Batman/Aliens 2: Gotham Hybrids & Arkham Horror
Batman/Aliens II is a three-issue crossover written by Ian Edginton and drawn by Staz Johnson, published by DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics between December 2002 and February 2003. A white Xenomorph sealed beneath Gotham City since a doomed 1928 Antarctic expedition broke loose during a construction dig, and Batman followed the trail through the subway and Arkham Asylum to Dr. Catherine Fortune, a woman growing soldiers from Alien biomatter and the DNA of Gotham's worst inmates. The sequel to Batman/Aliens is best remembered for its Arkham Xenomorph hybrids, and it is one of the stranger Aliens crossovers of the Dark Horse era.
Plot Summary
The Mount Erebus Expedition
The story opened on Mount Erebus in Antarctica in 1928, where an expedition had found an ancient alien spacecraft buried in the ice and a cargo that was still alive. Two survivors fought their way through the caves beneath the mountain with pistols and flares while a swarm of Xenomorph drones closed in on them from the walls and the ceiling. One of the men had already set a timed bomb, and the panels counted down on an old alarm clock as the creatures cornered him and dragged him down among them.
The bomb went off and buried the cave in fire and ice, and the prologue left the impression that the whole hive had died with the expedition. The opening narration explained that the last survivor of that expedition had carried something back to Gotham City and sealed it away in a hidden laboratory, hoping nobody would ever find it. That survivor was later identified from his journal as Professor Gollanz, and the eggs and specimens he salvaged from the ship became the root of everything that followed in the series.
The Sealed Laboratory
Seventy years later, a crew from DeChristo Construction was digging a building site in Gotham when the workers hit a brick structure with a single entrance that had been bricked and bolted shut. Steven DeChristo came down to look for himself, because his company was in trouble after bad investments and a divorce, and he was desperate to keep the job moving for his backer Roland Desmond, the gangster known as Blockbuster. Inside, the men found a vault full of decades-old scientific machinery and a desiccated corpse with a hole torn through its chest.
Before the workers could decide what to do, a completely white albino Xenomorph smashed out through the brickwork and tore into the crew. The creature had been dormant and half-starved for decades, and it killed the men around the vault one after another before disappearing into the tunnels below the city. DeChristo himself vanished from the site that night, and Batman, who had been watching him because of the Blockbuster connection, began looking into the disappearance without knowing what had really been let loose.
A Hive Beneath Gotham
Batman and Commissioner Gordon went down into the buried structure together, and in the dark beyond the vault Batman found the resin walls of a growing hive. DeChristo was there, cocooned into the wall, and a Chestburster tore its way out of him while Batman watched, a sight that sent his thoughts straight back to the ruins he had searched in the first comic, Batman/Aliens. He recognized the creatures at once, and he understood that the thing he had hoped never to see again was now loose under his own city.
Among the old equipment Batman found the journal of Professor Gollanz, which described the 1927 to 1928 expedition, the ship in the ice, and the creatures that hatched from its cargo. Batman used the journal to brief Gordon on what they were dealing with, including the eggs, the Facehuggers and the life cycle that had already started again in Gotham. Gordon decided the problem was too big for the police and called in the Centers for Disease Control, a decision that soon brought the federal government into the case.
Fire In The Subway
Following the trail, Batman found an abandoned subway platform where four people had been cocooned above a cluster of opened eggs, three of them still carrying Facehuggers on their faces. One of the victims had already given birth, and the young Alien attacked Batman along with the white creature from the vault, leaving him fighting two grown Xenomorphs in the cramped tunnels. The fight was brutal and close, and Batman relied on gadgets and the confined space of the tunnel rather than strength, knowing he could not afford a single mistake.
The battle ended with an explosion that collapsed part of the tunnel, and armed soldiers arrived soon after to take control of the scene and the surviving victims. The three hosts with Facehuggers still attached were carried away by federal agents before Batman could find out where they were being taken. In the last panels of the sequence a Xenomorph tail could be seen slipping away through the rubble, a sign that at least one of the creatures had survived the blast and was still somewhere under Gotham.
Dr. Catherine Fortune
The second issue opened in an operating theater at Gotham General Hospital, where surgeons worked to cut the embryos out of the subway victims in an early version of Chestburster removal. The operation was overseen by Dr. Catherine Fortune, a gray-haired woman from a federal emergency medical agency who had taken charge of the whole Aliens case and pushed the CDC and the local police aside. She was calm, polite and completely in control, and she made it clear to Gordon that the matter was now a question of national security.
