Aliens: Newt's Tale: Comic Plot, Characters & Lore
Aliens: Newt's Tale is a 1992 Dark Horse Comics miniseries written by Mike Richardson and drawn by Jim Somerville, with covers by John Bolton. Rebecca "Newt" Jorden dreams the story in a hypersleep pod on the Sulaco, on the voyage back toward Earth. The dream opens at Hadley's Hope on LV-426, where her parents take a survey tractor out to a company claim.
Plot Summary
Newt was asleep on the Sulaco when the dream took her back to Acheron. The colony sign at Hadley's Hope put the population at 159. A company order had sent wildcatters into an empty stretch of the moon, and the staff in operations passed the claim on. If the prospector found something out there, operations told him it was his.
The Jordens Find The Derelict
Russ Jorden drove the family tractor across the rock with his wife Anne, their son Tim, and Newt, who held her doll Casey. Russ treated a strong magnetic reading as a claim he meant to keep, and Anne and Tim split the joke with him while Newt asked when they could go back to town. The children had been playing in the air ducts at the colony, a game they called the monster maze. Tim treated Newt's smaller size as cheating, because she could fit into ducts he could not, and Anne told them she would punish them if she caught either of them in those vents again. Russ then saw the horseshoe ship on the plain and called the find the biggest score they had ever made.
Anne wanted the sighting called in before they named it. Russ wanted to know what they had before he reported it, and Newt's name for the hull was a big weird thing. Anne ordered the children to stay in the tractor while she and Russ walked to the ship. Hours later Newt woke Tim from a bad dream, and Anne hit the glass from outside with Russ behind her.
Anne Brings Russ Back To The Colony
A facehugger was locked over Russ's face. Anne got a mayday off on the tractor radio under the call sign Alpha Kilo Two-Four-Niner and drove for Hadley's Hope. Two and a half hours later, Tim's friend Aaron heard that Russ was awake, and the boys slipped out of quarters toward the medical lab. Newt followed them into the vents after Anne had told her not to leave the compound.
From a grate they watched Dr. Kent refuse to let Anne take Russ back to their quarters. The facehugger had been on him for more than twenty-four hours, and the dead creature was in a specimen jar while another team was out at the ship. Russ would talk about nothing but the claim. A second infected colonist then came in on a stretcher, and that man had a facehugger of his own.
The Chestburster Kills Russ
The chestburster tore out of Russ on the exam table while Anne and the medical staff were in the room with him. Newt saw it from the vent and called for her father as the creature came through his chest. Russ died there, under Dr. Kent's watch, with the dead facehugger in its jar. Anne later woke Newt to move her toward the secured rooms, and she promised she would not leave her.
The Families Move Toward Storage
Armed colonists walked the families through the corridors toward a sub-level storage area. The man leading them told the group that the creatures were taking people one by one, and that word from Earth said the Marines were coming. Anne passed that news to Tim and Newt. In a control room, survey hand Bill Andrews told Anne he was sorry about Russ, and that an armed party had gone to the atmosphere station more than an hour earlier because that was where the nest was thought to be.
Drapers Comes Through The Door
The nest party's radio came back through Drapers. He had found the nest, and there were more creatures than the colonists had expected. Before the channel failed he got out that the creatures had the missing people and the livestock. Loney's name cut across the call, and then the signal died. The operator in the colony lost the team and warned that the creatures were coming in a mass, and a colonist sent Anne toward the secured rooms with the children.
About twenty minutes later something beat on the barricade door. Men inside argued over whether to open it for Drapers' group, then forced the door against the people who wanted it shut. Drapers stumbled through, bloody at the mouth, and collapsed. An adult Xenomorph was on the wall above that doorway, and more of them came in behind him and overran the armed colonists.
Anne And Tim Die At The Vent
Anne took a pistol from the man issuing guns. The creatures had taken Russ, and she wanted a way to keep Tim and Newt from being taken as he had been if the room fell. The adult Xenomorphs from the open barricade were in the room when she reached a vent, and she pushed Tim and Newt inside before she could follow them. Casey fell on the floor, and Anne did not go back for the doll. An adult Xenomorph caught her leg at the opening. Tim crawled back out for the pistol to pull her clear, and Newt called him back into the duct.
Tim fired as he ran, and an adult Xenomorph lifted him off the floor and killed him. Anne died in the corridor with the pistol gone. Newt stayed in the vent, small enough that the adult Xenomorphs could not follow her into the narrow runs, and she went on through them because those ducts were the places she could fit. Days passed with her hidden in the colony, eating what she could find, while the adult Xenomorphs moved through the halls around her.
