Batman/Aliens: Plot, Characters & Lore
Batman/Aliens is a two-issue crossover written by Ron Marz and drawn by Bernie Wrightson, published by DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics in March and April 1997. Searching for a missing Wayne Tech geologist in a jungle near the Mexico and Guatemala border, Batman ran into a covert American team called Dead-Man's Hand, and together they found a crashed alien ship and an ancient temple full of Xenomorphs. The book is best remembered for Wrightson's horror art and for its giant crocodile-born Xenomorph, one of the biggest Xenomorphs in the franchise, and it ranks among the better Aliens crossovers of the Dark Horse era.
Plot Summary
A Drop Into The Jungle
The story opened with Batman leaping from an unmanned plane, programmed to ditch in the Gulf once he was clear, over a jungle near the border of Mexico and Guatemala. In his narration he admitted that the jungle was far from the alleys of Gotham City, and that he had come to find a man who had vanished there. His parachute tangled in the canopy, and he cut himself loose and dropped into a swamp, where he surfaced among the lily pads and the dead trees. Before he could get his bearings, a woman in combat fatigues stepped out of the reeds and aimed a pistol at him.
Her shot was not meant for Batman but for a huge crocodile gliding toward him through the water. The crocodile seized him anyway, and Batman wrestled it under the surface and back up again until he managed to choke it off and send it away into the swamp. The fight made clear early that the jungle's ordinary animals were dangerous enough on their own, and the crocodiles of this swamp would return in a far worse form later in the story. Dripping and alone, Batman found himself face to face with the woman and the armed men coming up behind her.
Dead-Man's Hand
The soldiers belonged to Dead-Man's Hand, a covert American special operations team on a classified mission in the jungle. Their commander, Captain Sealey, decided that a man in a bat costume who had seen them was a problem, and one of his men raised a rifle to Batman's head. The soldiers mocked Batman as being out of his element, while Batman told them that he was searching for someone and had no interest in their operation. The woman who had shot at the crocodile, Hyatt, watched him closely, and the rest of the team, including Gantry, Page, and Van Derpool, waited for their captain's call.
Sealey finally decided that killing Batman would cause more trouble than it was worth, and he let him come along on the condition that he stayed out of the way. The march through the jungle was tense, with the soldiers needling the stranger and one of them ending up in a brief scuffle with him when he tried to push Batman around. Batman kept his own counsel and treated the soldiers with open suspicion, since he knew nothing about whom they were hunting or why their mission was secret. The team was heading for the same area Batman was looking for, and the jungle soon opened up onto ancient ruins overgrown with trees.
The Crashed Ship
Beside the ruins lay a huge crashed spacecraft, half buried in the jungle, and this was the target Dead-Man's Hand had been sent to find. Inside the dark wreck, the team found the bodies of its crew, including an alien humanoid with a hole burst out of its chest, and Batman began to understand that whatever had killed the crew was still loose. The ship's interior was crawling with strange machinery, and the soldiers argued about what the government expected them to recover from it. Sounds from the jungle outside drew the group back out of the wreck and toward the stone temple nearby.
Deep in the temple, the team found a human corpse fixed to the wall in a mass of resin, its ribcage broken open in the same way. Batman recognized the dead man as Abel Barrett, the Wayne Tech geologist he had come to find, and admitted that finding Barrett was the reason he had come to the jungle at all. Hyatt picked up Barrett's digital recorder from the remains, and Sealey's team now had to admit that they were no longer the only hunters in the ruins. The temple also had a colony of bats, which burst out of the dark in a screaming swarm around Batman and the soldiers.
The Hive In The Ruins
Below the temple, the team followed a stairway down into chambers covered with biomechanical resin, where they found leathery Xenomorph eggs. Batman studied the eggs and the creatures that came out of them, and over the course of the night he pieced together the Xenomorph life cycle from egg to Facehugger to host. He trapped two Facehuggers in specimen jars, convinced that someone had to understand what the creatures were. The soldiers, meanwhile, were more interested in what the creatures could be worth to the people who had sent them.
In another chamber they found their own teammate Page cocooned in the resin, still alive but already carrying an embryo. Before Batman could do anything, another soldier stepped up and shot Page through the head, saying it had to be done, and Batman slammed him against the wall and called him a murderer. The soldier answered that Page had been dead already, and the argument was cut short when the Xenomorph drones came out of the walls and down the stairs. The team fought them back to back in the narrow passages, firing into the creatures as they swarmed over the steps.