The creatures broke loose inside the hospital, and Batman fought them through the wards and onto the roof, where Fortune's men stunned the white Xenomorph with an electric charge and carried it away alive. Batman was badly wounded in the fight and limped back to the Batcave, where Alfred patched him up and Barbara Gordon, working as Oracle, began digging into Fortune's background and the agency she claimed to represent. Recovering in bed, Batman was haunted by the fear that he had been implanted, and he dreamed of a Chestburster bursting out of his own chest, a nightmare that showed how deeply the creatures had shaken him.
Arkham Asylum
The surviving Xenomorph made its way to Arkham Asylum, and by the time Batman arrived the creature and its offspring were loose in the corridors among the most dangerous inmates in Gotham. Guards and doctors were killed in the infirmary, and Batman fought through the asylum with a heavy weapon, freezing one Alien solid and shattering it before it could reach him. The asylum, already a place of madness, turned into a slaughterhouse, and the panels made a point of showing how little the walls and cells could do to stop the creatures.
Fortune was already at Arkham, and Batman noticed that the Aliens did not attack her, as if they recognized her in some way. When he confronted her, she showed a strength no woman of her age should have had, knocked him down with a single blow, and ordered her team to bring him in alive. The issue ended with Fortune on the phone, telling her superiors that she had the Batman and asking them to send a recovery team, which set up the final issue's move from Gotham to her secret base.
Fortune's Platoon
Batman woke up a prisoner inside Fortune's hidden base, which turned out to be an oil rig far out at sea, and he broke out of his cell before his captors expected him to. Exploring the rig, he found a room piled with dead soldiers from the U.S. Navy SEALs, the Russian Spetsnaz, the British Special Boat Service and the French Foreign Legion, all elite units that had been taken apart. Still in the armored Batsuit he had worn into Arkham Asylum, he went looking for a way off the rig and soon ran into the reason for the dead bodies: Fortune's platoon.
The soldiers in green fatigues were Xenomorph hybrids, creatures with human faces and minds spliced together with Alien biomatter, and they could talk, use rifles and follow orders. Their features matched some of Arkham's inmates, and Batman realized that Fortune had taken DNA from the asylum's patients and grown soldiers from it in acceleration vats, with labels such as DENT-02 on the tanks. The hybrids treated the hunt for Batman as sport, joking and taunting him over the radio, while Fortune watched the fight from her monitors and sent them in one squad at a time to test what they could do.
The Joker Xenomorph
The worst of the hybrids that Batman met in the corridors was the Joker Xenomorph, a creature with the Joker's grin stretched across an Alien skull and a mouth full of long white teeth. It leapt onto Batman's armor, hissing and laughing, and the suit's plating was the only thing that kept its claws and inner jaws away from his face. Batman threw it off, and the fight spilled through the rig's catwalks while other hybrids fired at him, turning the narrow walkways into a shooting gallery.
The Joker hybrid spat a stream of acid at Batman, and the armor started to smoke and corrode where it was hit. Batman answered with the suit's own weapons, and the Joker hybrid died in a fiery explosion, a moment that drew a scream of horror from Fortune as she watched one of her prized subjects destroyed on her monitors. With the Joker hybrid gone, the platoon's discipline began to break down, and Batman used fire to drive the rest back, setting the rig's machinery ablaze in the process.
Fortune's Secret
Batman finally reached the lab where the hybrids were grown, a hall of glowing green vats, and Fortune met him there with her guards to explain what she was building. She said her work was backed by a far-sighted global cabal of politicians and industrialists who wanted a weapon against men like Batman, a superhero deterrent made of soldiers who would obey without question. Batman accused her of creating monsters from psychopaths and murderers, and she replied that they kept the one gene that mattered to her, the instinct for survival at any cost.
Fortune then revealed that she had known Professor Gollanz, because she had been a member of the 1928 expedition herself and had survived a week on the ice before an American science survey team found her. She had been carrying an Alien embryo that never hatched, apparently slowed by a disease she had caught on an earlier expedition, and it had made her faster and stronger than any man, so that the military took an interest in her during the war. She had spent decades searching for Gollanz and his egg cache, used her own altered DNA in the hybrids so that they showed her deference, and finally opened her blouse to show Batman that she was host to a female, a Queen.
The Killer Croc Xenomorph
Batman's fight wrecked one of the vats, and Fortune, furious that her work was ruined, ordered her guards to kill him. At that moment the Killer Croc Xenomorph broke out of its holding pen, a huge green reptilian Alien grown from the DNA of Waylon Jones, and Fortune boasted that its maturation rate was phenomenal because it was only a day old. She was sure the creature would obey her like the others, since all of her progeny were supposed to carry her altered DNA.