Ripley Finds Newt In The Lockers
The Marines reached Hadley's Hope after the days Newt had spent in the ducts, and a search team tracked movement in the lockers. She ran from the lights and fought the hands that caught her. Ellen Ripley called her out of the compartment. Cynthia Dietrich caught her and got bitten, with Ricco Frost in the same row of lockers. Ripley crawled in after the girl, found her with what was left of Casey among the debris, and held her until she stopped fighting.
A second-grade citizenship award in the colony named her Rebecca Jorden. Lieutenant Gorman asked where her parents were and got nothing he could use. Newt told Ripley that only her brother called her Rebecca, that the doll was Casey, and that her family was dead. She did not believe the soldiers would change that. Corporal Hicks then had bio-readings at the processing station and moved the squad out, after Newt bit him on the way to the vehicle.
Apone Leads The Squad Into The Hive
The APC took Ripley, Newt, and the Marines to the processor. Sergeant Apone led Hicks, Hudson, Frost, and Dietrich into the resin, where eggs were set in the hive. Gorman ordered the pulse rifles slung because of the fusion reactor and left the squad on flamethrowers. Apone collected the magazines. Hicks carried a shotgun for the close work, and a cocooned woman begged to be killed before a chestburster came out of her.
Ripley Drives The APC Clear
Adult Xenomorphs hit the squad from the front and the rear, and Apone called for the flamethrowers. Jenette Vasquez opened fire anyway. Gorman froze on the order to hold and tried to pull the team out, and the radio then reported that the sergeant was gone. Ripley put a belt on Newt, took the APC, and drove it into the pipes under the processor while Gorman tried to turn her back.
Mark Drake went down when acid blood from a creature Vasquez had shot ate through his armor, and she could not pull him out of the resin. Hicks got her and the other survivors moving toward the APC, and he fired his shotgun into the adult Xenomorphs in the corridor on the way. Ripley had the vehicle moving through the pipes under the processor. The hull smashed clear, the impact threw Gorman in the cabin, and one adult Xenomorph came through the glass as the pipes closed in.
Ferro's Dropship Hits The APC
Gorman was alive in the APC with a concussion from the impact in the pipes. Vasquez went for him, and Hicks stopped her. Hudson's motion tracker showed low signs for Trevor Wierzbowski and Dietrich, and Apone was not among them. Ripley would not go back for the missing Marines, because they were being cocooned, and she wanted the site burned from orbit. Hicks took command and called Ferro in for an evacuation.
Newt saw the dropship coming in wrong and told them the creatures were on it. Ferro's ship hit the APC and burned on the rock. Hudson, Newt, Ripley, Vasquez, and Hicks watched the wreck. Newt told Ripley the crash was not her fault, and that they had to get back to the colony because the creatures came mostly at night. The survivors walked in toward the lights of Hadley's Hope.
Hicks Sets The Defense
The counted weapons were four pulse rifles with about fifty rounds each, fifteen grenades, and one flamethrower under half a tank, with a second flamethrower damaged. Hicks put a rescue at about seventeen days if they went overdue. Hudson did not think they would last seventeen hours. Ripley pointed at Newt, who had lasted in the colony with no weapon and no training, and she ordered the building plans pulled so they could see the tunnels between the processor and the sub-level.
The plan was to weld ducts, set barricades, and funnel the adult Xenomorphs into corridors covered by remote guns. Hicks gave Ripley a locator bracelet. She put Newt down with Casey, heard that the girl's mother had told her there were no real monsters, and moved the locator onto Newt's wrist. She promised she would be in the next room and would not leave.
The Sentry Guns Empty Their Magazines
In the lab, Ripley worked from the colonist count to a hive, and Hudson supplied the missing piece: one breeding female, a Queen, larger than the rest. She wanted the jarred facehuggers destroyed when the exam was done. Bishop told her that Carter Burke had ordered them left alive for a company lab. Ripley confronted Burke with the colony log and company directive 6-12-79, which had sent the wildcatters out, and she counted 157 colonists against the claim that the order was only a bad call.
The alarm then put adult Xenomorphs in the tunnel, and two sentry guns cut them down until the magazines were empty. One gun read zero rounds and the other was nearly there. Hicks said the next wave would walk up to the pressure door. Bishop came on the comms with worse news from the processor: the cooling tanks were damaged, the plant could not be shut down, and the blast was about four hours out, with a radius of about thirty kilometers.
Bishop Crawls Out To The Dish
The second dropship was on the Sulaco, and the colony dish could not be aimed from inside. Someone had to take a portable terminal outside and patch the link by hand. Hudson would not go. Bishop volunteered, because he could fly the ship remotely, and he took the maintenance duct toward the uplink. He put the crawl at about one hundred eighty meters, with forty minutes in the pipe, an hour to align the antenna, thirty minutes to prep the ship, and about fifty minutes of flight, which left the landing close to the blast.
Burke Locks The Medlab Door
Ripley woke to empty stasis tubes and got Newt up without letting her move toward the floor. Facehuggers were loose in the room, and the door was locked. She broke for the glass and called for Hicks. Acid from the creatures ate through a ceiling valve and set off the alarm, and one facehugger reached her face before Hicks shot through the observation window and pulled it off.
Ripley named Burke. His route was to have one of them impregnated, freeze the bodies, sabotage the cryotubes, and jettison them so the specimens reached the company without a witness. The lights then failed. Hudson tracked a clean signal that closed from twenty meters to inside the room, and Hicks fired up through the ceiling tiles as the adults came down.
Hudson Is Dragged Through The Floor
Burke slid a door shut on the operations fight and left Ripley and Newt on the other side of it. An adult Xenomorph was in the compartment with him. Ripley shot another one off the doorway and took Newt into the ducts, where the girl knew the turns. In the operations room, adult Xenomorphs dragged Hudson down through the floor. He did not come out with the group that reached the vents.
Gorman And Vasquez Die In The Duct
Bishop reported the second ship about sixteen minutes out while Ripley, Newt, and Hicks crawled, with Vasquez and Gorman as the rear guard. Newt's route to the landing field was a left turn, until adult Xenomorphs filled the shafts ahead and they had to reverse. Vasquez ran her rifle dry, then killed one adult at contact range and took acid across her leg. Gorman came back for her. They pulled grenades in the duct, and the blast killed both of them as Ripley, Newt, and Hicks went for a roof ladder.
Newt Falls Into The Hive
On the climb toward the pad, Newt slipped out of her jacket while Hicks had the sleeve, and she fell down the shaft with the doll. She landed in water under a grate. Ripley and Hicks started cutting through from above. An adult Xenomorph rose out of the water, took Newt, and left Casey floating. Newt woke cocooned in the hive among eggs and other wrapped colonists, and a facehugger came out of an egg in front of her.
The Queen Is Blown Out Of The Airlock
Ripley burned that facehugger and cut Newt free. Burke was cocooned nearby with eggs at his feet and something moving in him. Ripley left him a grenade. He would not use it. The Queen was mounted on her egg sac in the next chamber, with about thirteen minutes left before the processor blast, and Ripley torched the egg field on the way out with Newt on her back.
Bishop set the second dropship on the platform with about thirty seconds left, and the ship cleared the mushroom cloud. On the Sulaco hangar deck the Queen impaled Bishop, and Ripley sent Newt running. Newt went under a floor grate. Ripley took a power loader, hit the Queen off the girl, and forced her into the airlock. The decompressing hatch pulled Newt toward space, and the torn Bishop held her until the lock sealed. In hypersleep Ripley renewed the promise not to leave. The last panel puts a facehugger on a pod, and the caption calls that sleep a future destined never to take place, hinting at the events of Alien 3.
Key Characters
- Rebecca "Newt" Jorden was the younger Jorden child. She watched Russ die from a medlab vent, lost Anne and Tim at the barricade, and lived in the ducts until Ripley found her. She fell into the hive, came out on Ripley's back, and went into hypersleep on the Sulaco.
- Russ and Anne Jorden took the family tractor to the derelict. A facehugger took Russ, and the chestburster killed him in Medlab under Dr. Kent's watch. Anne died in the corridor after she pushed the children into a vent.
- Tim Jorden was Newt's brother. He led her into the medlab ducts with Aaron, then crawled back out of the vent to reach Anne and was killed there.
- Aaron was Tim's friend at Hadley's Hope. He heard that Russ was awake and took Tim out of quarters toward the medical lab, and Newt followed them into the vents. From the grate they watched Russ on the exam table.
- Bill Andrews was a survey hand at the colony who knew the Jordens. He put the nest at the atmosphere station, where an armed party had gone more than an hour earlier. When Drapers's signal died, he sent Anne and the children toward the secured rooms.
- Dr. Kent held Russ in Medlab after the facehugger had been on him for more than twenty-four hours. He would not let Anne take Russ back to their quarters. The dead creature was in a specimen jar, another team was out at the ship, and the chestburster killed Russ on that exam table while Newt watched from the vent.
- Drapers led the armed party that went to the nest. He radioed that there were more creatures than the colonists had expected, and that the creatures had the missing people and the livestock. He came back through the barricade bloody at the mouth and collapsed, and the adult Xenomorphs were on the wall above that door.
- Ellen Ripley found Newt in the lockers, drove the APC out of the hive, and later cut her off the cocoon wall. She ejected the Queen from the Sulaco airlock.
- Dwayne Hicks took command after Gorman's concussion, called Ferro in, and was with Ripley and Newt on the ladder when Newt fell. He reached the Sulaco wounded.
- Carter Burke had sent the Jordens out under directive 6-12-79, locked Ripley and Newt in with the facehuggers, and shut a door on the operations fight. Ripley found him cocooned in the hive, and he would not take the grenade she left him.
Continuity
Aliens: Newt's Tale follows the Aliens screenplay from Newt's side of it, including colony scenes the theatrical cut does not show. The sign at Hadley's Hope reads 159 people, and Ripley later throws 157 colonists at Burke. The film's count for the same colony is 158. On the nest radio Drapers gives his name with the s, and the operator calls him Draper twice on that page. Hudson's tracker after the hive names Wierzbowski and Dietrich with low signs. Burke dies cocooned in the processor hive, and the sentry guns run dry in the tunnel before Bishop goes outside.
Alien: River of Pain later used the medlab grate, Aaron, and Bill Andrews as part of the colony fall. That novel's doctor is Theodora Komiskey, where the comic uses Dr. Kent, and its Marvin Draper is a Marine where the comic letters the colonist Drapers on the nest radio. The comic closes on the Sulaco, with a facehugger on a hypersleep pod and a caption that the dreamed future would not take place.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Aliens: Newt's Tale #1 on June 1, 1992, and #2 on July 1, 1992. Mike Richardson wrote both issues from James Cameron's screenplay, with story credit also given to David Giler and Walter Hill. Jim Somerville penciled the interiors, Brian Garvey inked them, Gregory Wright colored them, and Pat Brosseau lettered them. Randy Stradley edited the miniseries, and John Bolton painted the covers.
Dark Horse International ran the story again in the UK Aliens magazine, Vol. 2 #2 through #8, from August 1992 to February 1993. Bolton's Newt's Tale painting is the cover of Vol. 2 #1 because the reprint was first set for that issue, and the story ran from #2. Titan Books then issued a UK paperback in 1994, using Bolton's cover from issue 2.
Marvel reissued the two issues digitally in June 2021, with the same Richardson script and Somerville interiors and a 2021 copyright line on the indicia. The same year Marvel collected #1 and #2 in Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1, a hardcover released on May 19, 2021. That omnibus places the miniseries with the early Dark Horse Aliens runs.
Behind The Scenes
The credits page calls the comic an adaptation of the story by James Cameron and David Giler and Walter Hill, and of Cameron's screenplay. The 1991 Special Edition of Aliens had restored the Jordens at the derelict and the sentry-gun tunnel before this comic. Neither that cut nor the theatrical release shows Russ on the medlab table, the barricade, Anne and Tim at the vent, or Burke cocooned in the hive. Bolton's cover for #1 is signed in the art and shows Newt in a duct under an adult Xenomorph.
Jim Somerville and Brian Garvey drew the interiors, and John Bolton painted the covers. Dark Horse's listing for #2 names Somerville as penciller, Garvey as inker, Wright as colorist, Brosseau as letterer, Stradley as editor, and Bolton as cover artist. The 2021 Marvel digital files keep that credit block and add production names Annie Cheng and Tim Smith 3, with C.B. Cebulski as editor in chief.
Conclusion
Aliens: Newt's Tale is Mike Richardson's 1992 Dark Horse miniseries, drawn by Jim Somerville, with covers by John Bolton. It follows Newt from the Jorden tractor on Acheron through the fall of Hadley's Hope and the Marine mission that found her. The comic ends on the Sulaco, with the Queen ejected, Bishop ruined, and Newt in hypersleep under a caption that the future she was dreaming would not take place.
External Sources
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