Sealey's Last Order
The battle in the stairwell went badly for Dead-Man's Hand, and several soldiers were dragged down by the drones while Batman fought them hand to hand. Captain Sealey realized that the creatures could not be held back, and he ordered the survivors out while he stayed behind with the explosives. He set off the charges in the middle of the nest, and the blast brought the ceiling down on the Xenomorphs and on himself. Batman dug himself out of the rubble afterward with only two soldiers left alive, Hyatt and one of her teammates.
The three survivors took stock in the ruins that night, and Batman listened as the soldiers talked about their dead captain and the mission that had brought them there. Hyatt spoke about the mission with a cold ambition that Batman noticed, and it was clear that she still meant to bring something home from the jungle. The first issue ended at a moonlit lake, where crocodiles slid through the water, and in a cave beyond it one of them lay beside a nest that held something that was not a crocodile egg.
A Nightmare Of Gotham
The second issue opened with a nightmare of Bruce Wayne's childhood, as a boy left a Gotham movie theater showing It Came From Outer Space with his parents. In the dream, a mugger stepped from the alley as in the night of the Waynes' murder, but instead of a gunshot, the boy's father was torn open by a Chestburster. Batman woke up screaming beside the campfire, and Hyatt told him that he had been talking in his sleep. The nightmare showed how the creatures had already crept into the oldest fear Batman carried.
Batman then played Barrett's recordings, which explained what had happened before he arrived. Barrett had come into the jungle with a small party, found the crashed ship, and watched the creatures spread through the area until his companions were taken one by one. The recordings also revealed that the Xenomorphs had not limited themselves to people, since Barrett had seen crocodiles used as hosts, one of them a giant from the swamp. Barrett had not seen what became of every host, and Batman realized that something much larger than a drone might still be out there.
The Labyrinth
With the soldiers, Batman descended into a deeper labyrinth beneath the ruins, a maze of carved stone halls lit by their torches. The walls were covered in old carvings, and Batman studied them as the group moved deeper, looking for any clue to who had built the place and what it had been for. Hyatt's teammate badly hurt his hand along the way, and the group pressed on with the wounded man between them. The halls grew colder and the silence thicker until a drone dropped from the ceiling over the soldier's head.
Batman set the attacking drone on fire with a torch, and the burning creature thrashed through the hall before he finished it. More Xenomorphs came, and Batman fought them off with his fists and his gadgets while the soldiers emptied their rifles into the dark. He threw a grenade into a corridor packed with the creatures and brought the passage down on them, sealing the survivors off from the rest of the nest. Beyond the labyrinth lay a vast cavern with an underground lake and a waterfall pouring through a giant stone face, with the temple's last stair climbing out the far side.
Hyatt's Betrayal
Batman climbed the waterfall cliff to find a way out, and on the ledge above the lake another drone caught Hyatt's last teammate and pinned him against the rock. The soldier begged Hyatt to shoot, but she stood watching with her pistol lowered until he died, and only then fired at the creature. When Batman reached her, she said there had been nothing she could do, and she followed him across the cavern and up the long stair toward the surface. By then she was the only member of Dead-Man's Hand still alive, and the evacuation point was close.
On the steps of the temple Hyatt struck, knocking Batman down and holding her pistol on him while she took Barrett's recorder and one of the Facehugger jars. She explained that the creatures were the perfect weapon if the right people controlled them, and that bringing one home would make her career in the government. Batman told her that nobody could control them and that trying to put them in anyone's hands was lunacy, but she was too focused on him to see what was rising behind her. Out of the rocks climbed a gigantic Xenomorph with the long jaws and heavy tail of a crocodile, the creature that Barrett's recordings had warned about.
The Crocodile Alien
The Crocodile Alien seized Hyatt and killed her before she could turn around, and Batman was left alone with a monster several times larger than a normal drone. Its crocodile host had given it a huge body, armored jaws, and a long whipping tail, and it chased Batman across a broken plain of volcanic rock. Batman hacked at it with a serrated blade, and every cut sprayed acid blood across the ground. The acid ate through the thin crust under their feet, and Batman saw glowing lava below the rock.
Batman led the monster across the weakened crust, where its weight and its own acid blood broke through into the lava, and the creature plunged into the fire. It surfaced once in a burst of flame and clawed at him before sinking for good, and Batman was saved from the last drones when the temple's bats swarmed over the creatures. He collected the recorder and the jar Hyatt had taken, the only proof of the jungle's horrors, and walked away from the burning field battered and bleeding. For Batman it was a rare fight that ended in death, against an animal that had never had a choice in what it became.