The Killer Croc hybrid did not obey, and when Fortune stepped in front of it to give it orders, it killed her with a headbite in one of the most violent panels of the series. Batman and the guards opened fire, but bullets did little against the creature's hide, and the beast smashed its way through the lab toward Batman. With its creator dead, nothing on the rig could control it, and Batman was left to fight the largest of the Arkham hybrids in damaged armor while the fire spread through the structure around them.
The Burning Rig
The final fight took place in the burning heart of the rig, with Batman's armor failing piece by piece as the Killer Croc hybrid tore at it with its claws and jaws. The creature chased him through the flames, and Batman used the fire and the collapsing structure against it, leading it deeper into the blaze until it was burning along with the rig. The beast finally died in the inferno, screaming as the burning deck gave way, and Batman dropped from the rig into the sea below.
As he surfaced, Batman saw stealth attack helicopters sweep in and fire missiles into what was left of the rig, destroying every trace of Fortune's lab, her vats and her hybrids. His narration wondered whether the Navy was simply getting rid of the evidence, another dirty secret never to be told, or whether someone had realized that Fortune's work posed more of a threat to mankind than the heroes it was meant to fight. The series closed with Batman floating in the waves and calling it a simple case of "better the devil you know," a dry ending that left the cabal behind Fortune unnamed and unpunished.
Key Characters
- Batman tracked the white Xenomorph from the construction site to Arkham Asylum, broke out of captivity on Fortune's oil rig in his armored Batsuit, and survived the rig's destruction.
- Dr. Catherine Fortune was a survivor of the 1928 expedition who carried a Queen embryo and grew hybrid soldiers from Arkham DNA until the Killer Croc hybrid killed her.
- Professor Gollanz brought the expedition's eggs back to Gotham and sealed them in a hidden laboratory, leaving behind the journal Batman found.
- Commissioner James Gordon explored the hive with Batman and called in the CDC once he understood the threat.
- Steven DeChristo was the construction boss whose dig opened the vault and who died as a host in the hive.
- The Joker Xenomorph and the Killer Croc Xenomorph were the most dangerous of Fortune's Arkham hybrids.
- Alfred Pennyworth and Oracle supported Batman from the Batcave while he recovered from the hospital fight.
Editions
DC Comics and Dark Horse released the three issues in the prestige format between December 2002 and February 2003, with the title printed on the covers as Batman/Aliens Two. Staz Johnson drew the covers, the first showing Batman looming over an opening egg and the third filled with the grinning teeth of the Joker Xenomorph. The series was collected as the Batman/Aliens II trade paperback in September 2003, with a reworked version of Johnson's second cover showing Batman locked in a circle with an Alien.
The comic was collected again in 2016 in DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens, which also reprinted the first Batman/Aliens and Green Lantern vs. Aliens. Batman met the Xenomorphs again, this time together with the Predators, in Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator, published only a few years later and drawn in a very different style. His separate fights with the hunters are covered in Batman vs. Predator, which lists every one of his Yautja encounters across the crossover comics.
Behind The Scenes
Ian Edginton is a British writer who wrote a long list of Aliens, Predator and crossover comics for Dark Horse, including Aliens: Rogue and Aliens vs. Predator: Eternal. Gene-splicing of Alien biomatter is a recurring idea in his work, and Batman/Aliens II is one of the few Aliens stories to show spliced Xenomorphs bred to be obedient and controllable. Staz Johnson's pencils, inked by James Hodgkins, gave the book a cleaner superhero look than Bernie Wrightson's painterly horror art on the first series.
Unlike the first series, which kept its Xenomorph hidden in the jungle for most of the story, Batman/Aliens II puts its creatures in the middle of a crowded city, from the subway tunnels to the wards of Gotham General. The comic never reveals who Fortune was working for, and the dead elite soldiers on the rig hint at a much larger program that the story leaves open. The Arkham hybrids outlived the series, and the Joker Xenomorph in particular became one of the best-known Xenomorph types from the crossover comics.
Conclusion
Batman/Aliens II is Ian Edginton and Staz Johnson's sequel that brought the Xenomorphs out of the jungle and into Gotham City. It moved from a sealed laboratory and a subway hive to Arkham Asylum and an oil rig at sea, where Batman faced Dr. Fortune's spliced soldiers, the Joker Xenomorph and the Killer Croc Xenomorph. Its ending, with the rig destroyed and the people behind Fortune never named, gave the story a darker conspiracy edge than the first book. It is less grounded than the original, but its Arkham hybrids made it one of the most memorable Batman crossovers with the Aliens.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Alien Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers
