing in flames and rejoined the others without explaining what she had seen.
The destroyed clones closed the ledger on seven earlier attempts to recreate Ripley 8, and the eighth clone refused to leave them breathing in glass. Call watched her come out of the smoke and said nothing that would slow the run for the Betty. Wren lost another piece of the program he had built, and the Aliens gained nothing from the fire but a clearer path through the wreckage. Ripley 8 wiped her face and kept her rifle up. The Auriga still owed them a flooded shortcut before the dock.
Flooded Tunnels
The level below them was flooded, and Wren said the only way through was a seventy-yard swim before they could climb again. Vriess had to leave his chair, and the party took a deep breath before diving among the ribbed pipes. Swimming Xenomorphs hunted them in the murk, and the survivors broke the surface only long enough to scramble for a ladder. Hillard reached the rungs and cleared the water before a clawed hand seized her ankle and hauled her back under. Christie and Vriess climbed after the others while acid and gunfire lit the shaft above the flood.
On the ladder, acid burned Christie as a Xenomorph closed on him, and he cut himself free rather than pull Vriess down with him. He fell into the dark while the others made the hatch and sealed it behind them. Call took a hit that should have killed her and kept moving, and Ripley 8 already suspected why. The flooded shortcut had cost them Hillard and Christie for a few saved minutes on the Earth clock. The remaining survivors now had a clear run toward the chapel ports and the Betty beyond.
Call Is An Auton
Ripley 8 opened Call's jacket and showed the white synthetic fiber and wiring in her chest. Johner called her a robot, and Ripley 8 named her a second-generation Auton built by other machines that the government had tried to wipe out. Vriess remembered the purge stories while Johner demanded they keep moving anyway. Call plugged into the chapel ports to divert the Auriga toward an uninhabited quadrant, but she lacked the energy to destroy the ship and settled for a crash course that left forty-three minutes. Johner grabbed her face in rage, and Ripley 8 answered by choking him until he understood the threat.
Distephano, a surviving United Systems soldier, helped them cut through a wall toward the Betty while Wren slipped ahead with his own plan. Call accepted the crash heading because it kept the swarm off Earth's cities even if it doomed the Auriga. Ripley 8 stayed between Call and Johner long enough for the work to finish. Purvis stumbled with them, still carrying his embryo and still useful as a moving shield. The dock finally lay only a few levels away.
Hive And The Newborn
Slime on the deck told them they had walked over the hive, and Ripley 8 heard they had walked over the hive, and Ripley 8 heard the Aliens close enough to force a run. The floor opened under her and dropped her into the ship's nursery, where Gediman welcomed her as number eight and showed her the Queen. The Queen no longer laid eggs. A swollen human-like womb hung from her midriff as the secondary cycle Wren's team had expected. Ripley 8 hung cocooned in resin while the womb tore open and a pale hybrid Newborn climbed free. The Newborn killed the Queen and began to feed on her before turning its attention to the clone who shared its blood.
Ripley 8 tore loose from the resin and fled while the Newborn finished with its mother and followed the heat of living prey toward the Betty. On the dock, Wren seized Call and shot a crewman in the struggle to force a course change back toward Earth. Purvis finally burst, and the dying host drove the chestburster into Wren before both went down. Johner and Vriess sealed the Auriga airlock and prepped the Betty while Call warned that a cargo hatch was still open. Ripley 8 dropped through that hatch with the Newborn already on her trail.
Betty Lands On Earth
The Betty cleared the Auriga as the larger ship burned toward Earth, and the Newborn cornered Call among the cargo chains. Ripley 8 drew the hybrid in, smeared her green blood across a hull window, and held on as vacuum tore the creature through the hole. Call and the others braced through the decompression, then took the controls as blue sky filled the canopy. Johner wondered aloud how to put the ship down, and the Betty answered by landing in snow within sight of a distant city. Ripley 8 crouched in the white field beside Call while Johner carried Vriess up the ridge behind them.
Call said she might lose herself in the city below and admitted it was her first time on Earth, and Ripley 8 answered that she was a stranger there herself. The Auriga was gone, the Queen and the Newborn were dead, and only four survivors stood in the snow with a stolen cargo ship at their backs. The comic closed on that cold landing rather than on an orbital flyover. Dark Horse left Ripley 8 and Call looking out over a living world neither of them knew. The film adaptation ended where the Betty's crew finally touched ground.
Changes From The Film
The comic compresses Alien: Resurrection into two issues, so many dialogue scenes fall away or combine, while a few beats from the Special Edition still appear. Vance and Risso still keep the Auriga outbreak, the Betty escape, and the Newborn's death, but they change labels, deaths, and the final landing. The list below covers differences checked against the scans and the film, including blood color, the flood sequence, and the snow touchdown on Earth.
- The military ship is labeled the USS Auriga rather than the USM Auriga.
- Dr. Wren wears prominent bug-eyed goggles throughout the comic.
- After the Queen chestburster comes out, Ripley 8 wakes and breaks a surgeon's arm as he tries to close the incision, a beat kept from the Special Edition.
- The picture-test scene with Dr. Williamson is absent, and Perez discusses terminating Ripley 8 while watching her in her cell.
- Wren's line about Weyland-Yutani being bought by Walmart comes right after Ripley 8 is shocked for attacking him, instead of later in a mess-hall talk that the comic drops.
- The Betty crew's earlier introduction scenes are absent. The ship arrives, and the crew first appears as they disembark on the Auriga.
- Ripley 8's acidic blood is bright green, matching pure Xenomorph blood on the page.
- Wren's team treats the Queen's secondary reproductive cycle as expected, with a scientist calling it right on schedule, rather than an unforeseen mutation.
- After the escape, the survivors find bodies scattered through the ship instead of walking empty corridors.
- Ripley 8 asks why Father keeps addressing the ship if it thinks the vessel is evacuated.
- At least one failed clone in the 1-7 tanks has an elongated Xenomorph-like head.
- The underwater ambush is shorter. Hillard reaches the ladder and clears the water before a Xenomorph pulls her back under.
- The Queen's live pregnancy hangs from her midriff like a human womb rather than a distended insect abdomen.
- After killing the Queen, the Newborn begins to eat her.
- The Betty lands in snow near a city on Earth. The Special Edition instead sets down in a desert beside a ruined Paris, and the theatrical cut ends before a landing.
Key Characters
- Ripley 8 was the successful clone recovered with a Queen embryo, bled green acid, burned the failed clone lab, and killed the Newborn with her own blood.
- Annalee Call tried to assassinate Ripley 8, revealed herself as a second-generation Auton, and diverted the Auriga into a crash course away from cities.
- Johner started the mess-hall fight, argued for leaving Vriess, and survived to carry him through the snow on Earth.
- Elgyn sold the cryo hosts to Perez and died when a Xenomorph dragged him through a deck grate.
- Christie fought through the outbreak and fell from the ladder after acid burns forced him to cut himself free.
- Sabra Hillard reached the flooded ladder before a swimming Xenomorph pulled her back under.
- Dom Vriess shot an Alien from his chair, survived the ladder climb on Christie's back, and helped fly the Betty down.
- Dr. Wren ran the cloning program in goggles, guided the survivors under duress, and died when Purvis's chestburster struck him.
- General Perez paid for the hosts, threatened termination for Ripley 8, and destroyed a contaminated lifeboat during the evacuation.
- Purvis was a kidnapped colonist implanted on the Auriga who later killed Wren as the embryo tore free.
- The Newborn killed its Queen mother, stalked the Betty, and died when Ripley 8's acid blood breached the hull.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Alien Resurrection as two standard floppy issues priced at $2.50 each, with issue #1 on sale October 29, 1997, and issue #2 on November 12, 1997. Jim Vance wrote the adaptation from Joss Whedon's screenplay, Eduardo Risso drew it, Dave Stewart colored it, and Gary Fields lettered it, with Dave McKean on both covers. Philip Amara edited the series with David Land as assistant editor, Corey Stephens as designer, and Mike Richardson as publisher, and both issues were printed in Canada. Special thanks in the indicia went to Cindy Irwin and Maury McIntyre at 20th Century Fox Licensing.
The two issues stayed out of a dedicated trade for years and later reappeared in Marvel's Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Volume 3 in 2022. Titan had earlier reprinted material from the adaptation in its Aliens magazine line in late 1997. Dark Horse's original floppies remain the first English-language comic version of the film. The comic stands with the novelization and the later PlayStation game as one of the 1997 tie-ins that reached stores around the movie's opening.
Behind The Scenes
Jim Vance compressed Whedon's screenplay into forty-four story pages across two issues, which forced the cut introductions, shortened fights, and merged briefings that shape most of the differences from the film. Eduardo Risso drew the interiors with heavy blacks and sharp faces that later readers still recognize from his crime work, and Dave Stewart's colors kept the Auriga in sickly greens, browns, and hard orange firelight. Dave McKean's painted covers tied the comic to the film's marketing art without repeating a single still. Dark Horse timed the floppies to land in shops before the November 26, 1997, theatrical opening.
The adaptation keeps a few Special Edition beats, including the broken surgical arm and the Earth landing, while dropping others such as Williamson's picture test. It also invents or relocates small lines, such as Ripley 8's jab at Father and the on-schedule secondary cycle, that change how deliberate the Queen's pregnancy feels. Risso's Newborn and midriff Queen lean harder into body horror than some of the film's smoother effects shots. Marvel's 2022 omnibus reprint brought the story back into print for readers who never caught the 1997 floppies.
Conclusion
Alien: Resurrection follows Ripley 8 and the Betty crew from the Auriga cloning bay to a snow landing on Earth after the Newborn dies in vacuum. Vance and Risso keep the film's spine while changing blood color, ship labeling, the underwater deaths, the Queen's pregnancy, and the final touchdown. The two issues remain Dark Horse's official comics adaptation of the 1997 film and the shortest path through that story on the page. Readers who want the full movie beat sheet still need the film, but the comic stands as its own compressed account of the Auriga outbreak.
External Sources
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