Back In The Batcave
Before leaving the jungle, Batman burned the spaceship and the remains of the hive, then made his way through the jungle to the coast and on to Belize, where he contacted Alfred and arranged a pickup. His narration admitted that, in the cold light, the whole thing could have been a nightmare, but the explosion that obliterated the ship had left nothing behind that could prove otherwise. He wondered whether the men who sent Dead-Man's Hand had any idea what they had wanted their team to bring home. Seven hours later he was back in Gotham City and in the Batcave, his wounds dressed and the two specimen jars on his workbench.
Bruce Wayne studied the Facehuggers and reflected that the creatures were not truly evil, just what they were, like a shark or a crocodile, while the real evil he had met in the ruins was human greed. He played Barrett's last message, in which the dying geologist asked whoever found it to tell his wife and his little girl that he loved them, before the recording was cut off by a hiss. Agreeing with Barrett that the creatures were too dangerous for anyone to possess, "not because of what they are, but because of what we are," Bruce dropped both jars into the depths of the cave. He then told Alfred that his dinner would have to wait, because he had a phone call to make to repay a debt, the promise he had made to the dead man on the recording.
Key Characters
- Batman came to the jungle to find a missing Wayne Tech geologist, learned the Xenomorph life cycle in the ruins, killed the Crocodile Alien, and destroyed the evidence.
- Captain Sealey led Dead-Man's Hand, spared Batman, and blew himself up with the nest to cover his team's escape.
- Hyatt was the team's ambitious soldier who let her last teammate die and tried to take a Facehugger home before the Crocodile Alien killed her.
- Page was cocooned in the hive and shot by his own teammate before a Chestburster could emerge.
- Abel Barrett was the Wayne Tech geologist whose recordings explained the crash, and whose last message to his family Bruce Wayne heard in the Batcave.
- The Crocodile Alien was a giant Xenomorph born from a crocodile host, which Batman sent into the lava.
- Alfred Pennyworth arranged Batman's return from Belize and tended his wounds in the Batcave.
Editions
DC Comics and Dark Horse published the two issues in March and April 1997, with the inside covers labeled "Book One" and "Book Two." Bernie Wrightson painted both covers, the first showing Batman's face merging into a Xenomorph's head and the second a grinning Batman tangled with a drone. Dark Horse collected the series as a trade paperback in November 1997, adding the twelve-page prequel Aliens: Incubation from Dark Horse Presents #101 and #102, newly colored, with Titan Books handling the British release.
The comic was collected again in 2016 in DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens, a 400-page omnibus that also reprinted Batman/Aliens II, Green Lantern vs. Aliens, and Superman vs. Aliens. A sequel, Batman/Aliens II by Ian Edginton and Staz Johnson, followed in 2002 and 2003, and it introduced the Arkham Asylum hybrids such as the Joker Xenomorph and the Killer Croc Xenomorph. Batman's fights with the Predators are covered separately in Batman vs. Predator, and he faced both species together in Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator.
Behind The Scenes
Ron Marz was best known for writing DC's Green Lantern, including the Emerald Twilight story, and he later wrote Green Lantern vs. Aliens for the same two publishers. His other work in the franchise includes Predator: Demon's Gold, and Batman/Aliens shows his habit of building a crossover around a hero's own code rather than a simple monster fight. Bernie Wrightson was a celebrated horror artist known for co-creating Swamp Thing at DC, and his work gave the jungle ruins and the drones a heavy, painterly horror look. Marz and Wrightson also produced the prequel Aliens: Incubation, which showed the events that Batman later heard on Barrett's recordings.
Co-editor Denny O'Neil had overseen DC's Batman titles for years and is often credited with shaping the modern Dark Knight. The book's editing was shared between the two companies, with Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz among the editors. The first issue's solicitation placed the story among "Mayan ruins of the Amazon forest," even though the comic is set around Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, far from the Amazon. The Crocodile Alien became the book's most lasting creation, and it is still one of the largest Xenomorph hybrids from an animal host in the comics.
Conclusion
Batman/Aliens is Ron Marz and Bernie Wrightson's 1997 crossover in which the Dark Knight met the Xenomorphs in a Central American jungle. It sent him into ancient ruins with the doomed team Dead-Man's Hand, pitted him against a giant crocodile-born Xenomorph, and ended with him destroying the last specimens rather than handing them to anyone. Its closing line, that the creatures were too dangerous "because of what we are," made it one of the more thoughtful Aliens crossovers. Its sequel brought the Xenomorphs to Gotham itself, but the first book remains the more grounded horror story of the two.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Alien Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers
