Judge Dredd vs. Aliens: Incubus

Published: December 18, 2002, to April 9, 2003, in 2000 AD, and March 19 to June 18, 2003, from Dark Horse
Writers: John Wagner and Andy Diggle
Artist: Henry Flint
Colors: Chris Blythe
Lettering: Tom Frame
Covers: Greg Staples (#1), Kev Walker (#2), Frazer Irving (#3), and Jock (#4)
Editors: Matt Smith (2000 AD) and Philip R. Simon (Dark Horse)
Publisher: Rebellion and Dark Horse Comics
Format: Fifteen-part 2000 AD serial, reprinted as a four-issue Dark Horse miniseries
Setting: Mega-City One and the Undercity beneath it

Judge Dredd vs. Aliens: Incubus is a crossover comic written by John Wagner and Andy Diggle and drawn by Henry Flint. It ran in fifteen weekly parts in 2000 AD from December 2002 to April 2003, and Dark Horse Comics reprinted it as a four-issue miniseries between March and June 2003. The mutant criminal Mr. Bones bred a Xenomorph hive in the Undercity beneath Mega-City One and broke it into the Grand Hall of Justice. Judge Dredd followed the creatures underground, was implanted with an embryo, and destroyed the nest and its Queen with a flood of lava.

Plot Summary

Outbreak At Eisenhower General

The glowing machinery of the new Power Tower with work drones beside it, next to a panel of the tower on the wasteland and Earth Mothers protesters chanting no more Power Tower

In the southern sectors of Mega-City One, the city was building a new Power Tower that drilled down to the magma beneath the Earth's crust, and a group of protesters called the Earth Mothers gathered to stop it. Judge Dredd broke up the demonstration, and the traffic jam it caused trapped a sweating, sick man named Jimmy Godber, who left his car and ran for Eisenhower General Hospital. A gunman chased him and shot him in the leg, demanding to know where "they" were, and Godber admitted that he had woken up to find one of the creatures lying dead beside him.

Dredd answered the report of shots fired with Judges Giant and Sanchez, a rookie who had graduated the month before. When the gunman refused to drop his weapon, Dredd shot him dead, and the Judges identified him as Carlos Lenning, codenamed Jeremiah, an anti-judicial activist whom Dredd had locked away twelve years earlier. Inside the hospital, a Chestburster tore its way out of Godber's chest, ran through the crowded corridors past Dredd's shots, and escaped into the air vents.

Dredd called in the Verminators, a city pest control squad led by Captain Packer, and the hospital's administrator refused to evacuate 8,000 patients, so the wards were sealed instead. The Judges learned that Jimson James Godber was a petty criminal carrying 3,400 credits and false papers. His mother told Dredd that Jimmy had got hold of killer beasts for pit fights, and a hidden drawer in his apartment held a blaster and a keycard for a rental warehouse in City Bottom. In the hospital, a remote camera that the Verminators sent up an elevator shaft showed huge jaws before the screen went blank, and the creature was already far larger than the thing that had gone into the vents.

The Warehouse Eggs

A Facehugger leaping onto Judge Brubaker's face in the City Bottom warehouse as he shouts for someone to get it off

At the City Bottom warehouse, the Judges found a body with its chest burst open, like Godber's, and a clutch of Xenomorph eggs, most of them already hatched. One egg opened while Judge Brubaker was leaning over it, and a Facehugger leapt onto his face. Judge Pitt tried to cut the Facehugger off with a knife, but its acid blood sprayed over his hand and began to eat through the floor, and Dredd ordered everyone to leave the creature for the medics.

An adult Xenomorph was waiting on the warehouse ceiling, invisible on infra-red. The Judges' shots splashed acid blood over Judge Gomer's face, and when Dredd climbed onto a gantry to fight it face to face, its blood ate through the metal and it got away. The creature then dropped down and killed Judge Rauss. Judge Earl fired a high-explosive round that blew it apart, but the blast covered him in its acid blood, and the dead Xenomorph's remains burned a deep crater into the floor.

The Hunt Through The Hospital

Judge Dredd on the roof of a zoom train as a road flare burns in the Xenomorph's mouth, with the blocks of Mega-City One behind them

At Eisenhower General, the Verminators climbed the main shaft in pressure helmets and found the skin that the growing creature had shed. Packer had orders not to confront it, but Millar moved in for the kill, and the Xenomorph took his head off. It killed Fisk through her helmet with its inner jaw, and her lover Marinello fired wildly, hit a fuel tank, and set off a fireball that killed Maier. Within thirty seconds, the squad had lost three people.

Dredd arrived as the hospital was being evacuated, and when he, Giant, and Sanchez forced open the doors of an elevator shaft, the Xenomorph burst out on top of them. It hurt another Judge, smashed past them, and went up to the maternity ward, where it stood over the newborn babies. Dredd ordered the Judges to hold their fire because a stray shot could spray acid over the babies, and he goaded the creature into attacking him instead. It tackled him through a window, and both of them fell from the block onto the roof of a passing zoom train.

On the roof of the train, Dredd lost his Lawgiver and rammed a lit road flare into the Xenomorph's mouth, using its weakness to fire against it. He then kicked the burning creature off the train, and it fell through the city's levels onto a skedway, where its body melted a crater through the road. At the Grand Hall of Justice, Tek Division worked out part of the creature's life cycle. The thing on Brubaker's face was only a carrier that fed him oxygen through a tube in his throat while it delivered the true embryo, and the Teks did not dare cut it away while it was attached.

Mr. Bones And The Undercity Hive

Judges and onlookers around the smoking crater that the burning Xenomorph's body ate through the road

The body in the warehouse belonged to Godber's neighbor Rudi Lomas, and the Judges concluded that Godber had bred the creatures for pit fights and been infected himself. Surveillance footage tied Jeremiah to a car stolen by Frank Rimm, known as Futsie, a member of the Anti-Judge Brigade. Futsie had phoned his girlfriend about the "Incubus" before going down into the Undercity, the ruins of the old city buried beneath Mega-City One, and Giant explained that the incubus was an evil spirit said to impregnate sleeping women with demon offspring.

In the ruins of the old Grand Central Station, Futsie begged his leader, the skull-faced mutant Mr. Bones, to call off the operation now that the creatures were on the news. Bones had been exiled from the city for his mutant genes and had become a space pirate, and his face had been burned by the acid blood of the creatures when they attacked his crew. He came to admire them as perfect killers and planned to use them against the Judges, moving among them unharmed by wearing a pheromone tag that made them take him for one of their own. Godber had stolen eggs from Bones, and because Futsie had failed to get them back, Bones shot him and gave him to the creatures as a host in a vast hall full of eggs.

News reports said that the crater left by the Xenomorph's body went all the way down to the Undercity and that three Judges and three Verminators had died. At the Resyk funeral of Millar, Fisk, and Maier, Packer took the blame for their deaths herself. Tek Judge Benson told Dredd that the carrier had laid an embryo inside Brubaker's chest and then crawled off and died, and surgeons prepared to remove it. At a briefing with the Chief Judge, the Judges feared that the creatures found so far were only the tip of an iceberg, and Packer asked for her squad to be part of any hunt. Beneath the Grand Hall, Bones's men had already placed a shaped charge in a tunnel, with rows of adult Xenomorphs waiting behind it.

Attack On The Grand Hall Of Justice

Xenomorphs pouring up through the breach in the Grand Hall of Justice around Judge Combell

The charge blew open the machine floor on the lowest level of the Grand Hall of Justice and cracked the foundations through to the Undercity, and Xenomorphs poured up through the hole and killed the Judges guarding it. The Chief Judge sent Dredd down to take charge with assault squads, Giant, Sanchez, and the Verminators, and Verminator Charlie Shook quit rather than go. Dredd had Control seal every level above the sub-basement holding pens, shutting the Judges in with the creatures to keep them out of the city.

In the darkened med-bay, the surgeons pulled the embryo out of Brubaker, but it attacked the lead surgeon and escaped before it was killed, and Brubaker died on the table. Marinello charged the Xenomorphs to avenge Fisk and was drenched in their acid blood, and he sank screaming through the melting floor. Giant went down to a sub-level armory, where the Chief Judge authorized him to reactivate four mothballed Mechanismo robot Judges, whose programming was based on Dredd himself.

The Mechanismo units and the Judges caught the Xenomorphs in a crossfire and drove them back down into the Undercity. A Xenomorph tore into one of the robots and set its magazine on fire, and the explosion killed the Verminator Butterman. A Xenomorph dragged Sanchez down the hole, and Dredd ordered Giant to secure the building and seal the breach behind him, then went after her alone. He found a vast Xenomorph hive, and a swarm of Facehuggers buried him before his radio signal broke up.

Captives In The Hive

Facehuggers swarming over Judge Dredd in the Undercity hive

Dredd and Sanchez woke up cocooned in hive resin on the wall of the nest beside the dead bodies of earlier hosts. Mr. Bones came to gloat, and Dredd recognized him from an earlier case as Dan Dan Riboshevsky, a mutant born in 2084 who had been exiled from the city that year and had thirteen warrants out against him. Bones told Dredd that he was now hanging there for two, and as he was leaving to escape the Judges coming down after him, Dredd tore the pheromone tag off his coat and crushed it. The Xenomorphs fell on Bones and killed him.

Dredd broke free, shot two of Bones's men, and pulled Sanchez out of the resin, and both of them knew that they were carrying embryos. They took the dead men's pheromone tags and moved through the hive unharmed. Above them, the breach under the Grand Hall had been filled with 50 tons of liquid rockcrete, and at dawn the Chief Judge sent Giant into the Undercity with a convoy of Rad-wagons and a mini-nuke to exterminate the nest.

Giant's convoy fought what was left of Bones's Anti-Judge Brigade at the old Grand Central Station, lost a wagon to a rocket, and took prisoners. The Judges recognized the brigade's pheromone tags as a type used by breeders at the Xeno-Zoo and gathered as many as they could. Because the wagons could not go into the tunnels, Giant led volunteers on foot, among them Packer and her last two Verminators, with the Mechanismo units carrying the nuke and a captured mutant as their guide. The trail led to tunnels lit by magma, and the Judges realized that the nest was under one of the city's Power Towers.

The Queen And The Lava Tube

The Xenomorph Queen with her egg sac rising over Judge Dredd above rows of eggs in the Undercity hive

Sanchez felt the embryo move inside her as she and Dredd came out into a chamber where a Xenomorph Queen was laying eggs. Dredd opened fire on her with a gun in each hand, knowing that the tags would not protect them once the shooting started, and the Queen tore herself free of her egg sac and chased them into a tunnel. Dredd shot down an unstable ceiling on top of her, and they ran into Giant's squad.

Giant ordered the mini-nuke armed, and Dredd told him to get Sanchez to the surface and admitted that he had been implanted as well. The Queen attacked with a frenzy of Xenomorphs, and the Mechanismo carrying the nuke punched her and fired at point-blank range until her acid blood melted it, which left the Judges with no way to destroy the nest. Dredd decided to rupture one of the Power Tower's lava tubes instead, although Giant warned him that the reinforced plasteel would resist even high-explosive rounds. He ordered everyone else out, but Sanchez stayed to fight beside him, and their shots bounced off the tube as the Xenomorphs closed in.

Packer came running back into the chamber, blaming herself for the deaths of nearly her whole Verminator team. She ran to the lava tube, drew the Xenomorphs to her, and shot them there, and their acid blood ate through the plasteel. Packer was killed when the tube burst, and Dredd fired a grapple line upward and pulled Sanchez clear as the lava flooded the hive and burned the Queen, the eggs, and the Xenomorphs.

Aftermath

Judge Sanchez in a med-bay bed telling Judge Dredd, stripped to the waist and bandaged, that she did not think she was cut out for the streets

Dredd carried Sanchez out to Giant's wagons ahead of the rising lava and told the two surviving Verminators that Packer had given her life for the city and would be remembered. A week later, the news reported that a ruptured lava tube had sent molten rock up close to the Grand Hall of Justice. Half a million citizens had been evacuated, Harry Dean Stanton Block had been renamed the Stanton Memorial Volcano, and searches of the Undercity had found no trace of the Xenomorphs.

The surgeons had removed the embryos from Dredd and Sanchez with seconds to spare, using what they had learned from Brubaker's death. In the med-bay, Sanchez told Dredd that she did not think she was cut out for the streets, and Dredd told her she had faced her fear and had the makings of a fine Judge. Benson showed Dredd the two creatures, which had grown to full size in a containment tank within hours, and wanted to study them, but Dredd switched on the tank's microwave and killed them.

Key Characters

A Xenomorph bursting through the elevator doors at Eisenhower General onto Judge Dredd and Judge Sanchez

Judge Dredd led the hunt from Eisenhower General to the Undercity, was implanted by a Facehugger in the hive, and left Mr. Bones to the creatures by crushing his pheromone tag. He survived the lava flood, had his embryo removed, and destroyed the grown creature.
Judge Sanchez was a rookie one month out of the Academy who was dragged into the hive and implanted. She stayed to fight beside Dredd at the lava tube, survived the surgery, and doubted whether she should stay on the streets.
Judge Giant fought beside Dredd at the hospital and the Grand Hall, reactivated the Mechanismo units, and led the convoy into the Undercity.
Mr. Bones, born Dan Dan Riboshevsky, was an exiled mutant and former space pirate who bred the Xenomorph hive. He was killed by the creatures after Dredd crushed his pheromone tag.
Packer was the captain of the Verminators and blamed herself for her squad's losses. She was killed when she breached the lava tube that destroyed the hive.
Millar, Fisk, Maier, Marinello, and Butterman were Verminators killed during the outbreak, and Charlie Shook quit the squad before the fight in the Grand Hall.
Brubaker was the Judge implanted at the warehouse, and he died during the surgery to remove his embryo.
Jimmy Godber was a petty criminal who stole eggs from Mr. Bones for pit fights, and he was the first host the Judges saw die.
Carlos Lenning, called Jeremiah, and Frank Rimm, called Futsie, were Bones's men. Dredd shot Lenning, and Bones gave Futsie to the creatures as a host.
Benson was the Tek Judge who studied the creatures and wanted to keep the two grown from Dredd and Sanchez's embryos.

Editions

Judge Dredd vs. Aliens: Incubus began in the 2000 AD Christmas issue, Prog 2003, on December 18, 2002, and continued weekly through Progs 1322 to 1335 until April 9, 2003. The first fourteen parts ran six pages each, and the fifteenth was a double-length twelve-page finale. Each part credits John Wagner and Andy Diggle for the script, Henry Flint for the art, Chris Blythe for the colors, and Tom Frame for the lettering, and the indicia carry copyrights for Rebellion, Dark Horse Comics, and Twentieth Century Fox. Greg Staples drew the Prog 1324 cover, and the Prog 1330 cover by Frazer Irving wrapped around to the back of the issue.

Dark Horse Comics reprinted the story as four issues between March 19 and June 18, 2003, with Philip R. Simon as the American editor beside 2000 AD editor Matt Smith. The issues reused the 2000 AD covers, Staples on the first, Kev Walker on the second, Irving on the third, and Jock on the fourth. Dark Horse collected the miniseries in a 104-page paperback on January 28, 2004, and paired it with Predator vs. Judge Dredd in the Predator vs. Judge Dredd vs. Aliens: Incubus and Other Stories hardcover in October 2014. Rebellion reprinted it in Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 36 in February 2021.

Behind The Scenes

Judge Dredd with his Lawgiver drawn as a Xenomorph crawls toward him in the warehouse, asking whether reasoned discussion is out of the question

John Wagner co-created Judge Dredd and had written Dredd's first crossover with the Predators in 1997. Mr. Bones was a returning villain, and an editor's note in Part 13 points readers to his earlier appearance in the 2000 AD Dredd story Out of the Undercity, in Progs 1313 to 1316. The Mechanismo robot Judges also came from Dredd's own stories, and in Incubus they had been mothballed and banned by a convention before the Chief Judge allowed Giant to bring them back. Because the story ran in 2000 AD and was collected in the Complete Case Files, it counts as part of Dredd's own continuity.

Incubus is one of the Aliens crossovers that Dark Horse published with other companies, and it is one of the stories of Xenomorphs on Earth. Dredd met the creatures again in Predator vs. Judge Dredd vs. Aliens: Splice and Dice in 2016, where an editor's note in the second issue points back to Incubus. The 2014 hardcover credits the chapter-break art to Greg Staples, Henry Flint, Kev Walker, Jock with Chris Blythe, and Frazer Irving.

Conclusion

Judge Dredd vs. Aliens: Incubus is John Wagner, Andy Diggle, and Henry Flint's fifteen-part crossover for 2000 AD and Dark Horse. It follows the outbreak from Jimmy Godber's death at Eisenhower General through Mr. Bones's attack on the Grand Hall of Justice to the hive under a Power Tower. The comic ends with the nest buried in lava, the embryos cut out of Dredd and Sanchez, and Dredd killing the two grown creatures in their tank.